According to a Daily Gleaner article of March 23, 1910, Sylvester Leon was born in the later 1880s, at Russell Pen in St Catherine, Jamaica. When only two months old he was taken to live in Spanish Town, where he grew up. He was the only son of Mr and Mrs Isaac Leon, and his father died in 1894, while he was still a young boy.
He first attended St Catherine's School in Spanish Town. As a boy, he had a great admiration for Napoleon, and read everything about him that he could lay hands on. He was especially interested in elocution, for which he won at least one prize at St George’s College, the Roman Catholic boy’s high school that he later attended in Kingston. In his last year there he was ranked as ‘first scholar'.
After he left school he went briefly to the United States, where, during a stay of only 7 months, he worked for some time in the laboratory of the wholesale druggists, *Weeks and Potter of Boston.
Weeks & Potter bottle for the ‘Cuticura System of Curing Constitutional Humors’.
Notes:
*Weeks & Potter was a Boston proprietary medicine concern, founded in 1852 and operating well into the 20th century. They produced many patent & proprietary medicines including the Sanford's Radical Cure and several Cuticura products including the famous Cuticura System of Curing Constitutional Humors.
George Robert White (1847-1922) was a well known Boston philanthropist who made his fortune with the Weeks and Potter Drug Company. Working up through the company, he eventually became the owner of the Potter Drug and Chemical Corporation which made a best selling product called "Cuticura soap."
