WESTMINSTER - Leanora Francis closed a chapter and began a new one from an act of kindness 40 years ago.

She was a volunteer with Veterans of Foreign Wars. And she brought candy and sweet words to a wounded Vietnam War veteran in the old Fitzsimons Army Medical Center.

She had her picture taken, which appeared in the VFW national magazine. She cut out the photograph of her giving a box of chocolates to Dennis Cowen and put it up on the wall of the office in her home. She'd look at it periodically, wondering what happened to that nice young man. But she put off trying to track him.

"I had a dream about him a couple weeks ago," she said. "I was in the hospital and couldn't find the boy I was looking for. And that was probably Dennis."

So she decided to look him up. She flipped through the phone book and found a listing for a Dennis Cowen in Northglenn.

"That can't be him," she said. But she called, and it was. "I just about fell out of my chair."

Cowen, 61, asked her why it took so long to look him up.

She was nervous, she said. What if he didn't remember her?

But who could forget Leanora?

She has been a volunteer with VFW Post 6616 since she joined in 1948. Her late first husband, John Tribelhorn, was a member. So was her late second husband, Dan Francis.

"I've put in over 6,000 hours volunteer time," she said. "I'll be 91 in October. And I'm still volunteering."

She said she volunteers because her husbands and brothers came home from World War II. So it's her way of paying back her good fortune.

That's what brought her to Fitzsimons over the Christmas holiday in 1967. She and another volunteer went from wounded soldier to wounded soldier.

Cowen was among them. He took hits from a grenade and a mine, and shots from an AK-47, all leveled at him by the Viet Cong. He was in Fitzsimons more than a year, enduring 11 surgeries.

"I'm walking now," he said. "It took me a long time."

What he'd rather remember is Leanora's kindness.

"She was one of the few who came in and said welcome home," he said. "It was just encouraging to us boys coming back from Vietnam at a time when a lot of people weren't encouraging us."

They hit it off at a reunion over lunch last week.

"This is a lady with a heart," Cowen said. "This is a lady who for 60 years has devoted her life to help people."

Said Leanora, "You're my Dennis."

And he had a token of his appreciation for her. "I gave her a box of chocolates," he said.

massarog@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5271

Back to Top