http://new.music.yahoo.com/blogs/stopthepresses/292678/lynyrd-skynyrds-inspiration-is-a-free-bird-at-last/Leonard Skinner, the high school gym teacher who inspired the band name Lynyrd Skynyrd, has died at age 77 in a Riverside, Florida nursing home.
Skinner, born Forby Leonard Skinner, never intended to become a piece of rock-and-roll history. He was simply enforcing a dress code at Robert E. Lee High School in the late 1960s when he fatefully sent a few teenagers to the principal's office for violating new rules about hair length. "The hair had to be two fingers above the eyebrows, couldn't touch the collar," Skinner explained in an interview several years ago. "One of the ones I sent down was in this band ... called the One Percent," he recalled, referring to the band that would later become Lynyrd Skynyrd.
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