John Paterson Lesch, a former resident of the East Village, where he briefly ran an alternative newspaper, died …..Feb. 28 in Pennsylvania. The cause of death was cancer. He was 69.
John was born in Misericordia Hospital in the Bronx in 1944 to Samuel, an editor at The Wall Street Journal, and Margaret Lesch.
For the first few years of his life, the family lived at Clinton Court, a small “back building,” at 422½ W. 46th St., located in a courtyard in the block’s interior.
The family moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, in the early 1950s. John went to Cherry Lawn High School in Darien and graduated from Greenwich High School in 1963.
He attended Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont. There he met and married Jane Ward. They moved to the Barre-Montpelier area in Vermont, where John worked as an editor at the Times-Argus. They had four boys: Shawn, Jason, Damien and Forrest Lesch-Middleton.
In the late ’70s, the marriage ended, and John relocated back to New York City where he founded a short-lived alternative newspaper, The Other Paper, in the East Village. He lived in the East Village nearly 20 years, and worked for Save the Children and McNamee Consulting, as well as Dinosaur Hill, a children’s store on E. Ninth St., where he set up its computer systems.
In the ’90s, Lesch moved to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. He settled in Kingston, and spent about 10 years living in a tent in bucolic Kirby Park by the Black Diamond Bridge. He was estranged from his family.
About a year ago, with help from some friends, he was able to move indoors, and was in the midst of fixing up his apartment, working on writing projects and renewing his interest in shortwave radio. His call sign was K1VSW.
He is survived by his children, his sister, Margradel Hicks, of Burlington, Vermont, his nieces, Laura and Geneva, and a few good friends.
Pam Pier, Dinosaur Hill’s owner, said of Lesch, “He was brilliant, unusual, intense and funny…and many others loved him.”
