Member Profile: Lee Leonard and Penny Baldwin

CLUB MEMBERS  |  MILL VALLEY, CALIFORNIA

Where are you from?

Penny: I was born and raised in the Bay Area. Lee and I lived in Mill Valley for seventeen years. And then we decided to sell our house in Mill Valley and move to Palmetto Bluff, but then I got a job offer at Qualcomm, which is back in San Diego. So, we were bicoastal for a while. Now, we’re a hundred percent at Palmetto Bluff.

Lee: I grew up in North Carolina. I moved to California for my career in biotech in the early eighties, and we were there until 2016.

How did you meet?

Penny: A friend of ours set us up. He hosted a party that neither of us were supposed to attend. I was supposed to be on a business trip in Europe, and Lee was supposed to be at his best friend’s wedding in Florida.

Lee: But Hurricane Irene blew in, and all flights were canceled. I ended up going to Rob’s party and met Penny. And now we live on Irene Street at Palmetto Bluff.

How did you find Palmetto Bluff?

Lee: Penny had never lived outside of California. And she came here with her mom in 2006, and she said, Lee, I found this amazing place in Bluffton, South Carolina. I said, Baby, there ain’t nothing in Bluffton, just a liquor store and a speed trap. And so anyway, I was wrong.

Penny: That first trip was magical. I took my mom on a trip and fell in love with the waterways and the forest— it was spectacularly beautiful. We stayed in one of those beautiful little cottages overlooking the May River, and I was gobsmacked. I remember calling Lee and saying, You’ve got to come out here. I even looked at a couple of homesites.

Lee: We came back in October of 2016. We were having lunch at Buffalos, and the chapel bells started ringing. I said, I could do this starting right now. We bought a house pretty much on the spot.

Penny: At the time, we were living on our boat in San Diego, so it started off as a vacation destination. But when Covid hit, we ended up spending all of our time here.

Do you have a boat here?

Penny: We have Luna Blue, a thirtyfour- foot Pursuit that we keep at Windmill Harbour. And now that Grace is in our lives, we’re on the water even more. 

Tell me about The Grace Club!

Lee: We were having our boat painted at Marsh Harbor in Beaufort. When I brought the boat up, I saw Grace [a wood-hull yacht built in 1913] rotting underneath a tree. They had her propped up, and the owner of the yard had put a tarp over her. I got to talking to him. The rumor was that it was going to take a million dollars to restore her. But he said, Lee, I’ll show you the quotes. It’ll take $120k. So we put a little team together, Operation Saving Grace. We approached South Street Partners with a plan to form a nonprofit. We wanted to run it on a break-even basis and put the money back into the boat to restore. [South Street Partners President of Operations] Rob Duckett got right on it, and within a week we had the go-ahead.

Penny: So, we formed The Grace Club. Then South Street Partners bestowed ownership of the boat to the Club for a nominal amount of money. They also granted us the dock space, which was key because she’s a sixty-foot girl!

Lee: The community really got behind it. There is another club in Nantucket that has a boat like Grace. So we knew the model would work. We didn’t fully appreciate how passionate the community would be and how willing they’d be to volunteer their time and resources. What is the community like?

Penny: There is such a vibrant dynamic here. And there’s a common thread where everyone has a true appreciation for how beautiful this place is. Most of our friends are passionate about boating. It’s almost pathetic sometimes because we go to dinner and just talk about boats.

Do you have children?

Lee: We do. We have three children, two in the Bay Area and one in Las Vegas. We have four grandkids, two five-year-old boys and two seven-year-old boys. They’re pretty tight cousins. They love coming to Palmetto Bluff!