Jacquelyn ‘Jackie’ Leatherbury Douglass
Artist helped design giant crab sculpture at BWI
Jacquelyn “Jackie” Leatherbury Douglass, part of the artistic team who built the giant stained-glass crab on display at BWI-Marshall Airport and an exhibition water skier, died of unknown causes at Luminis Health Anne Arundel Medical Center on Jan. 13. She was 92.
Mrs. Leatherbury Douglass, the daughter of Ester Siegert, a homemaker, and Gilbert Leatherbury, an entreprenuer who started Leatherbury Brothers, an oyster cannery, and Leatherbury Sodas, a bottling company, was born Aug. 18, 1930.
Raised in Shady Side, she attended George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where she met her husband John Frederick Douglass, who died in 2021. She studied art while in college and toured Europe afterwards.
She and her husband were popular and athletic. After college they became water-ski instructors in Boca Raton, Florida, and performed water-ski tricks at Weeki Wachee, a popular Florida tourist attraction.
When they returned to Maryland they settled in Shady Side, near the house where she grew up. The duo were an artistic team who would go on to illustrate several books about creatures of the sea, many aimed at a young audience, including “Peterson First Guide to Shells of North America,” “Shells of the New England Coast: Long Island Sound to Canadian Maritimes” and “Peterson Field Guide Coloring Books: Shells.”
Mrs. Leatherbury Douglass went by “Jackie” professionally.
They were also business owners with ventures that included the Leatherbury Point Marina at Woods Wharf in Shady Side.
Mrs. Leatherbury Douglass was an outspoken critic of development in Shady Side. She once opposed a Moose Lodge moving near her home and was concerned about overdevelopment. “They’ll [developers] get us a slum. We’ll be a city,” she told The Capital in 1997.
Mrs. Leatherbury Douglass was a gardener and cook who lived in a home filled with art, both hers and other people’s. Her husband built a room in their house to grow orchids in.
“I once went to visit her and she said ‘Let’s have some crab cakes for lunch,’” said her cousin Robert “Bob” Leatherbury. “She plucked them [fresh crabs] and then made crab cakes. Nobody could beat Jackie in making a crab cake.”
As artists, the couple’s most famous creation was the 400-pound glass crab on display at BWI. Commissioned by then Anne Arundel County Executive O. James Lighthizer for $20,000, the 10-foot-long, 5-foottall piece is titled “Callinectes Douglassi,” a combination of the genus of the crab and the artists’ last names.
Constructed of blue, orange and red stained glass and iron, the crab is about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. It went on display at the airport in 1985 and moved several times to different parts of the terminal over the years. At one point it was in storage when 50 of the 5,000 stained glass panels fell off, The Sun reported.
The Douglasses, who said they spent 10 hours a day over 14 months making the sculpture, were upset when they were informed of the damage. “It was probably banged around,” John Douglass told the Sun in 1997. “And they left all of the appendages separated after they did it — on a little office room on a gray dusty rug, which is the worst thing to do to stained glass.”
The crab sculpture eventually returned to the airport in 2000, although Mrs. Leatherbury Douglass remained upset that county officials chose another artist to make the repairs. “I don’t understand why they [county officials] haven’t gotten in touch with me,” Mrs. Leatherbury Douglass told The Capital in 2000. “Why in the world wouldn’t they go to the manufacturer to find out how to care for it?”
She is survived by her cousins Gordon A. Crandall IV of Annapolis, Robert “Bob” Leatherbury of Garrett County and King Leatherbury of Mitchellville; friend and caregiver Tim Matthews, of Ontario, New York. She was preceded in death by her husband John and her brother Chauncy.