Is it not a char ? (a subset of int sure, but still )

http://www.lix.polytechnique.fr/~liberti...

An integer character constant is a sequence of one or more multibyte characters enclosed in single-quotes, as in 'x'. An integer character constant has type int.

OK, so I went with Roh-Bane's suggestion. However, I took from quixadhal renaming first to first_name and last to last_name and then did that in a few related functions to make it clearer what was doing what. That did shutdown the leak, so that you all for your help and explanation.

I still don't get quixadhal's code above, but I'm going to keep looking at till I get it.