Vet and long-time policeman is now Bristol’s Mayor.

By Tim Chicirda, BucksLocalNews.com


Robert A. Lebo, a graduate of Woodrow Wilson in 1966, has served Bristol Borough's community for years, living a patchwork of various experiences and careers.

Among these experiences were life as a Bristol Borough police officer spanning four decades, a D.A.R.E. officer for 10 years, a soldier for the United States Military, and most recently, the Mayor-elect of Bristol Borough.

A football lineman, cross country runner and track sprinter, Bob was also a member of the drama club. He performed in “South Pacific” as a “Navy guy” and also stage crew.

“I wasn’t a singer, so never had the lead role,” said Bob.

Three years after high school graduation, Bob was drafted into the Army, serving in Vietnam in 1969 and 1970.

As supply Sergeant E-5 (Buck sergeant), he kept the troops supplied with C-rations, ammunition, water and mail, among other things.

Bob earned the Good Conduct medal for his years of service and achievements during his “expedition” into Southeast Asia in the 199th Infantry Brigade, a major combat unit of the U.S. Army serving in the Vietnam War.

His shoulder sleeve insignia was a blue shield that featured a white spear in flames. The red ball in the middle of the patch represented the splitting of the atom and was meant to be indicative of how Infantry fought alongside the sophisticated weaponry of the nuclear age.

Bob still recalls the hours of boredom in the sun, mud and rain, punctuated with moments of sheer terror, physical and mental stress. He got out of the Army after his service obligation and proceeded to get on with his life.

Upon returning from the service, Bob was hired in April 1974 as police patrolmen and was promoted to Corporal in 1997, still maintaining his beat from Mill Street to Mulberry Street.

He was honored with the “VFW Policeman of the Year” in 1977 for saving six people from the Hayes street house fire, the Elks “Distinguished Citizen Award” and a letter of commendation from PA Governor Milton J. Schapp, among other recognitions.

In 1998, he began an additional career as D.A.R.E. officer for St. Mark, St. Ann and Warren P. Snyder- John Girotti Elementary Schools and in 1999, he earned his certification as a middle school officer.

“I always wanted to teach the youth the consequences of doing drugs and alcohol. There wasn’t a day that I went, that I didn’t love it,” said Bob, who had been the longest running D.A.R.E. officer in the Borough.

Sergeant Lebo retired from the Bristol Borough Police Department in Febuary of 2007 after 33 years of service.

Retired, Bob continued to drive the bus for the Borough school district, which he had been doing since 1988.

Then Lebo moved to the world of politics.

In what some deemed a surprise upset in an otherwise uneventful May primary election, Lebo defeated incumbent Mayor Joe Saxton, who was battling for another four-year term.

Lebo edged Saxton 1150-1084, though they each carried five of the 10 borough voting districts.
These results did not mean that Lebo was necessarily the next Mayor of Bristol Borough at that time, but with his name on the Democratic ticket in a highly-Democratic town, it was very probable and in fact, Lebo was elected Mayor in the general election months later.

Lebo won the mayoral race by a landslide, garnering 92.7 percent of the vote. He took 1,729 votes to Independent David J. Armitage Sr.’s 136.

“I will try to lead Bristol to a brighter future and manage the town and its services to the best of my abilities. I will try continuing progressing the vision of Bristol of being a thriving waterfront town,” said the new Mayor-elect Lebo. “I will also try to bring harmony back to Bristol. I love Bristol because it is a great town with great people.”

And nobody can argue with that statement, as history has shown one thing consistently: Bob Lebo has always been dedicated to Bristol Borough.

And, on top of this, he has been dedicated to his country, and that is why we salute Bob Lebo.

*****
Cate Murway contributed to this article.

Veterans of D-Day, Vietnam and the Gulf War.

By Jeff Werner, BucksLocalNews.com


Dan Lawler dreamed of traveling to Europe and becoming a portrait artist. But history had other plans for the 26-year-old from St. Paul, Minn., who now lives at Chandler Hall, Newtown.

In 1942, while studying under famed portrait artist Paul Trebilcock, Lawler was drafted into the army and began training as an infantryman, even as Hitler and his Nazi Party were on the march through Europe.

While completing his basic training at Camp Barclay in Texas, the graduate of the Minneapolis School of Art put his artistic talent to work, creating a mural inside one of the camp’s several battalion chapels. A photograph of his art and a short story appeared in the camp’s newspaper.

From Camp Barclay, he was sent to Louisiana to study military maneuvers. While there, he received a two month furlough to return home to St. Paul, where he married his high school sweetheart, Jeanne.

In April 1944, he boarded a troop ship in New York bound for Europe. Two months later, on D-Day (June 6, 1944), he joined 160,000 men as part of the largest invasion force the world had ever seen.

With shells exploding everywhere and bullets whizzing past their heads, Lawler and his outfit stormed the shores at Utah Beach, the westernmost of the five landing beaches, located between Pouppeville and the village of La Madeleine.

Lawler and his commanding officer were in one of the boats which landed about 100 yards out. “When we got out, the Major went down in the water over his head. He was only about five feet tall. So I held him up all the way in,” said Lawler.

The beach, he said, was covered in artillery and machine gun fire. “A few didn’t make it,” he said.
After the landing, Lawler was sent ahead as part of a reconnaissance team tasked with making sure the road up ahead was safe for the troops as the Americans pushed toward Paris.

“It was scary,” he said. “We’d come down the roads with hedges on both sides and they’d be hiding behind them.”

On Aug. 17, while patrolling on a road near Alencon, he was hit by machine-gun fire and taken prisoner by the Germans.

According to a newspaper account, “Lawler and nine others were captured when the rear German guard, perched on a hill above the Americans, began spraying them with machine-gun fire. One bullet caught Lawler in the leg, shattering his femur; others downed three more of the men. Before the entire platoon could escape, Germans closed in on the remainder from the woods lining both sides of the road, outnumbered and captured them.”

He spent the next several months as a prisoner of the Germans and with an untreated, broken leg that had him in constant pain. “They treated us okay – no abuse or anything,” he said of his captors. “Of course, they were losing at the time.”

He won his freedom when the allied troops marched into Belgium and liberated the town and hospital where he was a patient. “They (the Germans) just left us,” said Lawler. “They were busy trying to save their own hides.”

After the liberation, he and other patients were showered with flowers and kisses by grateful residents. One Belgian asked Lawler as he prepared to leave for England, “Why go away from us? Here you are king. There you will just be a patient.”

He was evacuated to England by way of France, where his leg was set in a Paris hospital. He returned to the States in Dec. of 1944 where he was admitted to Winter General Hospital.

“As bad as the war was, he was lucky to have gotten out when he did,” said his son, Tom, who lives in Newtown. “His 90th Division went on to fight through Europe, including the Battle of the Bulge. There were many, many more opportunities to be in harm’s way.”

Tom said as a kid growing up in New York City and then Long Island, he remembers his father showing his battle scar, but never really understanding the role he played in the war.

“We knew he had been involved in the war, but my parents never talked about it,” said Tom. “He, like many others in the Greatest Generation, did his duty and then went on with his life,” said Tom.

Looking back, the elder Lawler said he doesn’t often think about that time of his life, but he’s glad he was part of the invasion “because it was absolutely necessary to get the Germans out. You wouldn’t want someone like Hitler taking care of you.”

“It’s pretty cool that he was a tremendous part of history,” said Tom. “We respect the fact that they were this generation that had to do what they did but did it with such grace and not really asking for anything in return. It was just something they needed to do.”

Tom followed in his father’s footsteps, joining the U.S. Air Force as a pilot and becoming a veteran in his own right, flying a C-141 into Da Nang, Saigon and Thailand during the Vietnam War and missions to Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War in 1990-91.

“The big difference was my service was voluntary. I went in because I needed to learn to fly,” said Tom. “Guys like my father, as patriotic as they were, had no choice in the matter. They did it with the best of intentions, but none of them really wanted to be there.

“For me it was a means to an end and it was a good life for me,” said Tom. “I wanted to learn to fly and about the only way to do that was to go into the military.”

He attended Officer Training School in 1970 and pilot training from 1970 to 1971 before learning to fly the C-141. He began active duty at McGuire Air Force Base, earning the title of 1st Lieutenant at age 23.

He remained at MaGuire for 20 years, working as a pilot and flying C-141s all over the world. He retired as a Lt. Colonel from active duty in 1976 and the reserves in 1992. He now works as a commercial airline pilot for Delta.

Following the war, Dan and his wife, Jeanne, settled in New York City and Long Island, N.Y., and raised four children.

While he never realized his dream of becoming a portrait artist, he did put his artistic talents to use as an illustrator for Parents magazine in New York City. He also did covers for Humpty Dumpty magazine and completed numerous projects for Time magazine and Reader’s Digest.

Former Army LTC is the man with the plan

By R. Kurt Osenlund, Bucks Local News


When talking to former Army lieutenant colonel (LTC) Ray O'Brien, it doesn't take long to realize he's a very astute and organized individual, from the way he presents himself to his choice of words and relevant anecdotes. It's those qualities that have made O'Brien so proficient in logistics, an area in which he's excelled in both his military and civilian careers. Whether managing engineer equipment in Germany, arranging the railroad transportation of Sunoco products, or literally writing the book on how to run a successful Eucharistic Congress, this detail-oriented Richboro resident has long been the man with the plan.

Born in Philadelphia in 1948 to parents Anne and Raymond, O'Brien grew up in the Olney area of the Northeast with his brother, Martin (who now teaches at a school for the deaf in Frederick, Md.). O'Brien graduated from Cardinal Dougherty High School in 1966, and then went on to study geology and join the ROTC at La Salle University. O'Brien says his unique, scientific major enabled him to select the Army Corps of Engineers as a career path, without actually being an engineer. He says he avoided the “grunt” combat branches of infantry, artillery and armor in favor a branch where he could foster his affinity for building things.

Having completed the ROTC program, O'Brien was commissioned – or “knighted,” as he says – into the Army as a second lieutenant in 1970. He first headed out for intensive training at Fort Belvoir, Va., the official post for budding Army engineers. In 1971, he bought his first car and married Judy, who accompanied him to Germany that same year, and who is still by his side today.

“They say there are two things you don't take with you to Germany because they have too many of them: wives and Volkswagens,” O'Brien says of the couple's unconventional honeymoon. “I brought both.”

O'Brien and his wife shacked up in a small apartment in a village neighboring Zweibrucken, a town near the French border where O'Brien worked in the logistics headquarters during the Cold War.

“Being in the Engineer Corps, you'd think I'd have been out in the field, training for a Soviet attack (which, thank God, never came),” O'Brien says. “But, no, they gave me a job in logistics, managing Army engineering equipment like bulldozers, backhoes and dump trucks.”

He continues, “The word 'logistics' comes from the Greek word 'logistikos,' which means 'skilled in counting.' And that's what I was doing: counting things, making sure everyone had enough of what they needed.”

Apart from finding exquisite, inexpensive French restaurants and interesting exotic gifts (“It wasn't all work,” O'Brien says), the event that stands out most in O'Brien's memory of his four years of active duty in Germany took place in 1973, when Israel was attacked by Egypt and Syria in what would eventually be known as the Yom Kippur War. O'Brien was deployed to Israel to provide its struggling troops with equipment, a mission he describes as “covert.”

“There was a time when all of this information was classified,” O'Brien says of the mission, which, at that time, had no official U.S. involvement. “But (the Zweibrucken base) was the closest source of supplies, and if we hadn't got involved, (Israel) would have gone under.”

O'Brien says his time in Germany, which ended when he was discharged in 1974, was “a great experience,” one in which he and Judy lived “on the economy, made a lot of friends and were immersed in the culture.”

“History repeated itself,” says Judy, pointing out a noteworthy coincidence. “As a second lieutenant, he married me, and we lived in Germany. My mother married my father as a second lieutenant, and they also lived in Germany, where they had me. The only difference with us is we didn't bring home a baby.”

Back in the States, however, they did give birth to their first son, Jonathan. It was 1975, roughly one year after O'Brien started working with the Catholic church, a gig that would last three years and allow him to put his logistic skills to use.

With little to no direction, O'Brien helped to organize the 41st Eucharistic Congress, a week-long “spiritual Olympics” that draws in millions of Catholics and religious figures from around the world, and takes years to put together.

After a number of high-ranking cardinals proclaimed that the 1976, Philadelphia-set event was the best of its kind, O'Brien was commissioned to write an instruction manual on how to properly coordinate a Eucharistic Congress. The manual, which O'Brien believes is still in use today, bought him his next car.

In 1978, shortly after buying his current home, O'Brien also applied his training and talents to a job at Conrail, a now-defunct freight railroad company, where he says he felt comfortable since the structure of railroad corporations is similar to that of the Army.

He stuck with Conrail for 20 years, “going down many different career paths,” and all the while remaining active in the Army Reserves. In the late '80s, he became a civil affairs officer, and in the '90s, during and after the Gulf War, he was deployed to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bosnia to interface with local suppliers for logistic purposes.

In 1998, when Conrail was broken up and absorbed by Norfolk Southern and CSX, O'Brien briefly worked for a start-up Internet sales company before landing a gig with Sunoco in 2000. The position came just one year after O'Brien was forced to retire from the military due to his age and years of service. He still works for Sunoco today.

“And what am I doing for them?” he asks, rhetorically. “Logistics. In fact, making sure the railroads that bought Conrail move Sunoco's products to Sunoco's customers.”

Coming up on O'Brien's agenda is his 62nd birthday in February. Wife Judy, son Jonathan, son Jason, daughter Jennifer and granddaughters Anne-Sophie and Juliet may well help him celebrate, but it's safe to assume he'll be the one planning the party.

Navy veteran wrote two books, met Hollywood stars.

By Petra Chesner Schlatter, BucksLocalNews.com


U.S. Navy Third Class Petty Officer William M. Craighead, of Newtown, was a radar operator on a landing craft during World War II.

“I was drafted at the age of 18,” said Craighead, who later worked as a high school biology teacher at The George School in Newtown. He would go on to write two books about World War II, one with the late veteran Kingdon Swayne, also of Newtown.

Craighead said he served on the U.S.S. LSM 215. The landing craft was commissioned in Philadelphia and decommissioned in San Diego. He said the ship was part of the U.S. Navy Amphibious Fleet.

On Aug. 8, 1945, his ship arrived on Guam “just two days after the first atomic bomb was dropped on [Hiroshima] Japan. We unloaded our cargo of airplane parts and began preparing for the invasion of Japan…We had no idea of its significance at the time, for none of us were aware of the atomic bomb,” Craighead wrote.

“On August 9th, the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. We began to hope that this would bring an end to World War II. There were repeated rumors of a Japanese surrender…on August 14; the war in the Pacific finally came to an end.”

Craighead wrote, “I’m probably alive today because of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For that I am grateful, but on the other hand, I feel a great deal of remorse that so many died or were maimed for life.”

On a lighter note from his time in the service, Craighead prides himself on meeting actress Angela Lansbury at the Hollywood Canteen during the war. In “All Ahead Full,” he explained how he was star-struck when he met the young English actress.

In the book, Craighead included a picture of the movie star in her later years. She is perhaps best known for her role in the television murder-mystery series, “Murder, She Wrote.” He noted that she is the same age as he – 84.

“It was there that I met Angela Lansbury,” he wrote of the Hollywood Canteen. “At that time, she was a starlet, only 18 or 19 years old, just my age. She had just made her first big movie hit, ‘Gaslight.’”

“The Hollywood Canteen was inspired by two movie stars, John Garfield and Bette Davis,” Craighead wrote. “Garfield was known to have said to Davis, ‘Thousands of servicemen come to Hollywood without seeing any movie stars: something ought to be done about it.'

“Davis agreed and the Hollywood Canteen was born,” he continued.

“It was supported financially by guilds, unions, and movie stars themselves. More than a million servicemen passed through the canteen,” he wrote.

“There was a special place in the Hollywood Canteen where movie stars greeted servicemen,” Craighead wrote. “It was a time and experience I shall always remember.

“One night, I saw Anne Sheridan dancing with servicemen. I didn’t take advantage of the opportunity; guess I was too embarrassed. I took a good look at her though, and if I had had a picture of her, I would have made her my pin-up girl. Other shipmates visiting the canteen had stories of their own. One fellow was even invited to a movie star’s house for dinner.”

Craighead and his wife, Betty, recently attended a celebration for The National World War II Museum in New Orleans. The museum celebrated the grand opening of three attractions, including the Stage Door Canteen.

At the event, he was one of approximately 250 WWII veterans, representing each branch of the U.S. Armed Forces. He was escorted by active-duty military, Guard and Reserve, in a red carpet procession, which began the dedication ceremony. The ceremony featured actor Tom Hanks and broadcaster Tom Brokaw.

Because Craighead had written about the Hollywood Canteen, he was included in a documentary about the place. He was driven to New York City by limousine and he met Angela Lansbury again.

“When I met her, it was like greeting a long lost friend,” Craighead said. “She wouldn’t remember me from Adam. It was just delightful to see her firsthand.

“They photographed us together,” he said of the documentary which was made about the Canteen for the museum’s celebration.

About meeting Lansbury for the second time, Craighead said, “As a celebrity she appears to me to be very outgoing and so responsive to conversation. She’s a very attractive woman, and for 84, she’s exceptionally so, I might say.”