Sunday, September 26, 1999
Over the years, Charlie DeLeo figures, he must have climbed the iron girders through the upraised arm of the Statue of Liberty to the torch more than 2,500 times.
“I knew it was time to leave because my legs gave out,” he conceded one day last week.
Thursday was DeLeo’s final day on the job changing Lady Liberty’s 750 light bulbs, a job he did for more than 27 remarkable–and much-chronicled–years.
For the occasion, friends and co-workers held a long sendoff picnic for him. Perched on his head was an off-white baseball cap they gave him. Embroidered on it were the words “Keeper of the Flame.”
“I had butterflies in my stomach, because, you know, I’ve spend most of my life working at the Statue of Liberty,” he said of his last day on the job.
Reminiscing with his co-workers, DeLeo recalled that Americans had just walked on the moon for the first time and were still dying in Vietnam when he began his life’s work.
His love affair with the Statue of Liberty began when he was 9 years old. His fourth-grade class from Public School 42 on the lower East Side made a trip to the island in 1957.
He visited again in 1968. This time he was a Marine, bedecked in ribbons, including a Purple Heart for a shrapnel wound he got during a mortar attack on his unit in Vietnam.
DeLeo remembers muttering under his breath as he stood before Lady Liberty, “Man, I’d give my right arm to get up to that torch one time.”
“Little did I know God would hear my prayer, and that four years later I would become the keeper of the flame.”
On impulse, during a visit in January 1972, DeLeo, who was unemployed at the time, decided to ask for a job. Three months later, he started work.
Through the years, there have been countless stories in newspapers and on television about DeLeo and his work.
“Spencer Christian once interviewed me for ‘Good Morning America,’ and he said, ‘Charlie’s job is not for the fainthearted,’ They showed me doing my thing, and then he called me Spider-Man, and I am like Spider-Man,” DeLeo said.
Though DeLeo stands little more than 5-feet-5 and weighs not a wisp over 140 pounds, “pound for pound, I’m a crackerjack,” he said.
DeLeo has devoted so much of his life to his work, there were some things he never got around to. He never married, for instance.
“I certainly don’t worship the statue, but I talk to her,” he said. “Ever since my mother died of cancer in 1974, Lady Liberty has been like a mother figure to me.”
FLEET 2 (KRT122 Vert C, 5-20-98) A U.S. Navy helicopter from Light Helicopter Anti-Submarine Squadron 94 (HSL 94) flies by the Statue of Liberty Wednesday during the opening ceremonies of Fleet Week ’98 in New York City.
(c) 1999, New York Daily News.
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