The symbolic epicenter of freedom, the Statue of Liberty, holds high a flame under which millions of immigrants to the United States have passed, all hoping to discover what it means to live as a free people. Growing up on the mean streets of Brooklyn, Charlie DeLeo could never have predicted that his desire to glorify the Lord would lead him into an intimate daily connection with the statue and the freedom it represents.
Charlie had visited the Statue of Liberty several times as a boy, and had a strong bond with it and the vision for the United States it represents. When he visited Ellis Island again in 1972, he was unemployed, having worked a number of manual labor jobs after returning home from Vietnam. Charlie got up the courage to ask for a job and to his delight was hired as a maintenance worker. He soon proved capable of scaling the flame to clean and maintain it. “I didn’t fear heights,” Charlie says, and his strong 5’5, 140 pound frame made him uniquely qualified to climb the girders inside the torch and the catwalk outside. “My chapel” Charlie called it. “I dedicated the torch as a chapel to the Lord Jesus Christ.”

He was on his way to fulfilling his desire to “live for God 100 percent.”

A Reason to Survive
Charlie and his mother had a “tough life” in Brooklyn. He learned about Jesus Christ from his mom and at church when he was seven years old. He remembers his mother always working to make ends meet, and having to cope with many difficulties. Charlie didn’t graduate from high school, and he remembers the influence of gangs growing up. He enlisted in the Marines so he could serve his country during the Vietnam War. He survived six mortar attacks during combat and once had just zipped up his flak jacket before a spear propelled by a landmine flew right at his chest.

Charlie wanted to make his life count for something, and he resolved to live purposefully for Christ in any way he could. “I knew God saved me for a purpose,” Charlie says. “I felt God was calling me in a big way to spread His Word.”

Watchman For the World
Designated “Keeper of the Flame,” he ascended the statue 2,500 times over 27 years to keep the torch free from dust and dirt, clean the 200 windowpanes in the crown and make sure the flame’s four 500-watt sodium vapor lights kept shining. To reach the parapet at the top, Charlie would ride an elevator up 154 feet, make his way up a staircase closed to the public since 1916 to Liberty’s shoulder, then climb a ladder up the 63 feet to the door leading outside to a narrow catwalk. “My chapel,” Charlie says.

Climbing on the girders within the towering torch held by Liberty’s eight-foot-long fingers, Charlie did more than keep Liberty’s flame burning bright. This believer in Jesus Christ, this man who loves the salvation that God offers humanity, this humble Vietnam veteran who only wants to see God glorified, exercised daily one of the country’s fundamental freedoms. He prayed.

What would he pray for? “For the salvation of souls,” says Charlie. “ I would pray for my co-workers and all the people in Manhattan and across the country to be saved. I would pray for those who served in Vietnam, and I would pray for the spread of the Gospel of Jesus Christ around the world.”

From his vantage point 300 feet in the air, Charlie would see the visitors below, look over Manhattan, think of the people in the city, suburbs and country, of those who “make our country great,” and bring them before God, asking that to the farthest shore God would lead people to true liberty in His Son born to save the world.

An Uncommon Touch
“Live a good sermon, that’s my motto,” says Charlie. Co-workers described him as one of the friendliest people you could ever meet. He resolved to follow the 10 commandments and live out Jesus’ call to “love your neighbor as yourself.” He made thousands of friends along the way before leaving the job several years ago when it became too physically demanding. About 1 1/2 million people visit the Statue of Liberty each year. Charlie would greet people, especially children on school trips, and tell them about Jesus. He corresponded with the children and their schools long after their visits. “I don’t believe any Christian should force his beliefs on anybody, or condemn anyone else’s beliefs, but I am here to be a witness for Jesus and to glorify God just being who I am,” says Charlie.

He remembers vividly how he prayed for his mother one day atop Liberty after having watched her suffer for months from a painful disease. “Next morning she just slipped away … so quietly,” Charlie said.

As newspapers and magazines profiled Charlie, people would write to him with prayer requests, and he always wrote them back. After reading about Charlie in the “Reader’s Digest” in 1982, a Christian man in Nepal wrote him to “please send me a Bible. It is banned here.” Charlie sent eight, one for each of the man’s family members.

After meeting a woman with cancer at the statue, he communicated with her and donated a pint of blood in her name. He once befriended a seven-year-old boy he met at the statue who had been badly burned and took a personal interest in the boy’s development. Charlie has donated over 65 pints of blood over the years, contributed many thousands of dollars out of his modest salary to the Catholic Medical Mission Board, and sponsored poverty stricken children around the world. “I currently sponsor a girl in Bolivia who I correspond with regularly,” he says.

“Who am I?” Charlie asked himself many times, knowing that he was just an ordinary guy charged with keeping the Statue of Liberty lit for all the people of the world. “It’s all because of God and the moving of the Holy Spirit,” he says. “My favorite verse is Ephesians 3:20. ‘Now to Him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to His power that is at work within us.’”

Charlie wants to see the light of liberty still held high. He is concerned that young people are preoccupied with materialism; with thinking that life is only about satisfying themselves and thinking of their personal needs and ambitions. He sees the younger generation assaulted by evil.
“Only Jesus Christ can save you,” says Charlie. The thief who hung on the cross next to Jesus was a sinner, but Jesus saved him. There is the real liberty.”

This ordinary man, who sees the Statue of Liberty lighting the way to freedom which is found fully in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, has a special appreciation for the last lines of the poem “Mother of Exiles” by Emma Lazarus engraved on Liberty’s pedestal:

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning
to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your
teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless,
tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the
golden door.”

Count Charles DeLeo as one person who keeps that path clear.

(Charlie is now retired but he volunteers at Ellis Island regularly.)

Reprinted with permission of The War Cry, U.S.A, July 7, 2007 issue