Justin Lebo
By Phillip Hoose
At the end of August, Justin got a break. A neighbor wrote a letter
to the local newspaper describing Justin's project, and an editor thought it would make a good story.
One day a reporter entered the Lebo garage. Stepping gingerly through the tires
and frames that covered the floor, she found a boy with cut fingers and dirty
nails, banging a seat onto a frame. His clothes were covered with grease.
In her admiring article about a boy who was devoting his summer to help kids he didn't
even know, she said Justin needed bikes and money, and she printed his home phone number.
Overnight, everything changed. "There must have been a hundred calls," Justin says.
"People would call me up and ask me to come over and pick up their old bike. Or I'd be working
in the garage, and a station wagon would pull up. The driver would leave a couple of bikes lay
by the curb. It just snowballed."
By the start of school, the garage was overflowing with BMX frames. Pyramids of pedals
and seats rose in the corners. Soon bike parts filled a tool shed in the backyard and then spilled out
into the small yard itself, wearing away the lawn.
More and more writers and television and radio reporters called for interviews. Each time
he told his story, Justin asked for bikes and money. "The first few interviews were fun," Justin says,
"but it reached a point where I really didn't like doing them. The publicity was necessary, though.
I had to keep doing interviews to get the donations I needed."
By the time school opened, he was working on ten bikes at a time. There were so many calls now that he was
beginning to refuse offers that weren't the exact bikes he needed.
As checks came pouring in, Justin's money problems disappeared. He set up a bank account and began to make bulk
orders of common parts from Mel's bike shop. Mel seemed delighted to see him.
Sometimes, if Justin brought a bike by the shop, Mel would help him fix it.
When Justin tried to talk him into a lower price for big orders, Mel smiled and gave in. He respected
another good businessman. They became friends.
The weeks before Christmas Justin delivered the last of the twenty-one bikes to Kilbarchan.
Once again, the boys poured out of the home and leapt aboard the bikes, tearing around the snow.
And once again, their joy inspired Justin. They reminded him how important bikes were to him.
Wheels meant freedom. He though how much more the freedom to ride must mean to boys
like these who had so little freedom in their lives. He decided to keep on building.
"First I made eleven bikes for the children in a foster home my mother told me about.
Then I made bikes for all the women in a battered women's shelter. Then I made
ten little bikes and tricycles for the kids in home for children with AIDS. Then I
made twenty-three bikes for the Paterson Housing Coalition."
In the four years since he started, Justin Lebo has made between 150 and 200 bikes and
given them all away. He has been careful to leave time for his homework, his friends,
his coin collection, his new interest in marine biology, and of course his own bikes.
Reporters and interviewers have asked Justin Lebo the same question over and over: "Why do
you do it?" The question seems to make him uncomfortable. It's as if they want him to say what
a great person he is. Their stories always make him seem like a saint, which he knows he isn't.
"Sure it's nice of me to make the bikes," he says, "because I don't have to. But, I want to. In part,
I do it for myself. I don't think you can ever really do anything to help anybody else if it
doesn't make you happy.
"Once I overheard a kid who got one of my bikes say, 'A bike is like a book: it opens up a whole
new world.' That's how I feel, too. It made me happy to know that kid felt that way.
That's why I do it."