GALVESTON — Leroy Colombo, Galveston’s best-known lifeguard, last week received another posthumous honor when the city council voted unanimously to give his name to a two-block stretch of 57th Street.
The name change will start at Seawall Boulevard and end at Maco Street, just past the Kroger parking lot.
The street will be referred to as Leroy Colombo’s View and 57th Street on signs.
The spot is appropriate because Colombo patrolled beaches in the area while he was working as a lifeguard for the city of Galveston, said Donald Mize, who requested the street naming.
“He saved a lot of lives right there along that stretch of beach,” he told the city council.
Colombo is credited by the 1976 Guinness Book of World Records with saving 907 lives, but in a short biography written for the council, Mize said the real number should be more than 1,000. More than 90 rescues are not officially listed, Mize said.
Colombo was born in Galveston in 1905. A bout of spinal meningitis in 1912 left him deaf and mute, but his illness couldn’t keep him from the Gulf of Mexico. His brothers taught him to swim as a way to help him recover the full use of his legs.
When he was 18, Colombo was hired as a regular lifeguard for Murdock’s bath house after serving as a volunteer lifeguard since age 15.
According to Mize’s research, Colombo’s numerous rescues were a regular feature in The Daily News.
He entered and won many endurance swimming races, including a 15-mile swim in 1927 thought to be one of the longest ever staged at the time in the United States for amateur swimmers. He completed the race in 11 and a half hours. The only other person to finish was Colombo’s brother, Cinto, three-and-a-half hours later.
Colombo worked many different jobs during his life, continually saving stranded swimmers but not being listed as an employee of the Galveston beach patrol until 1945.
At 61 years old, Colombo was still patrolling the beaches and is credited with saving 38 lives that year, according to Mize.
He retired the next year and died in 1974.
The Galveston Island Beach Patrol’s annual fundraiser is named for Colombo, and Mize has submitted an application to the Texas Historical Commission to have a historical maker created in his honor and placed on the outside of the Galveston Island Convention Center.