The two 8-year-old boys are squeezed together shoulder-to-shoulder in a third-grade class picture taken more than 70 years ago in front of North Avondale School.

        They didn't know each other's names and never played together, because then, black children and white children did not mix.

John Leahr (left) and Herb Heilbrun stand in front of a painting of a P-51 Mustang Red Tail fighter. (Enquirer photo) | ZOOM |

        As young adults in World War II, they flew together over Europe, one piloting a B-17 bomber, the other flying fighter escort in a P-51 with the Tuskegee Airmen.

        They never met on the ground, because then, the military was segregated.

        More than 50 years later, a chance meeting of two retired salesmen at a reunion of the Tuskegee Airmen in Cincinnati led them to review their parallel lives and discover their shared history.

        The men, now in their early 80s, often speak to students — from grade school to college — and tell their stories in words and pictures.

        John Leahr kicks off with his adventures as a one of the Tuskegee Airmen, a legendary group of black pilots who protected bombers in the air from German attack during World War II.

        When he introduces Herbert Heilbrun, the two men always hug. It is always, Mr. Heilbrun said, “an electric moment.”

        “Some of these kids have never seen two men hug each other, much less a black man and a white man,” Mr. Heilbrun said.

        They recount a tale even the two men who lived it have to shake themselves now and then to believe really happened.

        They tell how two grade-school classmates ended up side-by-side again in the skies over Europe — a young Mr. Heilbrun as a bomber pilot and Mr. Leahr flying a P-51 Red Tail fighter.

        As officers in a segregated military, Mr. Leahr explains, their planes landed and “we went to our barracks and they went to theirs.”

        In 1997, Mr. Heilbrun read a newspaper article about a reunion of the Tuskegee Airmen. He decided to go downtown from his Sycamore Township home to the hotel where the black airmen were staying.

        There, he met Mr. Leahr of Kennedy Heights — like Mr. Heilbrun, a retired salesman — and gave him a hug.

        “I'd been wanting to hug one of those guys for 50 years,” Mr. Heilbrun said. “You don't know how many times they saved my tail.”

        And Mr. Leahr, who felt for many years that the nation he had served had paid him back with prejudice and discrimination, had been waiting just as long for one of those white bomber pilots to come along.

        “All I wanted was for someone to say, "Thanks,'” Mr. Leahr said.

        Both men had their old mission logs; they compared notes and found that Mr. Leahr had flown at least twice with Mr. Heilbrun — once on Dec. 16, 1944, on a bombing raid on a Czech oil refinery and the next day to strike an oil refinery inside Germany.

        A friendship was born — 50-odd years after the bonds were forged in war.

        “The guys flying the B-17s, we also looked for the Tuskegee people,” Mr. Heilbrun said last week, sitting in the living room of Mr. Leahr's home.

        “We could always spot them by their red tails,” Mr. Heilbrun said. “It was a good feeling when you saw the Tuskegees at your wing. They were good.”

        So good were the black airmen that they flew 1,578 missions over Europe and never lost a single U.S. bomber they were escorting.

        The bomber pilots, Mr. Leahr said, “were unbelievable. They'd bring these big old things in at 18,000 feet or so, usually with the sky just full of flak, and get it done.”

        Since the two men met, students all over the Tristate have been hearing their story. On Monday, TV viewers will see it on The History Channel's This Week in History program at 8 p.m.

        Both men say their lives have changed since they met; both believe they have changed the lives of the countless children who have heard their story.

        “I know I have changed,” said Mr. Leahr. “I had to cure myself of some feelings I had against white folks.”

        Joining a multiracial church and then meeting Mr. Heilbrun and learning how grateful the white pilot was “made me a different man,” Mr. Leahr said.

        In the schools, Mr. Heilbrun said, children will often start cheering when they are shown the 1929 class photo. He believes the kids know instinctively that the racism and segregation that kept the two men apart for so long can be overcome.

        “We are brothers,” Mr. Heilbrun said. “Always have been. Always will be.”

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