Legacy of ‘my Bobby,’ firefighter and friend, endures
Firefighters and police officers lined the way into Christ’s Church of the Valley in Peoria, saluting as Buckeye Fire Chief Robert Costello’s flag-draped casket was carried inside by an Honor Guard.
It was a fitting sendoff for a man who dedicated his life to taking care of others, as a police officer, fire marshal, firefighter, educator and advocate.
To us, his family and friends walking behind the casket, he was Bobby.
A big man with a gravelly voice, thoughtful, quick to laugh, hand you a beer and lend an ear. The favorite uncle. Always there.
“He was my cheerleader, my rock,” my friend Judie Bizzozero said. She called him “my Bobby.”
A lot of people felt that way. “From the time he entered this world — the doctor handed him to me first, would you believe it? — he was destined to a life of service,” Judie’s mother, Mary Lou Gaillard, said.
Mary Lou met Bobby’s mother, Cammie, at nursing school when they were 17. They each married police officers and raised their children together, sharing Sunday dinners after church.
The four “cousins” outran recruits at the Phoenix Police shooting range, where Bobby’s dad was range master.
Judie was 6 or 7 before she realized she and her older sister, Jacquee, weren’t related to Bobby and his younger brother, Michael.
It’s how we build families sometimes.
When Bobby was sick, he asked Mary Lou, “Aunt Lou” he called her, to pray for him. “I know he listens to you,” Bobby told her. She told him, “The Lord listens to you, too.”
Bobby died at 62 on April 8 from cardiac arrest months after getting COVID-19. The virus damaged his heart, and he was scheduled to get a pacemaker.
He died in his favorite recliner. “He’s probably looking down on this and thinking, ‘Wow, look at all those people,’ ” Mary Lou said. Hundreds of people packed the church.
Bobby probably would rather be drinking beer with us at the Silver Pony
Bar & Grill, I thought. But he’d have loved the hearse, a Rosewood Classic Coach, its chassis like a late model Chevy truck.
Bobby loved anything with an engine. He was restoring a 1967 Chevy truck.
His doctor and friend, Daniel Smith, said while Bobby wasn’t much for church, he was the gospel in action.
Bobby waved away any accolades, but he received numerous awards for his work. His Community Paramedicine Program, which provides free in-home visits by Buckeye firefighters to residents recently discharged from the hospital, became a national model.
He was inducted into the Arizona Fire Service Hall of Fame in 2012. There’s not an Arizona firefighter who didn’t learn from Bobby, in person or from his policy manuals, training sessions or certification programs.
“Most of all, he cared,” interim Buckeye Fire Chief Bill Stockley said. He thanked Bobby’s wife, Wanell, for sharing her husband for so many years.
Bobby met Wanell 30 years ago when he was a fire marshal and she was event coordinator at Veterans Memorial Coliseum. Wanell wondered why he had to come back so many times. They’d been married for 22 years.
Stockley promised the firefighters would be there for Wanell, as her husband always had always been for them.
“Chief,” he said, “I hope we make you proud.”
Call me if you need anything, Bobby always said. He meant it. Bobby was there for every family event, if you were moving, needed something fixed, or your car wouldn’t start.
“How unfair of life to take Bob from us,” Bobby’s brother, Michael Costello, said. “We needed so much more.”
I met Judie in college and then her family, including Bobby. Once you met Bobby, you become his.
Bobby was like a brother to Judie, her confidant. When she met her husband, Greg, Bobby told her not to screw it up because he was the only boyfriend of hers he liked.
Bobby was the first after her parents to hold Judie’s daughter, Katie. She’s 13 now, unbelieving that Uncle Bobby was gone.
They were family, Bobby told Judie: “There’s nothing that can break that.”
Not even this.