Serge Lebrun was called Boulon his whole life — Haitian Creole drift from ballon, French for balloon, because as a baby he had been agreeably round. Haitian families do this; nicknames given in infancy stay on you in old age regardless of how the shape changes. He grew up in Turgeau, the residential neighborhood up the hills above central Port-au-Prince, the son of Georges Marcel Lebrun (Boulogne, France) and Claire Gaetjens (Léogâne, Haiti) — a French-and-Belgian father, a Haitian-and-German mother.
His Haitian career arc threaded through four businesses in turn — first a baker in his teens, then a fabric and clothing-materials shop, then a jewelry-and-magazines store called La maison du livre (which his brother Claude eventually managed and bought), and finally a tire and battery store carrying the Englebert and Varta lines. When he emigrated to the United States around 1968, Claude took over the tire store and ultimately purchased it from him too. A clean Haitian-to-American business handoff between brothers.
In the US he worked for Mellon Bank in Manhattan until his retirement. He and Toye lived first in Jackson Heights, Queens, on 77th Street, and then in 1971 they bought a house at 34-38 92nd Street, Jackson Heights jointly with their daughter Mireille and her husband Peter — the multigenerational Lebrun-Jeannopoulos household that would raise Alex and Christopher.
He died on March 30, 2004, and was cremated rather than buried.
A footnote for the football historians: Serge’s first cousin on his mother’s side was Joseph “Joe” Gaetjens, the Haitian striker whose 1–0 goal upset England in the 1950 World Cup and who was later killed by the Duvalier regime. The kinship runs through Claire.
