Greenburgh resident Lois Bronz has been a groundbreaker in Westchester County politics, but she nearly did not live long enough to be a force for change.

In what she believed was a racially motivated attack, Bronz barely escaped a bombing of her home when she lived in New Orleans in the early 1960s.

Bronz, who retired from the county Board of Legislators at the end of 2009 after serving nine two-year terms, recounted the incident while reviewing her life and career during an interview at her legislative office in White Plains in December. She represented the Eighth District, which includes Tarrytown, Sleepy Hollow, Elmsford and Greenburgh.

Bronz recalled her family had limited financial means when she grew up in New Orleans, but that did not seem to disturb her.

“If you’re poor, you really don’t know that you’re poor,” Bronz said. “I was the ninth of 10 children and (had) a wonderful mother and father, neither of whom had lots of formal education. In fact, my father was illiterate. I used to read the newspaper to him because he was very interested in political and public things that were going on in the community.”

Bronz was politically active during her teen years and 20’s, helping people register to vote. At that time, residents of the then-segregated New Orleans had to pass a written test to earn the right to vote. She said the testing was used as a means of discriminating against minorities.

As a young adult, Bronz was also active with the Panel of Women. “This was a national organization to help educate the public with respect to school integration,” she said. “We’d go wherever we were invited to speak publicly about a personal experience with discrimination.”

As a member of the Panel, Bronz spoke about her son, Edgar, who was one of six African-American youths who scored highly on an intelligence test and was accepted into the Benjamin Franklin School in New Orleans in September 1960, which was for “exceptional students, to which no black youngsters had been registered.”

But her activism nearly cost Bronz her life. “In October, my house was bombed,” Bronz recalled. “A live bomb was placed in the bathroom window of the back of my house. Nobody was hurt, only because I was walking through the house when the bomb exploded and I hadn’t gotten to that part of the house. But the room where the bomb was placed was destroyed. So if I had been walking a little faster I wouldn’t be here to tell you this story.”

She said the FBI and local police never caught the person or persons responsible for placing the bomb. Undaunted, Bronz, who was a widow at the time, told her children that they were not going to be intimidated into moving from the damaged home. “We couldn’t let something frighten us away from our home,” Bronz said.

Bronz moved to the New York area as a result of her relationship with her husband, Chuck, who was a teacher in Tuckahoe when he decided to come to the Big Easy to experience Mardi Gras for his first trip to the city in 1966. Bronz, who was working in the public relations department of Xavier University, was asked by a former college classmate to show Chuck around the city.

“He met my family. That was in February. We became the best of friends and we got married in November,” she said. “I came to New York with my kids.”

The Bronz’s moved to Greenburgh and have lived there ever since. “The reason we chose Greenburgh was because of the schools,” Bronz said.

Bronz became active in Greenburgh politics against the backdrop of unrest in the community shortly after the 1968 assignation of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“Chuck and I decided we would try to work with our police department and our young people, especially,” said Bronz, who was a high school math teacher in the Greenburgh district at the time. “We literally invited everybody in our school community to a picnic in our backyard because some people who lived next to each other had never known each other.”

Bronz later spoke before the Greenburgh Town Board on a regular basis about local issues. She was asked by a town resident to run for political office and Bronz was elected to the town board in 1969 and served on it for 16 years.

Bronz won her first term on the county board in 1993. “I was not interested in the state level or anything beyond that,” she said. “The issues that I was interested in, housing, child care, addressing domestic violence and fiscal stability, were bigger than the Town of Greenburgh.”

Among the accomplishments she is most proud of as a county legislator include the creation of the Human Rights Commission; the addressing of child care and domestic violence issues; and creating affordable housing.

Bronz became the first African-American chosen as chairperson of the Board of Legislators and served in the post in 2002 and 2003.

“I have enjoyed a relationship, one-to-one and group wise, with all of my colleagues. And I just felt that I could make a contribution,” Bronz said. “I did enjoy it. It’s very challenging.”

One of her achievements as chair was the bi-weekly meetings she set up between the leadership of the Board of Legislators and the administration of County Executive Andrew Spano.

Bronz said she decided not to seek another term because, “I feel I have really accomplished most of things that I wanted to do. I’m 82 years old. I still want to spend time with family and do some things in the community. And I thought that this was a really good time to encourage some younger people to get into public office and government service.”

Though she left the county board, Bronz said she will “from a distance, make a contribution” to the county by sitting on the boards of several non-for-profit organizations; be heavily involved with the Lois Bronz Children’s Center in Greenburgh; and continue to work with the county board’s Committee on Appointments, which she chaired over the past two years. The committee is responsible for recommending to the full county board the approval of citizen volunteer appointments to county boards and commissions.

Bronz will also be able to spend more time with her family, which includes her son, Edgar, an attorney who resides in Maryland; daughter, Francine Shorts, a Greenburgh resident who is a school psychologist in the Greenburgh School District, and four grandchildren.