O’Connor guest speaker at Cal U Civil War Roundtable

By Matt Petras
For the Mon Valley Independent
Bob O’Connor has been hooked on Civil War history since he was a child. A Gettysburg trip with his family particularly sticks out in his memory.
“It was always interesting,” he said. “I would look at the collections of the uniforms and I would look at the guns and I would look at the bullets and I’d look at the cannonballs… it was just fascinating to me.”
O’Connor will present information about John Brown from his 2006 book “The Perfect Steel Trap: Harpers Ferry 1859,” at a Civil War Roundtable at California University of Pennsylvania’s Kara Alumni Building, 7 p.m. Thursday.
Before retiring, O’Connor, 73, of Charles Town, W.Va., worked in the tourism industry. While in this line of work, O’Connor got the opportunity to indulge in his two greatest passions: writing and history. In addition to writing press releases and working around historical locations for his tourism industry gigs, O’Connor has been writing and learning about history the vast majority of his life. First published as a seventh grader, he has written for a variety of publications about history and other topics like sports throughout his life.
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