A Decade of Hope

by Dennis Smith

  Ryan was born right before 9/11, in June of ’01, with a host of medical issues. He had a condition called craniosynostosis, a premature fusion of the skull bones. The skull is actually made up of six different bones, six different sutures in your head. In the first year of a baby’s life those bones are very pliable, which is the body’s way of shaping itself. The head’s growth is actually dictated by your brain’s growth. The bones in Ryan’s forehead had fused prematurely, so his brain grew [in] the only place it had room to move, which left him with kind of a cone-shaped head. He wound up having seven operations. On top of all that he had some other problems, and then 9/11 came. So I had a big challenge.

  Ryan’s baptism had actually been scheduled for the week of September 11, and we hadn’t given him a middle name. But then my two brothers died, and since our son Kenny already had the middle name Thomas, we decided to give Ryan the middle name Timothy. We postponed the baptism, because I was down at Ground Zero, and it wasn’t until maybe six weeks after September 11 that we finally had him baptized. I remember calling the city to try to get his birth certificate changed, to have Timothy added, because we needed the documentation for the church to baptize him with that name. I was told it would take six months, so I just explained to the guy what I was going through. And he said, “I’m sorry, buddy, you can have it this second.” So we got him a middle name, and we baptized him Ryan Timothy Haskell.

  I probably didn’t deal with 9/11 as directly as I would have had my son Ryan not been sick. Most of my energy from 2001 to 2003 was devoted to his health. We almost lost him more than once. The things we went through with Ryan then, coupled with losing Tommy and Timmy, made this an incredible time in our lives. There probably was a certain amount of strength in me already, to be able to handle what I did, strength that came from my parents. I’ve just always been somebody who could see things clearly, see them for what they are, and just deal with the problem—whether it is a fire in Brooklyn or my son in an emergency room. Ryan is a very special kid. He’s handicapped, mentally retarded, probably as a result of the craniosynostosis and all the trauma he had with his skull. But he just smiles all the time. He doesn’t have any physical limitations other than he just doesn’t do things as well as a normal kid would. And he has an attitude that has just inspired me over the last nine years. He never cried, never complained. Obviously there was pain involved, but he was so strong through all the surgeries he had to get, almost as if it were just a matter-of-fact thing to do. I realized a lot of my own strength from watching my son. Just the way he handled things. He is the one, really, who got Genene and me through it, and it brought us closer together too.

  Tommy and his wife, Barbara, had three girls: Megan, Erin, and Sara, who is a senior in high school now. We’re very close with Barbara and the girls—we talk and see them all the time. We’re very fortunate to still have Tommy’s girls so actively a part of our lives, as some families have been torn apart. It’s real sad. I know some of the lost firefighters whose parents had to take the spouses to court to get visitation to see their grandkids. The guy who was killed might have been the glue that kept the whole family together, or kept a particular relationship together; perhaps the in-laws didn’t like the spouse or vice versa. But the thing that really breaks my heart is seeing his girls hit all these milestones without Tommy being there. I remember when Megan was moving up from elementary school to middle school, they had a father/daughter dance, and she called me up and asked that I take her, which I was honored to do. I tell you, that got me. When I got off the phone . . . I hardly ever cried before, I don’t know why, I didn’t feel the need. I was impacted by 9/11 tremendously, but the two times I actually did cry, both were with Megan.

  The first week after 9/11 everybody was at Barbara’s parents’ house, and because I was at the site pretty much the entire time, my mother asked me to come home and just have dinner with everybody. They were tired of watching the news and wanted to talk to me and get a sense of what it was like down there. When I finally was able to go over to Barbara’s parents’ house, Megan, who was eleven at the time, came up to me and asked, “Did you find my dad yet?”

  “No, Megan, not yet. But I’m going to find him for you.”

  And she said, “I need you to find him for me.”

  I said, “I will, Megan,” and I just had to walk out of the house. I went to the side of the house, and it just hit me like I had gotten hit by a freight train. I sat there alone and cried for like five minutes. Realizing the loss had already come to me that day—being at Ground Zero on 9/11, seeing the destruction, I knew Tommy wasn’t coming back. But seeing it through Megan’s eyes just killed me. And then doing all these things with Megan over the years that Tommy should have done—you know, it’s just tough.

  The exciting part of living in that post-9/11 world is getting to watch Tommy’s children grow up. Megan is driving now. Tommy had this old Mustang, an ’86 Capri, that was his baby. He kept it under a cover in the garage, taking it out only on nice days. Tires with like thirty thousand miles on them. Barbara thought about selling it after 9/11, but I suggested, Let’s hold on to it. Megan was always talking about it, thinking it was going to be her first car. So when it was time to get her permit, she wanted that Mustang. But that car is superfast, so I told her she would not be driving it for a couple of years. First get a car and bounce it off the walls and whatever you’re going to do, and when you become a good driver, when you become comfortable, then you can start driving the Mustang. So she’s driving a Honda Civic in the meantime.

  My brother Timmy, on the other hand, had not started a family yet. He had had a girlfriend for two or three years, a woman named Gabrielle, but they weren’t married or even engaged. She was young, a young woman with a difficult personality, and the family found it hard to get along with her. When Timmy was killed, Gabrielle wound up getting the federal money from the Victim Compensation Fund, probably close to $1 million. In the long run that was pretty much the last we have seen of her, and I guess she went on with her life.

  Tommy’s girls are stronger than they even realize. I don’t think they’ll ever take anything for granted, as most kids do. But I’m hopeful they won’t see any more trauma in their lives. Their innocence was taken ten years ago, and they were forced to grow up quicker than they had to. Barbara is also not the same person she was prior to 9/11. She has had to learn how to be without Tommy, how to do more things on her own, and I think she was much stronger than she knew. When somebody loses a father or a husband, when a loved one is murdered in such an extraordinary event as September 11, I think it forces you to become a different person.

  Tommy’s family has always loved ladybugs, and Barbara and the girls said that whenever they see one they think of Tommy. I thought that was sweet and kind of funny and really didn’t think anything more of it.

  Then, in December in 2001, I went back to work. The Fire Department had told me to take some more time off, but I felt that I needed to work, to try to get my life back to normal. I got transferred to Ladder 175, and on one of my first calls there we pulled a really big fire—a three-story frame house with fire on the second and third floors, blowing out every window but one. I grabbed a portable ladder and put it up to that one window on the second floor. I’d done the same thing at many other fires, but this time, at the tip of the ladder, I suddenly felt apprehensive. It was like a clairvoyant moment, and something was telling me not to go in there. My senses were on overload, but I climbed in anyway to make a quick search of the room. I found the bed and felt my way around the room, and there was no one unconscious.

  But now, rather than find the door and go into the hallway and on to the next room, as I normally would for a full search at a fire, I just stopped myself and turned around. I turned around and said something like, Tommy said get the hell out of there. I went back down the ladder, and as soon as I stepped off it, the fire flashed out of that window, and part of the parapet on the front came down and wiped out the ladder I had
just been on.

  Afterward I was sitting on a stoop across the street, reflecting on what just happened. I reached for a bottle of water, and just as I was bringing it up to my mouth, I saw something on the top of my hand—a ladybug. Right away I thought, Thanks, Tom.

  Michael Burke

  William “Billy” Burke, Jr., was the namesake of Deputy Assistant Chief of Department William Burke, a high-ranking officer in New York City’s Fire Department. He followed in his father’s footsteps and entered the FDNY. Billy, a captain, was lost in the North Tower on 9/11. His family today refers to him as Captain Billy Burke, FDNY, which is the way he liked to describe himself. Billy was one of six children, and his younger brother Michael describes his peregrinations through the clouds of New York politics in trying to memorialize his hero brother appropriately.

  We were raised in Plainview, Long Island, around forty minutes outside of the city, and we kids had very little concept of what my father was doing in New York City. He never told us why he joined the FDNY. He never really talked to us about his job, never came home and told us about any fires or exciting runs they had had that day. He would talk about the South Bronx, his experiences with the people there; he’d talk about the community, the poverty. I think he had a strong sense of social justice. It might have just been innate in him. My father was first-generation American, and my mother was as well. His parents, our grandparents, were old, both in their eighties. They were ordinary elderly people, Irish immigrants. They went to church on Sundays, but religion or social justice wasn’t something they brought up or spoke about.

  My father came out of the big war, put a year in at Fordham, apparently didn’t like that much, and then didn’t do a whole lot of anything for a year or two, taking whatever jobs he could get. When he got the Fire Department job in 1949, he got married and started a family. We were not a small family, six kids in all. There are two girls—Elizabeth is the oldest and Janet is the youngest—and then there are four boys in the middle—Billy was the oldest boy. Chris and I are twins, and then Jimmy. Very balanced. And the blue eyes were the oldest and the youngest.

  We were always a Fire Department family, but much different from other department families. My father didn’t have work paraphernalia around the house, and he didn’t wear anything that was particularly Fire Department, which I guess was not as common as it is now, because they didn’t have all the sweatshirts and stuff back then. I could probably count on one hand the times we were in the firehouse when I was growing up. If we were there, it was only because he was going to see his parents in the Bronx and had us with him while stopping by the firehouse for some reason or another.

  When my younger sister, Janet, was in seventh grade, she made a little doll in her ceramics class at school—a little go-go dancer with blond hair, blue eyes, and pink skin. Seeing it, my father thought of the children who would hang around his firehouse. And he knew that a little Puerto Rican girl was having a birthday, so he asked my sister to make another go-go dancer, but one with dark hair, dark eyes, and dark skin. I can still see him wrapping it up in a shoebox, tying it up, putting a lot of paper in it. He was really careful with it. He took the train then, as he usually did. And just imagine it: Here’s this deputy chief going to the South Bronx and bringing a doll to this little girl. I always remembered that. In fact, I ended up marrying a black Puerto Rican girl, and when we were first dating I used to look around her apartment to see if the dark-skinned go-go dancer ceramic doll was there.

  My brother Billy was a chip off the old block in many ways. He was an FDNY captain, and there was no doubt he would become a chief like my father. He was good-looking, witty, charming. You could say life was pretty good for him. Because he also lifeguarded at the beach, in his mind was: I save lives for a living. And his running joke was that he used to sign all his letters: Hero Billy Burke. He put it tongue in cheek, but it was pretty accurate. There were one or two instances in which he got hurt and was treated, but, kind of taking after my father, he didn’t bring that up. He never told us about it. I remember one fire that he was proud of when he was with 11 Truck, on the Lower East Side. He and another guy, Leroy Smith, saved people on the third floor. There was fire beneath them, and still they were able to get them down in a very difficult, hair-raising situation. There was an article about it in the New York Post, along with a couple of photos, and he saved those papers. He had a bunch of papers like that. When I met Billy’s lieutenant after 9/11, he told me, “I wish I had put him in for a citation. . . . I should have put him in and the other firefighter.”

  Billy had worked in a firehouse right down from La Salle Academy. My father had actually graduated from La Salle Academy too, and was the captain of their basketball team. They won the Catholic Eastern Seaboard Championships when he was a junior, and they went back to the play-offs when he was a senior. My father had saved the newspapers that covered the stories of his team and shared them with us as kids. It’s kind of funny that we knew all about his success in basketball, but we didn’t know all about his success in the Fire Department. Well, we did know what his responsibilities were. We knew he was of high rank, a deputy chief. We didn’t know he was the commander of the 6th Division in the South Bronx.

  On 9/11, I was working at the Sheraton Hotel, the big one on Fifty-second and Seventh. My wife, Wanda, was also working there—it’s where we met, actually—on an early shift that Tuesday, so I dropped her off at 6:00 A.M., driving in like we did every day to get to work. At the time we were living in the black Latino section on Commonwealth Avenue in the Bronx, the same kind of neighborhood my father had worked in the South Bronx. I was off that day.

  So on 9/11, I dropped my wife off and then drove back home. Our son, Josh, was home sick from school that day, and Wanda called right before 9:00 A.M, to check up on him. She then said, “Oh, by the way, turn on the television; a plane hit the Trade Center.” I looked out the window, and it was a beautiful, clear day, so I’m thinking, How’d that happen? I hung up the phone and turned on the television, and there it was on the first station: ten floors of the North Tower, smoke pouring out, and I thought immediately, The only thing that could have done that is a jetliner. It had to have been hijacked; it couldn’t have been an accident. It would have taken a hijack on such a beautiful, clear day. Somebody had to have flown that plane intentionally into the building. But . . . you know, it was unbelievable. Your mind couldn’t comprehend it. Couldn’t accept it.

  On the TV station that I was watching the newscaster was saying that people were calling in and reporting that they had seen the plane fly overhead and hit the tower. They were reporting it as a private jet, a chartered jet. So then I thought it was a private chartered jet and debated with myself whether it was terrorism or not.

  But then Wanda called back. She had just gotten off the phone with my brother Billy, who had called the hotel looking for me, thinking I was at work. They passed the call to Wanda, and she was in a state when she reached me, you could hear it in her voice. This is a tough woman, my wife—you’re talking about a black Hispanic woman, a single mom, who had raised a son before we married. So to hear the fear in her voice was scary. Billy had told her, “We’re under terrorist attack. Get out of the building, get out of the city. Go home.” And I was like, “Where was he calling from?”

  She said, “I don’t know. He sounded like he was out on the street somewhere.” “Mike,” she whispered, “I could hear it in Billy’s voice, I could hear the urgency in his fear. And that scared me.”

  For Wanda to have heard fear in Billy’s voice, that was a hell of a thing. And that’s when the second plane hit.

  I didn’t know it at the time, but Billy was calling from the firehouse. And he’d called other people who lived in New York from there.

  And then my younger sister, Janet, called from Florida and said, “Mike, do you see what’s going on?” I was like, “Yeah, sure.” And she asked, “Where’s Wanda?” I said, “At work.” And then Janet asked me what I was going
to do. Like everyone else I had to think. What to do?

  How was Wanda going to get home? She couldn’t get on the train, for fear of bombs. She was in Midtown. If they hit the Trade Towers, then they were gonna hit Midtown too. Then they reported that the Pentagon had been hit.... You could see smoke coming from the Pentagon. They didn’t even know what happened there. You didn’t know what to do.

  I was watching a reporter on TV who was downtown. And as the first tower collapsed, he reported that a third plane had hit. That’s what he thought. He was running for his life; the cameraman was running; everybody was running. There were people passing by and were screaming, “A third plane has hit. A third plane has hit!” I was at home in the Bronx, and my wife was in a war zone. And that’s when I told Wanda to get out of the hotel—now. She was saying that nobody in the hotel knew what to do. They were all sitting around there crying and making calls. They didn’t know what to do.

  So I said to her, “A captain in the FDNY has told you to evacuate the building. Get out of the building.” So that’s what she did, and started walking up Madison Avenue. I told her to go up Madison, because I figured Fifth Avenue was more well-known. If they were gonna hit an avenue, it’d be Fifth. She was in good shape, so I knew she’d be okay walking a long distance. Once I knew she was walking, I got on my bike to go down and meet her. Wanda’s older son, Louis, who was about nineteen, was home, and so he stayed there to watch Josh while I headed out.