The Red Bandanna

by Tom Rinaldi

  At Ling’s behest, Richard called Alison. He explained he was reaching out, due to his mother’s condition, trying to gain more clarity, to confirm whether the man who led Ling down the stairs was in fact Welles. Richard and Ling were determined to confirm Alison’s hope, but only if it was true.

  “‘My mother thinks this may be the man,’” Alison recalled Richard saying. “‘But can you send another photograph?’”

  Ling wanted a different image, she told her son, “a casual picture of him, something that’s not all dressed up, like in a suit and tie.”

  Alison thought she knew the right shot. “I’ll overnight it to you.” The picture had to be recent, and clear, out of a suit, Welles in a natural setting. The first image that came to mind was Welles from a year before, standing beside Harry Wanamaker Jr. on the deck of Marine 1’s John D. McKean, on their cruise around Lower Manhattan. Behind them, the dark towers of the World Trade Center loomed, soaring into the darkness.

  She made a copy of the photo, but altered it first. Alison didn’t want the full picture to add in any way to Ling’s pain, or influence her decision. She enlarged it from the center until the towers were invisible, cropped from the frame.

  Then she sent it to Richard and Ling.

  • • •

  After receiving the second photo, Richard prepared to show it to his mother. He understood the stakes of her reaction, for Ling and for Alison. During their phone conversation, Alison had stressed to Richard that she didn’t want to place any pressure on Ling. She was ready to accept a different answer. She could live with no.

  Richard had his back to Ling, holding the picture, and then turned quickly around. He wanted to see his mother’s immediate, raw reaction. Ling looked at the image of Welles’s face aboard the boat, the smile broad and easy, the early summer evening, the moment sweet upon the water. Two men, one who would work the pile and come to Alison’s door covered with its terrible dirt, and the other, who would be lost somewhere beneath it, inside its crypt, for months. Still lost to her.

  Ling looked at the man she’d never seen before September 11, whom she last saw turning around to go back up the stairs to the blood and fire. The face. She looked at nothing more than the face.

  One word: Yes.

  “I looked at it very carefully,” Ling said, recalling the moment. “My son says, ‘Are you sure? Are you one hundred percent sure? You know, you can’t be wrong.’”

  She didn’t hesitate. She was certain.

  “If you’re going to ask me ten times? Yes. One hundred times? Yes. Because that’s the face. . . . That was him, there was no question in my mind.”

  She didn’t know how long it was until the next thought entered her mind, but it would stay there for years to come.

  He saved my life.

  • • •

  Before calling Alison, Ling reached out to Judy first, to share what she saw in the photo, and to build a time line. They could help each other piece together the sequence that led them out of the inferno of the sky lobby, into Stairway A, down to clear air and beyond, to the ground floor, and into the ambulance they shared.

  Judy’s story shone a light on Ling’s own path down the stairwell. Talking with each other, they were struck anew by the improbability of their escape. Ling was the first to answer to Welles’s call in the lobby, following him as he led the way into the stairwell, walking with her and the other tall, thin man she didn’t know. He walked with them, carrying the woman on his back, until they reached the 61st floor. Then he told her he was going back up. He left to make the ascent back up seventeen floors to 78, to see who else he could help.

  When he emerged through the smoke and fire a second time, it was Judy who heard him call out, a man with a red bandanna covering his face against the smoke. She heard his instruction, urgent but strong and clear. They were among the first words she told her husband from her hospital bed hours after the buildings collapsed.

  “She heard him call out to everyone,” Gerry said. “And he said, ‘Everyone who can stand, stand now. If you can help others, do so.’ Those were his exact words as she told them to me that afternoon.”

  At least two others followed Judy into the stairwell, by her account guided there by Welles. Later, after reaching the clear air below the 61st floor, she saw a fire extinguisher. She remembered thinking how strange a place for it, there in the stairwell.

  Ling told Judy that this was the fire extinguisher Welles asked her to carry, the one that proved too heavy to lug down. The fire extinguisher helped them understand the sequence—it was Ling who’d gone down first, and then Judy. Welles had helped two different groups of survivors find the stairwell. When Judy reached the 50th floor, she encountered firefighters who were on their way up, exhausted from the climb and the heavy gear they carried. These were the firefighters who told her and the others to continue down to the 40th floor, where they’d find a working service elevator.

  More questions remained. How many others had Welles helped? How many of the survivors from the sky lobby followed them after Welles’s original instruction? They couldn’t know.

  • • •

  The call came from Richard.

  Before telling Alison, he had a few final questions, to be thorough. To be right. Alison breathed deeply, trying to slow down, to root herself in the moment, not to race ahead.

  Alison recounted their conversation vividly. “This red handkerchief that’s been mentioned in the article,” Richard said to her. “Was it solid red?”

  “No,” Alison said immediately. “If it was solid red, then that’s not Welles. It would have been a bandanna pattern . . .”

  “Okay,” Richard said. Then another question.

  “He was wearing a T-shirt. What kind of T-shirt would it be?”

  She knew instantly. He’d worn the same style his whole life, it seemed.

  “He would have been wearing a crewneck, short sleeve Brooks Brothers–type white T-shirt.” She added, “Not V-neck or tank top.”

  Richard said that matched his mother’s description. How many more questions? She was glad for the tests. She’d told Ling and Judy both, she never wanted to pressure them. She wanted only to know. To fill in the awful blank of the final hour of his life.

  No more questions. Just the answer.

  “My mother says it’s him,” Richard told her. “She says this is the man.”

  Nearly a decade later, in the house on Birchwood, the words still echoed. Reaching back to the moment, Alison fought to describe the meaning. The best accounting came through her tears.

  “I finally found him,” she said, sobbing. “I finally found him.”

  • • •

  Nine and a half months after Judy and Ling shared their cramped, frightened ride in the back of the ambulance, rushing away from the perimeter of the Trade Center complex toward the hospital, they were meeting again in person. Others would join them too—their families and their hosts. On June 23, 2002, they were spending a warm, sunny Sunday afternoon in Upper Nyack, guests of the Crowther family.

  Alison had seen Ling and her family already. After their phone conversation, she asked if she could visit with them. She wanted to share so much about Welles, about his life before that moment when he and Ling met. She wanted them to understand her son, as best a mother could explain her child, wondering too if she was being selfish in her need to share him, but Richard’s reaction dismissed that concern, according to Alison.

  “Richard said to me, ‘My mom wanted to know who this man was for a long time.’” The entire family wanted to know.

  Alison took some family photo albums, filled with so many of the images that played over and over again in Jeff’s slide show, to share the different stages of Welles’s life—the boy with his fire truck under the Christmas tree, the one wearing the bandanna across his forehead, the budding lacrosse player, the college kid
, the young professional. For Alison, they were portraits of wonder for new eyes to see.

  She traveled down to New York Hospital, Cornell Burn Center, where Ling was preparing for her seventh skin graft surgery, to meet Ling, Richard, and their family for lunch. The two women sat beside each other, face-to-face for the first time since Ling made the identification. As painful as Ling’s scarring was, as difficult as her recovery continued to be, Alison looked at Ling in awe. She had faced the same fire, breathed the same air, and walked the same steps as her son, and she’d made it down. She said the first thing that came to her mind.

  “Thank you so much,” Alison said. “I just want to . . .” Her voice trailed away for a few seconds. “I’m so happy to meet you and . . . thank you. Thank you for taking the time to meet with me.” She remembered what she carried with her. “I just brought these albums to show you . . . to show you my Welles.”

  He was almost the sole subject of that first meeting. Ling said virtually nothing about the scene in the sky lobby then, about what she’d endured, about the attacks and the suffering they’d brought her. Alison spoke about Welles, and Ling and her family listened, expressing their gratitude to her as best they could. For raising him. For his help. For his choice.

  Now, a few weeks later, they were together again in a larger group—these three families sitting on the shaded patio behind the house on Birchwood, sharing lunch. Ling in a wheelchair with her husband, Don, and their children; Judy with her husband, Gerry; and Alison, Jeff, Honor, Paige, and a few others, all sharing the same table.

  At that table, the others listened as Judy and Ling began to talk about the horrors they each endured that day. The descriptions went beyond the time line that led each to understand how Welles had helped them. They spoke about their own suffering, their damaged bodies and haunted visions, the sights never to be unseen. Alison and Jeff were carried into the sky lobby’s furnace, and they understood the destruction and death in a way they hadn’t before. “They really shared their experiences completely with us,” Alison said. The only word she could find to label it was horror.

  “The horror . . . I just remember thinking how incredibly brave these women are, how they faced what they faced, and have come through it, and are still carrying on. How they were able to reopen all of this so soon to share with us.”

  Both said Welles had been the only commanding voice they heard, the only one anywhere on the floor who seemed to understand what to do and where to go. With their families around them, each told Alison and Jeff, over and over again, what Welles had done, what he meant to them, what they owed him.

  When lunch was over, the tears dried and the plates cleared, they decided there was one more place to go. Judy and Gerry went with Alison, and Ling and her family with Jeff, and the group left the house and headed on a short drive to First Avenue in Nyack. They pulled up outside the stone façade of Grace Episcopal Church. Together, they walked inside, the sanctuary warmer but filled with nearly the same slant of light it held nine months before during the service. The group came to a spot, and turned its gaze upon the church’s memorial wall. Jeff and Alison pointed to the place where Welles’s ashes lay inside.

  • • •

  The Crowthers were so grateful for the light that had been cast on Welles’s final hours. To be able to look into the faces of these two lives he saved, to know their names, to hear their voices. But there were still so many unanswered questions. How many others on the 78th floor might never have seen the red bandanna but had heard a voice, or seen a hand, or followed a lead that came from Welles?

  There were tantalizing clues. Two other survivors followed Judy to the stairwell, at least. One of them was Ed Nicholls. He was in the sky lobby waiting for an elevator when the plane’s impact blasted him off his feet. He was thrown across the floor, injuring his arm badly when he landed. He had a distinct memory of a man’s voice directing him and the others to the stairwell, but not a clear recollection of what he looked like.

  Even without more answers, there was a story, and Jeff and Alison wanted to share it—for its message, to help them heal and to help others heal too. They had been granted something so few others had: an understanding of their son’s final actions, and their consequences. There was great pride in that knowledge, and no small degree of comfort. They believed the story might prove a point even beyond their son’s sacrifice. So many responded by running toward the threat and into the peril. This was the story of one responder, not assigned or asked, not dispatched from a station house or dressed in gear, who did the same and never returned.

  Alison believed she knew who would be interested in telling it. Back in March, she’d met Jane Lerner, a veteran reporter with the Journal News, a newspaper based in the Lower Hudson Valley and part of the USA TODAY Network across the country. Lerner was assigned to cover the small ceremony at Grace Episcopal after Welles’s body was recovered and cremated. Her story, “Volunteer Firefighter Found at Ground Zero Laid to Rest,” ran in the Sunday edition of the paper, quoting Alison and rendering the scene with skill and compassion. The piece made an impression on the family.

  In June, Alison shared with Lerner the story about her son, the mysterious man noted in the New York Times who helped to save others on the 78th floor before losing his life in the South Tower’s collapse. Alison told her about Welles, about the red handkerchief he carried since he was a little boy, and, after the planes hit, how he’d swapped his role from equities trader to volunteer firefighter, using the bandanna to cover his face from the smoke and dust as he led others to safety.

  The 1,565-word piece ran under the headline BANDANNA LINKS ACTS OF COURAGE, and traced Welles’s actions up until, and through, September 11. With quotes from Ling Young and Judy Wein, the story identified Welles Crowther for the first time publicly as the man who saved their lives, and those of an unknown number of others.

  “He saved so many people,” Young was quoted in the article as saying, “but he didn’t save himself.

  “His whole life was ahead. It’s such a tragedy.”

  The story was now told.

  Soon, it would spread.

  • • •

  The chapel wore its gray proudly, rising like a fortress in native granite. The high-flown arches and opulent carvings looked down upon all who walked its aisles and knelt among its pews. It was a mighty setting for a sacred rite.

  Ten months and one day after the towers fell, on July 12, 2002, so many of Welles’s childhood and high school friends from Nyack gathered inside as the first among them stood at the altar, awaiting his bride’s approach.

  Rob Lewis was getting married. He’d known Welles nearly all his life in Nyack, all the way back to playing T-ball games together and being in the same Cub Scout troop, where Alison served as den mother. As each grew, their bond hardened over afternoons of pond hockey and through the seasons of their lacrosse careers. Of all the friends who gave Welles grief while growing up, Lewis was likely the toughest. He would be the first to admit it. But friends they remained, delivering and receiving each other’s jabs while protecting each other from anyone else’s. After graduation they moved in separate directions, Lewis continuing his lacrosse career just twenty-seven miles north up the Hudson Valley, at West Point.

  While Welles walked the paths of Chestnut Hill with his lax stick over his shoulder and Lewis endured plebe life and formation drills and combat training, they stayed in touch, part of the larger Nyack crew who saw one another during holidays and summers and reunions back home.

  Lewis’s fiancée, Liz Chambers, whom he had dated since high school, was a lacrosse standout for Nyack as well. After graduating, she played at Rutgers. Lewis remembered one visit he and Welles made to see her. The two stayed in Liz’s apartment for the weekend, and during a party there, a fracas broke out. Lewis looked over to see Welles in the center of a fight, slamming another partygoer to the floor and rolling around with him.


  “He was never a bully,” Lewis said of Welles, “but he was tough. There were a bunch of drunk college guys, and he saw one going into her room. He didn’t like it.”

  After graduating, Lewis proposed to Liz while stationed at Fort Stewart in Georgia before leaving for a posting in Kosovo as an army officer. They knew it would be a large wedding. Liz had five siblings and a long roster of friends and teammates. The side of the altar would be crowded. That was perfect for Lewis. He wanted as many of his friends there to stand beside him as would come. Ultimately, it was decided. Liz would have eight bridesmaids; Lewis, nine groomsmen. Welles was among the first he asked.

  When the planes struck the towers, Lewis was forty-six hundred miles east, in Kosovo. He remembered a group of fifty soldiers packed into a room in their camp, watching the smoke and fire unfurl across the television screen. He’d never felt so maddeningly far from his country. Soon after, he was attached to an e-mail chain, including Welles’s address, connecting Nyack friends, searching for any information. As days, and then weeks, passed, the dispatches grew less frequent, until the communications stopped completely. All understood the silence.

  Just a few weeks before the wedding, the story of Welles’s final hour began to make the rounds, from one friend to another, one e-mail and call to the next, in a spreading pool of recognition. What he’d done. Who he’d saved. The story was at once astonishing and real. The friends and their families had to share it with one another, and with others outside the circle too, with people who never knew Welles.

  By the time Rob Lewis and Liz Chambers kissed each other for the first time as husband and wife, walking down the aisle past Jeff and Alison and more than a hundred others there to celebrate them, stepping out into their first moments of a new life, they’d already made room for one guest who wasn’t there. When the bride and groom were introduced at the reception, the wedding party lining up to greet them, Lewis walked in beaming, an enormous smile on his face, his arms raised high. In his hand, he held a red bandanna. All the groomsmen, including his brother, Steven, and his army buddy Jimmy Silliman, and all the Nyack gang—Karim Raoul, Jody Steinglass, Willie Hopkins, Matt Dickey, Michael Barch, Matt Drowne—had red bandannas in their jacket pockets. They lifted them high.