by Tom Rinaldi
They were carrying Welles to the party.
• • •
And so it started. From an e-mail Alison sent to those who’d reached out in the first days and weeks after the attacks to the friends desperate to know if he’d made it out, she decided to share the story—not focused on Welles’s death or the way he’d died. Everyone knew that already. This message was about what he’d done just before his death, the details of where and how he’d done it, and for whom. She didn’t dwell on the reasons. All receiving the note knew Welles, so they already understood.
The story pushed past the friends, beyond Boston and Nyack and Rockland County, down the Lower Hudson Valley into New York City, and from there, across the country. CNN. USA TODAY. ABC News. There was a flurry of coverage in particular as the first anniversary arrived, spotlighting the tale of a young man who climbed back up as others went down. But after the anniversary passed, as powerful as the story was, Jeff and Alison could feel the momentum gently slow, and the spread stall.
They didn’t stop, though. Together with the help of friends and a close board of advisers, they created a charitable trust in Welles’s name, determined to find and build good from his death, to share the meaning of his life and his sacrifice. It was essential to their own survival to find some light. Their goal was not just to remember but, through memory, to give. Starting the year after his death, the trust began granting scholarships to Nyack students who embodied Welles’s values and passions, and making gifts and grants to other nonprofits sharing his example. The trust required a great deal of work in its creation, but the work provided its own measure of healing.
As for its symbol, in time that would spread in ways no trust could ever seed.
• • •
The hollow in the ground remained. Fights over the site’s future persisted. But some of the wounds to the city’s psyche, and to the country’s, started to close, if not in healing or acceptance, then through the unremitting push of time. The pulse of the tragedy grew fainter if it didn’t course through you each day—marked by the empty chair, or the silent phone, or the vacant room at home.
For those Welles left, there was a simple fabric in the absence, a red piece of him that resisted any fading. Somehow, the bandanna mattered, its knot tying together his memory and example to those who still held them, and might perpetuate them. His friends began carrying his story inside the handkerchief’s folds.
John Scott, his teammate in Nyack, ran a youth hockey program in Raleigh, North Carolina, and told every player about the bandanna and the man behind it. The same was true for the women’s college softball team Scott helped at his alma mater, Barton College, in Wilson, North Carolina. “For every team I coach, nobody wears number nineteen,” he said, “and I tell the kids why.”
Tyler Jewell, his friend and teammate at BC, represented the United States as a snowboarder in the Winter Olympics in Turin in 2006, competing in the men’s parallel giant slalom. Though he didn’t win gold, Jewell wore his own medal to the games, one made of cloth. He wrapped the red bandanna around his neck for the world to see as he slashed down the mountain.
Matt O’Keefe, a college classmate and avid golfer, tied a bandanna around the handle of his golf bag the week Welles’s body was recovered, and never removed it. After BC, he founded an apparel company for CrossFit athletes, several of whom would wear the bandanna design O’Keefe created. “They have such an attachment to that story,” O’Keefe said. “It’s become a symbol of strength and courage.”
Chris Varmon, another hockey teammate in Nyack, helped to create the Red Bandanna Skate for young and old players of all skills in Rockland County, an event to celebrate sportsmanship, team spirit, and passion for the game. Each year, most of the skaters wear bandannas beneath their helmets, as Welles often did.
Matt Drowne, another friend from Nyack, went a step further. He had a tattoo of the bandanna inked between his shoulders, with Welles’s initials placed at the bottom. As a teacher and administrator working with special needs students, he began a red bandanna award, given each year to a child demonstrating exceptional courage.
Jessica Alberti, a friend from BC, remembered Welles as a kind voice during the challenges of their college years. After learning what Welles had done, she pushed herself to run her first marathon. In 2002, she crossed the line in Central Park after 26.2 miles through New York City, with Welles’s name written across her shirt and a small red bandanna attached. “I felt like if he could do something that amazing,” Alberti said, “I should be able to do this.” In 2004, she and others helped to start the annual Red Bandanna 5k at Boston College, now one of the biggest events on campus each fall.
Tim Epstein, a friend who lived in the same freshman dorm at BC, would present Welles’s story to the board of the Fetzer Institute, a foundation with a deep endowment working to promote love and forgiveness around the world. Through the presentation, Fetzer would help to fund a character-based curriculum (developed by Alison, Jeff, and others) for schools around the country to teach lessons of service and compassion through Welles’s story and the bandanna’s symbol. When Epstein’s wife gave birth to their daughter, he called Jeff and Alison from the hospital to ask a favor. “I wanted to make sure that they would be comfortable with us naming her Madeline Welles,” he said. “They gave the blessing, and we announced her to the world thereafter.” Other such announcements would come as children were named after Welles in numbers unseen before. Before 2012, there were no more than five children in the United States who were given the name Welles in a single year. Between 2012 and 2014, there were thirty-five newborns given the name—many in families who’d never met Welles or the Crowthers.
Chris Reynolds knew Welles from childhood but understood the symbol of the bandanna differently from anyone else. A friend growing up, a teammate in football and hockey, he remembered joking in a high school locker room that he and the other guys “would be flipping burgers, and Welles will be making a difference in the world someday.” The others laughed, Welles maybe the loudest. But Reynolds would make his own considerable mark. He too became a volunteer firefighter as a teenager, and knew immediately it would be his career. After attending college, getting the FDNY application, taking the exams, staying in shape, waiting, the call came. His first posting was with New York City EMS, which had just come under the FDNY’s control. A short time later, in February 2001, he made the move to “probie school,” the department’s probationary firefighter program. After ten weeks he graduated, and in the spring he received his first appointment. Engine 80, Harlem. A lifelong dream achieved, was how he described it.
The morning of September 11, Reynolds was at work when a second alarm transmitted, indicating a plane had struck the World Trade Center. He and others turned to the house television.
“We see the smoke coming out of the building,” Reynolds remembered, “and everything that’s happening downtown, and we start getting ready. We’re going to get a response to head down to the Trade Center. We did a refill on all of the medical equipment and getting ready to go, waiting for the dispatcher to send us downtown.
“And then we saw the second plane hit.”
As one of the last units left in Upper Manhattan, Reynolds’s company endured an agonizing wait before being dispatched to the scene, not arriving until after dark. The site was overwhelming in its destruction, the twisted shards of steel reaching upward from the pile like bones through skin. He arrived with his company Tuesday night, and didn’t leave for five days.
“We still thought it was going to be a rescue operation,” he said. “We would get some people out alive. There were a lot of names going around, people who were missing. . . . There were a lot of firemen’s names.” Hundreds were unaccounted for, some Reynolds knew, all who shared his calling, his brotherhood.
Thursday, he saw Harry Wanamaker on the pile. They hugged each other in their relief, grateful each was alive. Wanamaker t
old him that Welles was among the missing. As days turned to a week, it became clear to them both that there were no more lives to save, only remains to recover. Like Wanamaker, Reynolds worked the pile, returning to the site week after week for months. Wanamaker would die of cancer in 2010, his family believing his death was caused by the time he spent inhaling the toxic fumes at the site. Few could understand what the recovery workers endured, or their dedication.
“Going down there,” Reynolds said, “was almost therapeutic. I didn’t want not to be on the pile. Every time we got released, to be at home or go sleep, all you were doing was going to funerals. I’d rather be working, at least helping families with some closure, than not be there.” He wasn’t there when Welles’s body was found, but knew the area well, and understood where Welles was, and why.
“I know he was found with Ladder 4 in the lobby,” he said. “I’m sure he was standing right there with his brothers, waiting to go back up and help. . . . I’m sure he was helping the chief, the command post, and the officers of the companies and the firemen, to let them know what the best route was, because he came down from the upper floors. He obviously had a path, he’d let them know what stairwell he used, and I’m sure he gave them a sense of what was going on in the upper floors. I mean, he just went through hell.”
Reynolds paused.
“He had every opportunity to leave and he didn’t. He stayed and he put others first and that’s something you either have or you don’t. He had it, and he used it.”
Even after the funerals were finished, and the pile cleared, and the anniversaries commemorated, as the years passed, Reynolds never allowed the memory to fade. Above the banister outside his house, there is a red bandanna tied to one of the rails, and he passes it every day as he leaves for his next shift.
“I have two little girls,” Reynolds said more than a decade after the towers fell.
“A four-year-old and a two-year-old. My girls ask about the bandanna, ‘What’s that for?’ I tell them, ‘It’s for Daddy’s friend, a friend that did a lot of good for a lot of people. Daddy’s friend is up in heaven,’ and I don’t say any more.”
• • •
On a December day, with temperatures in the fifties, Jeff and Alison led a small caravan traveling south to the city for a ceremony they never thought they’d witness. They gathered at MetroTech Plaza in downtown Brooklyn, off Flatbush Avenue, ten days before Christmas for an event held just once before in the 141 years since the department’s founding. It was only the second time the FDNY would posthumously name someone an honorary member of its ranks.
The idea had its seed in a chance encounter. Lee Ielpi, who joined the FDNY in 1970, had lost his son Jonathan in the attacks when he responded as a member of FDNY Squad 288. Ielpi had spent months on the recovery effort at ground zero, and he was on the pile when Assistant Chief Donald Burns was found in late March 2002 in the ruins of the South Tower’s lobby, along with the remains of several other firefighters, and Welles’s own.
Months after his son was recovered, Jeff went downtown to the Family Room, on Liberty Plaza, a space adjacent to ground zero where victims’ loved ones could come for privacy and reflection. One of the rooms was solely for immediate family, its walls covered with photos and mementos. Jeff brought a photo in a simple wooden frame to add to the collection. While there, Jeff encountered Ielpi, and the two began to talk. Ielpi explained that he too had lost his son in the attacks, among the 343 FDNY members who were killed. Jeff told him that Welles was a volunteer firefighter, and that his remains were found on March 19 in the lobby’s rubble.
“You have to remember where the lobby was when we got to it,” Ielpi would later recall about the pile’s slow, brutal clearing. “It was below grade. It collapsed down with all the weight of the floors above it. We were quite a ways down. Jeff said the reports were that Welles was right in that area, with Donald Burns. So I had to think about it for a second and I figured, ‘Let me tell him, let me tell him.’”
After months of the solemn but tedious work flanking the heavy machinery, watching the mechanical jaws sift through the mangled steel and pulverized concrete, and always searching for any hint or flash of something in the rubble, something fragile and human, flesh or bone, the days blended together. But not those few days in March, not the day Burns was found. That day Ielpi remembered clearly. And meeting Jeff, the memory came back.
“I was underneath a very large beam and there were some remains there,” Ielpi later recalled. “When Jeff said that about Chief Burns, who I knew very well, I said to him, ‘Jeff, I want you to know that I found Donald Burns.’ And he started crying and he said, ‘Well, you found my son.’ I said, ‘I cannot say I found your son, that’s not fair. I cannot say that. I can tell you I was there with Donald Burns, and there were quite a large number of human remains in that area. Maybe one of them was your son, I would hope so. He still gave me a big hug and said, ‘You found my son.’
“We left it in that general idea, that I was there when Welles’s remains were found.”
Ielpi never forgot the conversation, nor the story of the man in the red bandanna, and a few years later, he played a role in helping this day take its shape. Upstairs at the FDNY headquarters in Brooklyn, in a plain room with beige walls, the Crowthers gathered alongside department officials, including Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta and Chief of Department Salvatore Cassano, the leaders of the FDNY. The ceremony was short and to the point, and so were the remarks.
“This is the least we could do,” said Scoppetta. “He had everything to live for, and his parents can take comfort in the fact—if it’s possible to take comfort under these circumstances—that he died while helping others.”
Standing on the right side of the podium, facing the local news cameras and a small group of reporters, Jeff tried to stay composed.
“We are honoring a true hero,” Cassano said. “He had the genes of a New York City firefighter.”
The commissioner and chief of the department named Welles a member, forever a part of its rolls, a brother among the bravest. At the end of the ceremony, Alison and Jeff were presented with a framed special commendation, a certificate of appointment for Welles, acknowledging his place in the ranks along with the more than eleven thousand others under the department’s command. The frame was heavy and solid in their hands. It was proof that their son was recognized in a way he’d dreamed about since he was a boy.
Four years before, two months after the attacks, Jeff had held another piece of paper, unframed and less formal. On a cold November day, Jeff and Alison had gone to the apartment on Washington Place, to clean out Welles’s belongings and take them home. The trip was necessary but almost unbearable. The evidence of his interrupted life was crushing in its detail, in the mute simplicity of his possessions: the suits still hanging in the closet, the empty shoes waiting beneath them, the photos of family on the bedside table, the sweatpants in the drawers.
Going through Welles’s papers, Jeff found the tangible manifestation of Welles’s wish to change his life. It was a city form. Standing in the apartment, Jeff looked down at the small type and understood the depth of his son’s dream. Welles had gone past imagining or talk. He’d begun. There, in the apartment, Jeff looked down at the paper, an application to the FDNY, several of the lines already filled in, dated just a month before his death.
Now, four years later, Jeff hoped Welles would know—that although some of the lines would forever be blank, his application was received, his submission reviewed.
Yes, Welles. You were accepted.
• • •
Alison had nodded off on a couch near the back of the house, the television throwing colors across the room, its chatter blending into the rhythms of her breathing. Spring had arrived, and the yard was stirring to life. It was late on a Sunday night, not quite eleven P.M., she thought. A crime procedural had been on as she’d drifted off, and
now, coming to, she dimly perceived that the case had been cracked. She heard the authoritative voices speaking, part of the formula.
Then she saw the image. The white turban. The flowing black beard specked with gray below the chin. The Kalashnikov rifle slung over the shoulder. The most wanted man on the face of the earth. She saw his face, and below it, she read the words: “Osama bin Laden, killed.”
Startled, she stood up, confused and then outraged. How could a television drama use the death of a man who claimed responsibility for 9/11 as some plotline prop, as entertainment? Who would do this? It was offensive, and wrong. It was too soon.
Then she looked closer, her mind clearing and her heart racing. The show was apparently interrupted, or over. It was not a series. It was a news set, or images of the White House exterior, and again, the pictures of bin Laden. The news anchors were sharing what they knew, obvious excitement pushing against their attempts to be measured. The words scrolled across the bottom of the screen. Could this be real? She heard anchors promise a presidential address.
Standing up in the room alone, she felt her chest constrict tightly. And then the coil inside her let go, and she burst into tears. She ran toward the stairs.
“All this emotion,” Alison said, “bottled up inside of me . . .”
All of it came out in wails and tears, the black block of ice inside her that would never melt, hardened by frustration and rage, despair and fury, freezing some part of her insides for ten solid years, and now it cracked and splintered. The hollow refrain that ran through her—Why can’t they get this guy? Why can’t they get him?!!—stopped.