by Tom Rinaldi
“Jeff!” she yelled down the stairs. “Jeff! They got him! They got him!”
Jeff was already watching, trying to process the news. He came up and saw Alison in tears. “Why are you crying?” he asked, embracing her. “This is great news.”
A short time later, at 11:35 P.M., the president stepped to a lectern in the White House to tell the nation and the world that Osama bin Laden was dead. After announcing the operation that killed the Al Qaeda leader, he harkened back to the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the wreckage of United Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Less than a minute into his remarks, his message grew more personal, his tone softer. He looked directly into the network pool camera, and spoke as if directly to the two people standing in a house in Upper Nyack.
“The worst images are those that were unseen to the world,” the president said. “The empty seat at the dinner table. Children who were forced to grow up without their mother or their father. Parents who would never know the feeling of their child’s embrace.”
They both listened, maybe even nodding, burdened with an understanding of such terrible truth.
At some point, the date occurred to them. May 1, 2011. It was Jeff and Alison’s fortieth wedding anniversary. Later, when they spoke to Paige and Honor, the sisters would immediately credit their brother.
“That was a gift from Welles,” they said.
• • •
The next morning, Alison was at the computer checking e-mail, still processing the news overnight, when she received a message with an official-looking insignia attached. The note indicated that the president was preparing to visit ground zero, and if she would like to attend a private event to meet him, she needed to provide pertinent information for a necessary background check. The message asked for her Social Security number and other personal material.
Scam, she thought. No way would she provide the information to a confusing, unknown sender with a government address, buried in an avalanche of letters and slashes. Her finger hovered over the delete key but then retreated. Her head was still buzzing with the president’s speech and the notion of bin Laden gone. She clicked open the form and provided the information. She hit SEND and closed the screen.
Three days later, on a sunny windswept Thursday, Alison and Jeff traveled to Lower Manhattan. This was President Obama’s first visit to the site since taking office. On previous anniversaries of the attacks, in 2009 and 2010, he’d paid his respects at the memorial at the Pentagon. This day, he came instead to the site where the overwhelming majority of lives were lost and to its deepest scar, to pay tribute to the victims of the attacks and to meet with their families as well as with firefighters, police officers, and other first responders. It was not a day for speeches. His presence was meant both as symbol and as salve—to honor those lost, and to represent justice done.
Before arriving at the site, the president stopped to spend time at Engine 54 on West Forty-eighth Street in Manhattan. Inside the firehouse, he ate lunch with firefighters and looked at photos on the walls, a patchwork of lives lost, portraits of an entire shift of men who rushed to the towers after the first plane hit, all now dead.
Later, at the site where the Twin Towers once stood, with construction halted and large cranes looming above him, the president laid a wreath at the base of a tree recovered from amid the ruins, replanted, and somehow restored to full leaf. Afterward, he retreated to an area out of public view, without press. He visited the preview site for the 9/11 Memorial Museum, set up across the street from St. Paul’s Chapel on lower Broadway, the church that miraculously survived the terrorist attacks a block away without a single window broken. The chapel had served as refuge for those working at the site for months afterward, and stood to many as an emblem of God’s grace.
In the preview center’s simple setting, Jeff, Alison, and roughly sixty other family members of victims waited at tables of eight set up for the president’s visit. All guests were checked and vetted, having passed facial recognition tests. Several early exhibits had already been designed and set up, awaiting transfer to the museum’s permanent home, its opening still a few years away. One of the exhibits was dedicated to Welles. Jeff and Alison drifted to it as if to stand near him.
Just then, the door swung open and the president entered. Alison was immediately struck by Barack Obama’s presence, less formal, more radiant, different from the hundreds of times she’d seen him as an image on television, or pressed into a newspaper photo. She and Jeff had both been briefed about the visit. The president wanted to spend time with the families privately. Beyond that, they didn’t know how much time he would spend, if they would speak to him directly. They had little real sense of what to expect from the visit. Her first glimpse surprised her. Here he was, on the other side of the room, so close, moving so easily from family to family, person to person, speaking with each one.
In the next moment, the president approached them, extending his hand, looking directly into their faces. Alison was clutching a red bandanna, squeezing it tightly in her hand, a piece not just of her son’s life but of hers. Jeff put out his hand and said, “Mr. President, I’m the father of Welles Remy–” The president cut him off: “Crowther,” he said.
“I know about your son,” the president continued. “The man with the red bandanna.” Whether he’d learned just that morning or long before was meaningless to them. The acknowledgment was astounding. The president knew their son’s name, knew his story. It was unfathomable, yet as clear as the man standing before them.
“Thank you,” Alison said, the first words that rushed out of her, looking at him. It wasn’t gratitude for the acknowledgment. This came from a more primal, visceral place. “Thank you for getting the job done.” She didn’t feel she was speaking to a nation’s leader right then, to the commander in chief who had ordered the mission.
“It was a feeling of one parent talking with another,” she remembered years later. “Commiserating.” As much as his praise for Welles’s courage that day touched them, the president also spoke to them about their loss, and their coping. He told them he couldn’t imagine losing one of his children, and marveled at the strength they possessed in enduring it.
As the president was about to leave, Alison didn’t hesitate. She had to ask him a favor.
“Would you be willing to take a photo with us, Mr. President, near Welles’s exhibit?” she asked. He agreed, telling them to stand by the display and wait for him there after he’d met with all the families in the room. They moved to the part of the room where Welles was memorialized and stood near his picture, wondering if Barack Obama would stop back. He did.
He put his arms around Jeff and Alison and posed for a picture. And before leaving, Alison asked for one moment more. Would he be willing to sign a red bandanna for her? She had two ready.
The president reached for his pen, bent over, and signed the red fabric. Above his name, he inscribed a simple message.
“We won’t forget Welles.”
• • •
Exactly when it changed from a story to a mission, he couldn’t say. But he knew he was called to tell it to the country.
Drew Gallagher and Welles first met as wide-eyed freshmen, each worried about little more than catching the bus to the main campus, keeping their class schedules straight, and acclimating to the pressurized freedoms of life away from home. Over the next four years, they crossed paths often, in the same parties and the same bars. They played intramural hockey games together and hung out in larger groups afterward. Their friends were friends, and the different crowds often melded together.
After graduating, when Welles went to Wall Street, Gallagher entered a field many of his buddies dreamed about but few ultimately pursued: sports. After spending the summer as an intern for the BankBoston Classic, an event on the Senior PGA Tour, he landed a job at NESN, the New England Sports Network, one of the
most successful regional sports broadcasters in the country. He worked there as a special projects coordinator for just three months before getting the call he most wanted. In February 2000, he joined ESPN as a production assistant.
Gallagher was more than a sports junkie or someone with encyclopedic recall and knowledge of stats and jersey numbers and arcane records. A good athlete himself as a hockey and a baseball player, he wanted to get off the corporate campus in Bristol, Connecticut, and out in the field whenever he could, to interview players and coaches, to shine a light on the backstories beyond their exploits. Cutting highlights was a start, but he wanted to tell stories. A creative thinker, he discovered that the fastest way to a role in feature producing was to pitch ideas in volume. The more pitches, the better the chances to be assigned to produce and tell the story, from arranging and conducting interviews to crafting scripts to overseeing the edits that shaped the material into televised life. He climbed quickly, producing stories for NHL and NFL shows at first, before earning a spot as a full-fledged feature producer in 2006.
The last time he’d seen Welles was on an escalator in Grand Central Terminal in the summer of 2001. They were moving in opposite directions, Gallagher headed up from the subway platforms and Welles headed down. They shouted their greetings to each other, the conversation swept away by the moving stairs. The encounter lasted less than fifteen seconds.
Gallagher first pitched the idea to his bosses for the five-year anniversary of 9/11, as a story about a former athlete who died in the attacks after saving the lives of others caught in the South Tower. He didn’t think the story needed an overwhelming sports hook; the nature of Welles’s sacrifice was compelling enough on its own. But his lacrosse career mattered, and would present him as an athlete to an audience of sports fans.
The bosses passed. Whether it was fatigue from all the stories the network had already done about the day, the feeling that the sports hook wasn’t pronounced enough, or the fact that another feature about 9/11 was already in production, Gallagher understood the rejection. He pitched ideas all the time, and only a handful were green-lighted. He understood, but he didn’t accept.
Over the next several years, he continued to pitch Welles’s story. As a Boston College alum, he’d seen the Red Bandanna Run on campus grow steadily, and believed a longer feature on Welles’s life would move people who’d never met him, simply through the valor and sacrifice of what he’d done. With the approach of the tenth anniversary, he pitched the story again. This time, the bosses gave the go-ahead.
Gallagher had already done a lot of preproduction work, reaching out to Alison and Jeff, gathering footage, lining up other interview subjects, when he asked if I’d be interested in joining the project. I served as the reporter and writer for the feature, which was narrated by native New Yorker, actor, and director Ed Burns.
The piece ran thirteen and a half minutes, debuting the first week of September 2011. The reaction came quickly.
“His story had come out,” Alison said. “In the initial year there was media coverage, and every September 11 there was some talk of it. But once the ESPN story hit . . . wow. It launched . . .”
“Welles’s story was out there,” Paige said, “but the piece was the tipping point.”
In the days following, the reaction grew and spread, nearly overwhelming the family. Teachers showed the piece to their students, coaches to their teams, parents to their children, and children to their parents, many of them writing letters to Jeff and Alison. A team in New Zealand competing in the Rugby World Cup wore red bandannas as a way to honor Welles. A news crew from France interviewed Jeff and Alison about the meaning of the symbol. And less than a week later, two students from the University of Central Florida started a social media campaign, asking their classmates to wear the red handkerchiefs when their football team, the Knights, hosted Boston College on September 10. BC’s athletic department caught wind of the students’ push. Paige, and Honor, who went on to write a children’s book about her brother, both made the trip to Orlando to represent the family.
Even before they walked into Bright House Stadium Welles’s two sisters, both of whom also graduated from BC, saw the bandannas everywhere, outside in the tailgating lots, worn by fans as they walked through the turnstiles. When they reached the field, they were stunned as they looked into the stands. Nearly the entire student section, more than five thousand strong, was paying tribute to their brother, waving bandannas for a man they’d never met, an alumnus of the opposing school. It wouldn’t be the last time a surge of red would flash through a stadium in homage to Welles.
In the years to come, the piece would air every year on September 11. Posted on the Internet by dozens of sites, the video drew millions of views. Maybe some already knew the story, while others heard Welles’s name for the first time. Maybe some were sports fans, while others were simply proud of one man’s courage in the final measure of his life. Maybe there were some moved by Jeff’s emotion, or Alison’s strength, or Welles’s valor.
Maybe the story caught the eye of one viewer who already knew some of its details. This viewer had a passion for sports, playing pickup basketball and the occasional round of golf, watching games and highlights and checking the scores and standings when his schedule allowed, if only to escape from the weight and stress of his day. Maybe there was something in the story that reminded him of the mother and father he’d met a few months earlier, of a bandanna she presented and he autographed, and a message he wrote above his name.
We won’t forget Welles.
Two and a half years later, he proved the message right.
The president of the United States remembered the red bandanna.
• • •
She’d never returned.
For more than thirteen years, through countless days in hospitals and dozens of surgeries, across punishing hours of therapy and the never-ending pain of the rehab sessions, amid all the nightmarish visions and the annual recitation of the names, in the ceremonies and anniversaries and milestones, she never came back. Even when she looked at his picture, frozen and ageless against time, sitting on a table next to the sofa in her living room in New Jersey, she didn’t allow her mind to travel back. She focused only on the face and the name. Not the day. Not the place.
Ling Young knew how difficult it would be to step back inside, to walk into the hollow where the towers once stood, across the ground where she once worked and so many friends and colleagues perished. If she viewed coming back as a descent into a tomb from which she escaped, if there was some healing to find or reckoning to face in walking once more in the space where the World Trade Center once soared, she didn’t say. She came on this day not by her choice, but because of a friend’s request.
Alison asked her to come.
May 14, 2014, marked the long-awaited opening of the National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York City. The discussions and disputes over its creation formed soon after the ruins were cleared, lasting through years of delay and acrimony. The victims’ families, though bound by loss, would never reach a consensus on the way to honor their loved ones best. Some found the museum’s location offensive and insensitive, a gallery atop the still unrecovered remains of their lost. Others saw it as disrespectful to share a space beside a private repository where unidentified remains were stored. The museum and plaza above had cost more than half a billion dollars to construct.
But others believed in its mission, contributed to its displays and collections, and found a quiet and deep honor in having their kin remembered and their lives commemorated in a place of permanence for generations to see. Its public unveiling would come in a week. This day was for a carefully selected crowd, seven hundred invited guests gathering far belowground, inside the museum’s soaring central hall. The ceremony was set for broadcast around the country.
The Crowthers were not only on the guest list. Alison would be called onstage, the fi
rst speaker to follow the president. He’d be introducing her, and Ling Young as well, the two women scheduled to walk to the stage together once the president finished his remarks. The White House reached out to Alison a week earlier and, over a series of calls, gently broached the idea of having her give a brief speech of her own. By the third call, she realized she was being vetted by the staff, to be certain she was willing and capable. Barack Obama’s director of speechwriting, Terry Szuplat, spent nearly an hour on the phone with her, reviewing Welles’s life, mining her memories, to prepare for the president’s remarks. Initially, Alison was told she’d have forty-five seconds of her own to speak. The time seemed to her impossibly short, and immensely important.
The night before, the Crowthers and Youngs had dinner together, as they had many times over the years since their first meeting in 2002, at the hospital burn center. They stayed in a hotel in Lower Manhattan, but not in the financial district. Ling liked the location, especially for its distance from the site. She didn’t want to be any closer to ground zero than necessary before the ceremony.
The families arrived together early the next day, along with Honor, her husband, Rick, and their four children, and Paige and her fiancé, Jarrod. Their seats were in the second row, and walking to them they saw the names reserved for the chairs directly in front of theirs. Their seats were behind Bill and Hillary Clinton. Jeff and Alison were in the same row, but across an aisle. Before the ceremony began, Alison and Ling were led from their seats to a place backstage behind a large screen set up for images to be displayed during the event. There was a monitor placed there, for them to watch what unfolded on the other side of the screen.
But it was the sound at the ceremony’s start that reached inside Alison, stopping her. A children’s choir onstage and in an upper balcony began the program with a rendition of “Somewhere,” from West Side Story, the play’s most yearning anthem.