A Decade of Hope

by Dennis Smith

I rode down the Bruckner Expressway service road into Manhattan, and from there I got a full-scale view of the skyline. By the time I set eyes on it, all you could see was the white smoke of the towers, and I wasn’t sure what that meant.

  On the service road there was no one—no cops, nothing. So I biked along the Bruckner Expressway, which I was familiar with because I used to run it when I was training for the New York City Marathon a few years back. It was about ten miles and took me right through the South Bronx, past St. Jerome’s Church, where my parents were married, Intervale Avenue, where my father worked the fires, and over the Madison Avenue Bridge. And that’s when I started to see the people marching up like refugees. I was stunned. It was just: Wow, this is New York City. This is America. This is happening. I remember thinking, Well, we’re at war. We are a different world now than we were a half hour ago, and it was . . . This is the world now. That was then, this is now.

  My sister Janet had told me a reporter was saying there were eight more planes, so I fully expected more planes to drop into New York.

  At the time Wanda had a cell phone, but I didn’t, so I would stop on my bicycle whenever I saw a pay phone to call her. Then I would call home to get the messages, hoping that someone would have called about Billy. Wanda and I planned to meet at Marcus Garvey Park, and when I got there I couldn’t find her at first. The park was . . . Wow . . . There was this stream of people, thousands, who had just walked up from downtown. Everything and everyone was so frantic. The day was frantic.

  By now I knew that both towers had collapsed. In my mind I was visualizing a partial collapse—chunks of the towers the size of a city bus. I knew the towers. I once worked not far from them and used to walk over there at lunch. Those buildings were so big that if a piece the size of a city bus fell from the hundredth floor, you couldn’t possibly outrun it, because your perspective would be all off. How dangerous that was.

  And then I saw Wanda, who had her back to me, and there was that instant sense of relief, knowing that she was alive, such an emotional thing. Now I began thinking of Billy. Wanda saw the look on my face and asked, “What’s wrong?” I said, “Billy’s down there.”

  I got home late that day, eight o’clock, and spoke with my younger brother, Jimmy. He had spoken with Billy’s girlfriend, Jean, who said that Billy had called her from the towers.

  “I’m okay,” he said. He told Jean to call our sister Elizabeth in Syracuse and let her know he was all right, and for her to call the rest of the family: “Tell everybody I’m okay.” And that was just after 10:00 A.M.

  He was in the North Tower.

  So that night I was with the family, and I was talking to my brother Jimmy on the phone as we were watching everything on television, looking at the ruins. And as we were staring at the screen, we both realized we hadn’t heard from him. Billy was the type who called, and he hadn’t called. I said, “Well, if he’s down there, if he is, how’s he gonna call, anyway?” He’d have been too busy doing something else. So hell, it wasn’t a sure thing; you know, it wasn’t a sure thing.

  Then there was the rest of our family, my mom and other siblings. I guess I spoke with Janet again; I don’t recall. And my twin, Christopher, went over to Elizabeth’s up in Syracuse, and they were watching TV together, hoping to get word from us, or from Billy. We were all communicating, but none of us had heard from Billy yet.

  The next day everything changed. I drove into the city to look for Billy’s firehouse, Engine 21. I wasn’t sure exactly where it was, because he had just started there as captain five months before 9/11. All I knew was that it was somewhere around Fortieth Street on the East Side. I got stuck in a massive jam by Grand Central Station. There was a bomb scare, I heard on the radio. I just gave up and pulled over into a parking spot. I don’t know what street I was on, somewhere on Park Avenue by Grand Central, but it was a spot no one should park in. So I wrote on a piece of paper: “I’m looking for my brother, Captain of FDNY, ticket if you must, please don’t tow.” I left it on the dashboard, and I took off.

  I found a pay phone and called my brother Christopher in Syracuse to ask him where the firehouse was, but he didn’t know. Then he told me that he was watching the news, and four firemen just walked out of the pile. “They were down at Bellevue,” he said. “Go there, get down there.” At this point I was on Thirty-eighth and Second Avenue, so I wasn’t far away. I was halfway down and began thinking, Things just don’t happen this way. It’s a nice dream, but things don’t happen this way. But I went down there anyway.

  There was a big crowd outside of Bellevue, and so many pictures everywhere—pictures of people whose families were trying to find them. There were a bunch of people holding the flyers, and family members crying, being interviewed by newspapers, holding up the pictures, hoping that somebody would see them. I managed to speak with a woman at Bellevue who had this great big book, and I said, “Billy Burke.” And I asked about the four firefighters. She said that those four guys had just been working at the site today, and fell into a pit down there, and they were fine. But nobody had found anybody yet. I looked at the flyers again, seeing those family members. It was so sad.

  I left Bellevue and somehow stumbled upon Engine 21, which was on Fortieth Street between Second and Third avenues. After speaking to a couple of the guys there, I became the point man for our family. Plus, I was the one who lived closest to the city.

  I remember calling a general number given to me for the Fire Department. You were supposed to call this number for any updates, hopefully, on survivors. I would call and ask these FDNY guys on the phone, “Billy, Captain Billy Burke?” And they knew Billy, knew who he was. Still missing.

  There was another guy I wanted to know about, a good friend named Quinn, who was with Engine Company 55. I asked about him as well, and they didn’t have any information. And this was maybe a couple of days later. I knew one man had been found, the only survivor from Engine Company 55. His brother, who is also a fireman, found him in the cafeteria at Bellevue, maybe forty-eight hours later, sitting there, still covered in the same dust. When one of the towers collapsed, he ran, and was the only one in 55 who survived. It hurts to remember that story.

  Jimmy came in frequently to help with the whole search. And our sister Elizabeth came down from Syracuse. I remember Liz and I walked around the city. We went past Union Square Park, which was filled at the time with flowers and memorials. It was hard to see all those things, reminders that we were missing Billy.

  It was a gradual thing for us, my siblings and me, to realize that Billy was gone. And it was probably an individual thing rather than a singular moment for all of us together. After twenty-four hours, I knew, no matter how busy, that he would have gotten to a phone by then. Billy . . . Billy would have called. At first we were like everybody else. We went on TV. We went to the family center that they had set up on Lexington Avenue. I called all the hospitals in the city. Then I saw a story about a guy who was taken to a hospital in New Jersey. So I called up the hospitals there.

  Billy was the oldest boy in our family, second oldest overall. Elizabeth may have been his older sister, but Billy was the oldest brother, and he filled that role completely in terms of making our lives miserable. He was also somebody we looked up to and depended on. He was the point man for us to my father, and that was a big job, you know, growing up. It was a complicated thing, to deal with my father, especially as teenagers. The classic butting of the heads. Billy took the grief. He was the guy who got most of the grief, and he kept it. We took the leftovers, but he took the brunt of it. There were just clashes—as if a competition was going on between my father and Billy. Ten years later my brother had such admiration for our dad—and reverence. I found some letters that they had written back and forth, and it was interesting to see how special their relationship had become. My dad giving Billy advice, talking about the job—there was real communication and mutual respect there. You would never have predicted it from those teenage years.

  A
s kids, our experience with the Fire Department happened on special occasions, such as at a New Year’s Eve party or on St. Patrick’s Day. The firefighters would come for a barbecue, or we’d go to a picnic—that was a big thing, the firemen’s picnic. We saw the reverence that they paid to my father. That was a big influence on us when we were growing up, because you could see that even when you were ten, and it really affected Billy. We grew up with the idea that firemen were the greatest guys in the world. That was the line in our house. And my mother would quote my father in a playful way, imitating him, saying, “Firemen are the bravest and the greatest.” All in good fun. But I never really appreciated the truth in that statement until after 9/11.

  What we learned when Billy died, what we lean on, is the idea that he left this legacy: Billy was doing what he wanted . . . what he loved. He was following in his father’s footsteps. It was so important to him, living up to that ideal. It was not just an ideal but a fact—the entire culture of FDNY. I think that was the comforting factor for us. There was nowhere else that Billy would have wanted to be on September 11 between the hours of 9:00 and 10:30 A.M. than where he was.

  Had Billy not been there, had he not been working that day, his company would probably have been wiped out. I remember telling people, “Had any of his men died and he survived, I would have had to go down to his apartment in Stuyvesant Town and nail the windows shut.” It would have been very difficult. We know that Billy always put his men first. And that’s the thing we lean on, that’s what got us through in the days afterward, and the months afterward.

  I want to see the firemen get as much attention today, as much appreciation, as they received in those days and weeks after 9/11. And they got a lot. The city would stop for a fireman’s funeral. The city did just that for Billy’s. Fifth Avenue was stopped; people stopped walking on the streets out of respect. I remember the east side of Fifth Avenue was filled with pedestrians, and the west side was filled with firemen from all around the city, and the world.

  The attention the firefighters received in the media, the papers—it was real and genuine and deserved.

  We went down to Ground Zero not too long after 9/11. My mother, my twin brother, Christopher, and his wife came in, and we went to the site. We took the subway there. We clowned around. Mom was taking pictures of us, as if we were out-of-town tourists. We got to Broadway, which was as close as they let people go. You could look at the facade remnants, and you could see the damaged sphere.

  But as much as everyone appreciated the way the press was turning the firemen into saints, we also knew that ultimately you looked at the character of the person. Me, I never cease to be astounded by what the firefighters did that day. And I think that’s what got the country through it. That’s what got New York through it. Thinking about it, I guess that was a big part of what got me through it in those days: Their courage. Their character. Their humanity. Their sacrifice. What those 343 firefighters, 23 New York police officers, 37 Port Authority officers, and 3 court officers left us is a memory of uniformed courage.

  I called my friend Quinn and spoke to him maybe two days after 9/11. I’d known this guy since high school, and I could always make him laugh. I began talking to him and trying to get his mind off of what had happened. But I knew at some point I’d have to get to it, and I asked him what had happened, and he started talking about it. He said, “Mike, they were falling out of the sky, and they were exploding,” and his voice broke. I leaned on that display of character and humanity to get me through. And I think that’s what each of us did.

  Keeping this huge and historic courage in mind, it wasn’t until the early spring of 2003 that I heard about and got involved in the plans for the memorial. By that point the discussion about how to commemorate 9/11 had been going on for a year already, which surprised me. I couldn’t imagine people sitting around in conference rooms the previous spring talking about this. But they had been, and the first thing we heard was that they weren’t going to identify the firefighters in any way on the memorial. Which was wild to me—totally disrespectful. My brother’s identification would just read “William F. Burke, Jr.,” rather than “Captain William F. Burke, Jr., Engine Company 21.” Well, that doesn’t tell any of the story.

  We could see that the memorial officials were going to exclude the heroic sacrifice that our country had embraced, that our world had embraced. We were getting invitations from France; 9/11 families were being invited to Ireland. The world had embraced this sacrifice, and there was a reason for that. It wasn’t just out of kindness, or that it was just the right thing to do. I think everybody understood what the first responders had done. But the people running the memorial did not: first Governor George Pataki, and then the people running the LMDC [Lower Manhattan Development Corporation]. When I found out that they weren’t going to honor and commemorate that heroism and sacrifice, I was sure there had been a mistake.

  I had gotten an e-mail from one in the 9/11 families, who was in opposition to identifying the firefighters and police officers, urging me to work against this. This is a misunderstanding, I thought. So I e-mailed the guy back and said, “You know, you have to understand how important this is for these guys. They went down there as firefighters and police officers to help. This is who they were.”

  It’s very weird that the naming procedure became so political. After 9/11 Governor Pataki insisted on referring to all those who died as heroes. Sometime in October 2001 I remember hearing a woman say, “Everybody’s talking about the heroes. My sister wasn’t a hero. She was sitting at her desk when the planes hit.” She was sitting at her desk, but we have to remember her. And we do not honor her memory if we don’t remember that she was sitting at her desk. This woman, whoever she was, shouldn’t be remembered as a hero. That’s diminishing the meaning of her death. Of course there were some heroes among the victims—many men and women. As [Mayor Rudy] Giuliani said at my brother’s service in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, “There were civilian heroes we will never know. They perished with everybody else.”

  There was an article in USA Today that basically asked: Who got out of Tower 2, and who didn’t? Most of the people who did get out of Tower 2 were those who had a view of Tower 1. They saw what the hell was going on, and so they ignored the radio speakers telling them to stay in their offices. There was a man on the ninety-sixth floor of Tower 2 who looked out his window. A man in a brown suit was standing opposite him in Tower 1, the window smashed out, his tie flapping in the wind. The two men made eye contact, and then the poor soul in the brown suit jumped. That’s when the guy in Tower 2 took off—he evacuated and lived to tell his story. A story of wanting to live. A story very different from that of the first responders, who went in to die.

  The first memorials had actually already been created by the families, posted by the families. These were the memorials on our streets and in our parks, little groups of candles and flowers and photographs of loved ones. Each photograph in those little memorials gave details on the personal characteristics of the person, whether it was sex and age or tattoos and jewelry. And, of course, the floor he or she was working on. When I saw those flyers for the first time, there was still a desperate hope to find them. We, the families, did believe that some of them would be found. We looked at those photographs, at the photo of a man who had been on the 102nd floor, Tower 1. We did not know that he had jumped. We found out slowly. He was able to make a call, left a message at home, saying, “I love you. Remember me and that I love you,” and then he jumped out of that building. But in the photo he’s still sitting with a smile, looking at you. The terror of that, knowing your loved one was now gone. It’s pure and spontaneous and genuine. These memorials were embraced by the people on their own, spontaneously, without any input from politicians or their cultural experts. Now they were going to subtract all of that personalization. This we couldn’t have.

  George Pataki and others who were referring to everyone who perished on 9/11 as heroes were and are wrong. I thou
ght I was politically astute, but I learned otherwise. I thought Pataki would have done the obvious thing, but he did not make himself popular with the 9/11 families of the first responders by refusing to make any decisions, by just going along with the volume of the loudest argument at the moment.

  But Mayor Giuliani was meeting with the families of Ground Zero to discuss the issue, and I thought that could help, because at the time Giuliani was the man. On November 12, 2001, there was a conference at the Sheraton Hotel for the FDNY family members. The city had the medical examiner there and a few other people to talk about the recovery of remains. I just watched what was going on, and it was a hell of a thing. These women, mostly the widows, were beyond distraught. They wanted their loved ones, their husbands, brought back to them. They had heard that there were entire bodies at Ground Zero, and they wanted the city to get them. Meanwhile, the medical examiner was saying that hundreds of thousands of tons had dropped on Ground Zero, and he presented a graphic medical explanation of what happens to a human being who is hit with eighty-five floors, each floor weighing four hundred thousand tons. It wasn’t very helpful—it was insulting, and the crowd was about to lynch the guy.

  Giuliani then walked into that conference room and just took control of it. The people there had such faith in him, because they knew that he meant what he said. I had always liked Giuliani, but Billy had loved him, because of how he had turned the city around as mayor. He told everyone at that meeting, “Here’s what we’re going to do,” and they believed him, because they had a reason to.

  What I wanted was simply identifying by rank, department, and company all of the first responders. Among the 9/11 family members there were a few who had a casual and sort of philosophical opposition to listing ranks, companies, and departments. They didn’t want anybody identified. Because so many hundreds were lost from Cantor Fitzgerald—658, to be exact—they didn’t want people from the company identified, because, they complained, it would end up being a Cantor Fitzgerald memorial.