This weekend, Margaret, Gidg, and I (and upwards of 30,000 other participants) will be in lower Manhattan for the 20th Annual Stephen Siller Foundation Tunnel to Tower Run. I know of no family that better exemplifies turning something horrific - barbaric even - into something philantrophic. Their good works are boundless. Twenty years after the Foundation's inception, this is what an illustration of its accomplishments looks like:
Illustration Credit: The Sporting News
FF Stephen G. Siller, FDNY Squad 1 is one of 343 members of the FDNY who laid down his life at the World Trade Center on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, rescuing thousands of people in the process. He was the youngest of seven Siller siblings. He was just eight when his father died. He was nine-and-one-half years old when his mother died.
Orphaned before he hit "double numbers" (as we used to call them in the Kenny household when I was a little boy), he was raised by his older siblings. On what proved to be the final day of his life, he was just thirty-four years old. He and his wife Sally were parents of five children.
Stephen Siller had just come off a tour and was on his way to his brother's house in Staten Island, the first stop on a Tuesday he intended to spend on the golf course at the Glenwood Country Club in Old Bridge, New Jersey with his brothers Frank, Russ, and George. All that changed when the call came over the scanner that the North Tower had been struck by a plane and was ablaze. He called Sally to ask her to call his brothers to tell them he would catch up with them later. He turned his truck around, returned to Squad 1 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and hopped into his truck to head into lower Manhattan through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel.
By the time he reached the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, it had been closed to vehicle traffic. Undeterred, he got out of his truck, threw on his gear, and ran through the tunnel into lower Manhattan...
T2T Sand Sculpture
2011
and into eternity.
-AK
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