Joyous Noise

We are now three-quarters of the way through 2022.  If age has taught me one thing (other than how to navigate my way, over and over, between the bedroom and the bathroom in the dark of night) it is that time goes where it has always gone, which is from ahead of me to behind me.  It simply does so at an ever-increasing rate of speed the older I get.  

This year’s transition shall be accompanied by the sounds of a new Springsteen album.  If the first track, his cover of Frank Wilson’s “Do I Love You (Indeed I Do)” is any indication than not only shall the strong survive the ever-shortening days that lie ahead of us, we shall thrive and flourish.  

-AK

Speaking Words of Wisdom

A little food for thought on September’s final Thursday and its penultimate day…

If you have ever been that man, even for just a little while, then you know just how perilous a place that is in which to find yourself.   Speaking from personal experience, it is indeed a dark ride.  

-AK

Every Picture Tells A Story

As we are now more than twenty-one years removed from September 11, 2001 it is more important than ever for those of us who were alive on that date to do what we can to make sure that those of who were not learn what happened before they were born.  

Rick Rescorla

Father Mychal Judge

Welles Remy Crowther

The Wall at Ten House

If you reading this were alive on that terrible Tuesday morning twenty-one Septembers ago and you do not recognize at least one of the names and/or images, then now is as good a time as any to educate yourself...

...and once you do, then you can pay it forward and share what you now know.  Perhaps with a child or grandchild who did not experience the day's events firsthand.  

No better way to make sure that we never forget than to continue to learn.  Trust me, you shall be happy you did.

-AK 

Flag Bearing

On Saturday afternoon,  as I was placing our eighteen flags at the September 11 Memorial in Manhattan, a woman and her son stopped to ask me why I was placing them.  When I answered her question, she smiled at me and thanked me for taking the time to answer her question.  I, in turn, thanked her for taking the time to ask. 

Nina Patrice Bell and Joshua M. Rosenblum 

Brian Thomas Cummins and Scott Thomas Coleman

Leslie A. Whittington and Chandler Raymond Keller

Frank Bennett Reisman and Antoinette Duger

Christopher Edward Faughnan and Allison Horstmann Jones

Joyce Ann Carpeneto and Mohammad Salman Hamdani

Thomas Irwin Glasser and John Michael Collins

Thomas Edward Gorman and David Prudencio LeMagne

Adam S. White and Christopher Ciafardini

If we are here this time next year and the Memorial is here this time next year, then we shall do then what we have done every September since the Memorial opened.  We shall place our flags and do our small part to help honor our commitment to those souls murdered on that terrible Tuesday morning more than two decades ago to make sure that neither their lives nor their deaths shall ever be forgotten. 

-AK 

Same Time, Next Year

Yesterday’s 21st annual Tunnel to Towers 5K in New York City was an extraordinary event.  It always is.  Bravo to the Siller Family, to the T2T Foundation, and to all the people who make it possible.   

Until next September, may we all continue to follow in FF Siller’s footsteps.   

-AK

Doing Good

This morning it shall once again be my great pleasure and privilege to be one of the thousands of runners and walkers participating in the annual Tunnel To Towers Foundation New York City 5K.  It shall be an extraordinary event, as it always is…

Let us do good.  

-AK

Now Playing the Part of the Cheese

This afternoon, I will make a solo trek across the river from the Jersey side.  Usually the trip into lower Manhattan on September’s final weekend for the Tunnel to Towers NYC 5K is one that I make with Margaret and our great friend Gidg.  

This year I am the proverbial cheese.  I shall walk around the Memorial this afternoon alone and then tomorrow morning shall run from Red Hook through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and through lower Manhattan to the World Trade Center.  

This weekend, a wedding is on the docket Sunday afternoon out in the bucolic splendor of Hackettstown, New Jersey to which all of us are invited.  Wedding preparation (even as a guest) is a far more involved process for the Missus than it is for me.  Thus, this year Margaret is sitting out the T2T NYC 5K.  

I shall do my level best to hold up our end.  Promise.  

-AK

On This Good Day

While the jukebox containing the soundtrack of my life is not uniquely populated by his music, it is not an understatement to say that Bruce Springsteen dominates it.  Today, the Poet Laureate of the State of Concrete Gardens celebrates a birthday.  May it be a happy one.   

My oldest brother Bill introduced me to Springsteen’s music so long ago that I cannot remember precisely when.  I do know that in the four-and-one-half decades or so since, it is a relationship that has served me well.  All these years later, my favorite Springsteen song is - as it has been since I first heard it way back when - Racing in the Street.   It is my poor homage to him that this particular piece of real estate on Al Gore’s cyber-superhighway is named what it is named.  

Among the songs and the stories that have engrossed me the most throughout the years are those chronicling his relationship with his father.   My father and I had a very difficult relationship during what proved to be the final year of his life.   Dad died on May 31, 1981.  In what turned out to be the final Christmas of his life, I received The River.  By mid-January I had committed “Independence Day” to memory.   

Springsteen released Nebraska in 1982.  Included among its tracks was “My Father’s House”.  Its final verse both spoke to me and gouged me:  My father’s house shines hard and bright/It stands like a beacon calling me in the night/Calling and calling, so cold and alone/Shining ‘cross this dark highway where our sins lie unatoned.  

As much as I love and relate to his music, it was when I read his autobiography “Born To Run”  that I felt as if I got it.  He wrote at length about his relationship with his father, including the road they traveled from perdition to redemption in the final few years of his father’s life.   Although Dad died long before he and I had an opportunity to make that journey, reading that it had in fact happened for the Springsteen men gave me hope that maybe - just maybe - in fact it could have happened for the Kenny men.  

Happy Birthday, Bruce, and thanks very much.  Of all the voices in my head battling for supremacy, yours is the one to which I pay the most attention.   

Truth be told, it is the one to which I pay the second-most attention.  Margaret’s is number one.  I am a fan.  I am not a man with a death wish. 

-AK

A Toast to That Old September Feeling

Today is the first day of Autumn here in the Northern Hemisphere.  Food for thought for the Autumnal Equinox…

Wiping away last year’s mistakes?  I, for one, like the sound of that idea.  

Be careful out there. 

-AK

Every Man

Food for thought as jury selection begins anew...

-AK 

The Queen's English

Words of wisdom from one significantly smarter than I...

 

-AK 

Teach Our Children Well

 

Yesterday morning, the Missus and I were leaving Costco when the woman who reviewed our receipt took note of the t-shirt I had on and began speaking to us about September 11.   She voiced concern that "young people" are losing interest in remembering the events of September 11 because they happened before they were born.  

If she is correct, then shame on "us".  By us, I mean people older than twenty-one.  If people who were not alive as of that date have a fundamental lack of understanding of its significance, then those of us who were are obliged to help them acquire it and to make sure they appreciate its significance.  At last glance, no one presently alive in these United States was present at the time of this nation's founding, yet most of us celebrate Independence Day and understand its origin.  

Of the slightly less than 3,000 innocents murdered on September 11, 2001, 750 of them were New Jersey residents.  Slightly more than one-quarter of all the people killed that day were New Jerseyans.  Yet,  New Jersey school districts are not - and have never been - required to include lessons about the events of September 11, 2001 to elementary, middle, and high school students.  

The New Jersey State Senate unanimously passed a bill, S-713, in March 2022, requiring such education be part of every district's curriculum.  To date, the State Assembly's own bill, A-3877, has gone nowhere.  

Perhaps, sooner rather than later, New Jersey will join the other fourteen states that presently require lessons about September 11, 2001 to be included in the curriculum of our schools.  

The twenty-fifth anniversary is only four years away.  It should not take that long but then again it should not have taken this long.  

-AK  

Making the Music Last

 

(c) Bob Lang

For the most of us, there is only the unattended Moment,

The moment in and out of time,

The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,

The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning

Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply

That is not heard at all, but you are the music

While the music lasts.  These are only hints and guesses,

Hints followed by guesses; and the rest is 

Prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.

-T.S. Eliot

The unattended moment.  The moment in and out of time.  Twenty-one years ago, on a crystal clear, simply gorgeous early September Tuesday morning, the world changed.  In a moment in and out of time. 

World Trade Center - The Final Sunset

September 10, 2001

If you were alive twenty-one years ago, the world in which you lived was far from an idyllic place.  We the people of these United States had already begun to trivialize those things that were important and to elevate trivial things to an unwarranted level of importance.  For a period of time, which proved to be all-too-short following September 11, 2001, we ceased to do so.  We focused not on blue/red, liberal/conservative, or Democrat/Republican.  We focused not on the things that make us different.  We focused instead on the things we had in common.  The things that we shared. 

The world to which we awakened on September 12, 2001 was markedly different than the world to which we said good night on September 10, 2001.  It was a world in which we had seen firsthand the sacrifices complete strangers were willing to make for one another.  A world in which our whole was greater than the sum of our parts.  

We, the living, owe a debt to the dead.  The debt we owe is to never forget.  To never forget their sacrifice.  To never forget how their sacrifice made us all better.  Their sacrifice was forever.  

That long, at the very least, should be spent repaying that debt.  

Never forget.  Never forgotten. 

-AK

  

Wearing the Cross of Their Calling

 Good days.  Bad days. 

Up days.  Down days. 

Sad days.  Happy days. 

But never a boring day on this job.

You do what God has called you to do.  

You show up.

You put one foot in front of another. 

You get on the rig and

You go out and you do the job -

Which is a mystery. And a surprise.

You have no idea when you get on that rig. 

No matter how big the call. No matter how small.

You have no idea what God is calling you to do.

But he needs you.  He needs me.

He needs all of us.

Father Mychal F. Judge, FDNY Chaplain

September 10, 2001

(Mass at Engine 73/Ladder 10)

One day later, Father Judge died at the World Trade Center with 342 other members of the FDNY. 

The FDNY has always been a generational organization.  It is an organization into which children have followed their parents.  The tragedy of September 11, 2001 did not change that fact.  As of this time last year, on the 20th anniversary, there were sixty-five active duty members of the FDNY who lost a first-responder father either in the collapse of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 or due to the toxic smoke and debris at Ground Zero in the months that followed.  Sixty-five. 

Each of them is an extraordinary story.  Perhaps none more so than the Asaros (Matt, Carl, Rebecca, and Marc) whose father Carl Asaro, Sr. was one of the fifteen members of Midtown's Engine 54/Ladder 4/Battalion 9 who responded to the World Trade Center that morning.  All fifteen of them were killed.  

This morning, a couple of hundred runners will toe the line at the Fallen Heroes 5K in Lake Como, New Jersey, including Yours truly.  We run to honor those who were killed that morning.  We run to honor their families.  

They deserve nothing less.  

-AK 

Jersey Girls

 

Patricia Cushing - Bayonne, N.J.

United Flight 93 | September 11, 2001

Patricia Cushing, 69, of Bayonne, New Jersey had never flown on an airplane - not even once - until Tuesday, September 11, 2001.  On that terrible Tuesday morning, she boarded United Flight 93 at Newark Airport in the company of her friend and sister-in-law Jane C. Folger for the flight to San Francisco.  They were heading west for a long-planned vacation.  

Ms. Cushing had been widowed in 1988.  She was the mother of five.  She was an opera lover, the proud holder of season tickets for the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.  A Maryland native, she had raised her family in Bayonne while she worked for New Jersey Bell Telephone for twenty years.  It was the job from which she had retired.  Her family referred to her, with simple eloquence, as "a classy lady".  

Jane C. Folger - Bayonne, N.J.

United Flight 93 | September 11, 2001

Jane C. Folger, 73, was the sister of Patricia Cushing's late husband, and these two branches of the family tree lived within four blocks of one another in Bayonne.  She had raised six children and once the youngest was old enough to permit her to seek work outside of the home, she did.  After beginning, literally, on the ground floor as a bank teller, over the course of a twenty-five year career she worked her way up to the position of Bank Officer at Commercial Trust, the position from which she retired in 1994.   

Ms. Folger endured a mother's worst nightmare twice as she was forced to bury two of her sons.  One was killed in action in Vietnam.  One was killed by AIDS in 1994 and as she, his mother, had also been his caretaker, his death angered her and hardened her.  One of the things that helped bring her back?  The time she spent with her friend and sister-in-law, Patricia Cushing.  

Two extraordinary Jersey Girls, related by marriage, bonded by life, and forever loved and remembered by those they loved and those who loved them most of all. 

-AK 

"That Was My Girl"

 

Lieutenant Colonel Karen J. Wagner,

United States Army | Killed at the Pentagon

September 11, 2001

Karen J. Wagner proudly served the people of these United States for seventeen years as a member of the United States Army.  At the age of just forty, Lieutenant Colonel Wagner secured what proved to be her final promotion on August 1, 2001, working at the Pentagon as medical personnel officer in the Office of the Army Surgeon General and Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel.   

Lieutenant Colonel Wagner was at work at the Pentagon on the morning of September 11, 2001 when the murderous cowards who had hijacked American Airlines Flight 77, deliberately crashed it into the Pentagon, killing all sixty-four passengers and crew members on board the flight and one hundred and twenty-five people on the ground.   Lieutenant Colonel Wagner was one of those killed.  

Karen Wagner graduated from UNLV with a degree in Business Administration.  In 1984, she was commissioned as a second lieutenant...one week after she had gotten married.  Three years later, on her twenty-sixth birthday, she gave birth to the couple's daughter, Sandra.  Her little girl was every bit as tough and as strong as the mother with whom she shared her birthday.  She had to be as she was born with spina bifida and hydrocephalus.  She was blind and needed to be fed through a tube.  Doctors did not expect little Sandra to survive more than a month or two.  She survived fourteen. 

On what proved to be the final morning of her life, Lieutenant Colonel Wagner died doing what she excelled at doing, which was saving and protecting others, getting people out of the Pentagon after Flight 77 struck it.  She was killed in the collapse of the building.  

While the death of her daughter broke her mother Mattie's heart, the fact that Karen Wagner died while keeping others around her from being killed did not surprise Mattie Wagner even a little bit.  "That was my girl", said Mattie, in this beautiful piece that Jeff B. Flinn wrote back in 2005, which I cannot recommend enough.   

We the people of these United States should be thankful that Mattie Wagner shared her daughter with us.  She made those around her better.  She made the world around her better.  

-AK 

The Personification of Grace

 

Michael Patrick Iken 

Euro Brokers, Inc. - Bond Trader

September 11, 2001

Michael Patrick Iken and his wife, Monica, spent the night of September 8, 1964 at their home in Riverdale, New York celebrating his 37th birthday with close friends.  It was a night so perfect that at some level they likely did not want it to ever end.  

It did.  

On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, Michael kissed Monica goodbye and headed to work on the 84th Floor of the South Tower.  He was a bond trader at Euro Brokers, Inc.  After he reached his office that morning, he called Monica twice.  The first time was to tell her to turn on the TV because a commuter plane had struck the building, everything was under control, and was going to be fine.  He called a second time, telling her that he had to go and that people were jumping out of windows.  He, like so many others on that terrible day, never made it home. 

It was the second anniversary of the night they met. 

Monica Iken-Murphy is an extraordinary woman.  Simply extraordinary.  The life and legacy she has built out the worst day of her life is a testament to her resolve, her strength, and her grace.  Activist, philanthropist, school founder, wife (she got married again in 2006 to a FDNY firefighter, Bob Murphy), and mother (she and Bob have two daughters, Madison and Megan).  

She used the funds she received from the Victim Compensation Award to launch and run September's Mission Foundation, a non-profit that advocated to secure land on the World Trade Center site for what became the National September 11 Memorial and Museum.   

-AK 

On the Edge of the Razor

 

FF Christopher J. Blackwell 

Rescue 3 - FDNY 

End of Watch:  September 11, 2001

Christopher J. Blackwell served the people of New York City as a member of the FDNY for twenty years.  His final twelve years were spent as a member of one of the FDNY's elite Rescue units.  FF Blackwell was part of Rescue 3, which is located in the South Bronx.   He was killed while saving others at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.  

He was a specialist in collapsed buildings and as part of his duties in the FDNY, he traveled throughout the United States sharing his expertise with firefighers in departments across the country.  His job was a high-risk job and one that he performed proficiently but not recklessly, conmensurate with his role as a teacher of his particular set of skills to other firefighters.  

In the course of his storied career with the FDNY, FF Blackwell earned multiple awards including the Heroism and Community Service Medal in 1989, the Thomas Kenney Award for Courage in 1990, and the New York Medal of Valor in 1992.

FF Blackwell and his wife, Jane, were the proud parents of three children, Alexandra, Ryan, and Samantha, who were 15, 13, and 11 years old respectively on the morning their father was killed.   Ryan Blackwell has followed his father into the family business, joining the FDNY.   

Apples and trees.  

-AK 

The Seventeen of Three

 

(c) Pivot Point Academy 

On the morning of September 11, 2001, seventeen members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 3, working for various firms throughout the World Trade Center complex, were killed in the collapse of the Twin Towers.  

If you visit the National September 11 Museum (and if you have not done so, I cannot implore you enough to do so), then you can see the Last Column.   At the completion of the recovery operation at Ground Zero in May 2002, Kevin Flynn of Local 3 left this marking on the Last Column to honor his fallen brothers.  

Local 3 had more members killed at the World Trade Center than any other local contruction union did.  The seventeen men from Local 3 who died on that terrible Tuesday morning were: Thomas J. Ashton, James Marcel Cartier, Robert John Caufield, Joseph Di Pilato, Salvatore Fiumefreddo, Harvey Robert Hermer, Ralph Michael Licciardi, Michael W. Lowe, Charles Peter Lucania, Lester V. Marino, Jose Angel Martinez Jr., Joseph M. Romagnolo, Anthony Segarra, Jeffrey James Shaw, Steven R. Strauss, Glenn J. Travers Sr. and Kenneth Wilburn White Jr.   

-AK

He Died As He Lived - Unafraid

 

Lt. Robert B. Nagel 

FDNY - Engine 58

End of Watch:  September 11, 2001

Robert B. Nagel served the people of New York City for twenty-eight years as a member of the FDNY.  Prior to that, he served the people of the United States as a member of the United States Army. 

Lt. Nagel lived in Manhattan with his wife, Janet, and the couple's daughter, Bridget.  In addition to his family and the FDNY, Lt. Nagel loved history and science-fiction.  According to Janet, he also loved being direct with people.  He was - in a word - blunt.  

Lt. Nagel was the only member of Engine 58 killed at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.  According to FF John Wilson of Engine 58, Lt. Nagel survived the collapse of the South Tower.  He ended up trapped under and behind a wall of debris in the Tall Ships bar on the bound floor of the Marriott hotel on the southwest corner of the ground floor.  Although he was out of sight, they were talking to him and managed to pass him water through the debris which consisted of aluminum studs and BMX cable.  

However, after his men tied off a rope to a column and passed it through to him, the North Tower collapsed.  When they were able to get back to where they had tied off the rope, there was an additional twenty to thirty feet of debris between them and where Lt. Nagel had been.  Although his men spent until 9 pm that night digging and removing the debris and then picked up there again the following morning, Lt. Nagel was gone.  They never found him.  

-AK 

Forever Buffs

Mom died sixty-three months ago today.  She is missed every day.  Some days, such as today, I miss her even more than usual.   

I am the youngest of six Kenny siblings and 1/3 of us (Jill and I) graduated from the University of Colorado, Boulder.   When Joe (Jill's husband) is included in the count, you add a third Buff to Mom's herd.  

I'm smiling because I've graduated.

Mom? Because she'd made her last tuition payment

Boulder, Colorado - May 12, 1989

Ten CU alumni were killed on September 11, 2001.  I did not know any of them.  Annually, when the Missus and I make our pilgrimage into lower Manhattan for the Tunnel to Towers 5K on September's final weekend, we place flags at several names at the September 11 Memorial, including at the names of all ten Buffs.  

Three years ago, in October 2019, Clay Bonneyman Evans contacted me and asked me for a few minutes to discuss the placement of these flags for a piece he wrote for the Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine, which piece helps honor the memories of those ten Buffs.   Today, we remember and honor them - and the late, great Joanie K. - by remembering the life each led and the family each left behind.  

Shoulder to Shoulder.   Same as it ever was.  Same as it shall always be. 

-AK 

Heart and Soul

 

FF James Nicholas Pappageorge

Engine 23 - FDNY

End of Watch:  September 11, 2001

James Pappageorge was born to serve.  In 1993, at age nineteen, he became an EMT, working at various volunteer and private ambulance companies.  Thereafter, in 1995, he joined the EMS Division of the FDNY, attended LaGuardia Community College, and graduated as a paramedic in 1999.  

He had dreamed of becoming a FDNY firefighter and on July 23, 2001, he graduated from the FDNY Academy.  He was assigned to Engine 23 in midtown Manhattan.  Less than two months later, he was one of four firefighters from Engine 23 killed in the collapse of the World Trade Center.  

His sister, Helen Pappageorge, an NYPD Detective, wrote of her brother, "Your heart and soul were pure and beautiful."  At the time of his death, he and his fiancee Gina Pinos were planning their September 2002 wedding.  Although he was not the little boy's biological father, James Pappageorge considered Gina's then-five year-old son, Justin, to be his child, raising him and treating him as such.  

He and Gina intended to give Justin a little brother or sister and, as fate would have it, on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, Gina had telephoned him at the firehouse to tell him she was pregnant.  However, as the two of them spoke, alarms were blaring in the background.  He told her that he loved her but that he had to go - otherwise the men of Engine 23 would head downtown without him.  He hung up and he was gone.  At that moment, she hoped that she would have another chance to tell him.  She did not.  

-AK 

Not One To Brag

 

Battalion Chief Joseph Ross Marchbanks, Jr.

Battalion 12 - FDNY

End of Watch:  September 11, 2001

At the time of his death at the too-young age of 47 on September 11, 2001, Battalion Chief Joseph Ross Marchbanks, Jr. had spent slightly less than half of his life protecting and serving the people of New York City.  A native of the Bronx, he qualified to join the NYPD and the FDNY in the very same week, opted to become one of New York's Bravest, and never looked back.  

In the span of his twenty-two year in the FDNY, Chief Marchbanks was promoted on four separate occasions.  Although he had earned the rank of Battalion Chief, in which capacity he served out of the Harlem firehouse that is home to Engine 35/Ladder 14/Battalion 12, he preferred to be called a firefighter, for that was who he was and that was what he did, irrespective of rank.  

He also loved being called "Dad", which he was to his two kids Lauren and Ryan, and "Husband', which he was to his wife Teresa.   The family lived in Nanuet, where Chief Marchbanks helped coach Lauren's softball team to a championship.  

On what proved to be the final day of his life, Chief Marchbanks had just begun a 24-hour shift, relieving his friend and fellow Battalion Chief Fred Scheffold, when the alarm rang.  Both men hopped into the truck heading downtown to the World Trade Center, riding together to help save others.  It was there they died.  

Chief Marchbank's wife, Teresa, noted that her husband was never one to brag about himself (although Lauren's exploits on the softball diamond were another matter altogether).  Instead, he allowed his actions to speak for him.  On that terrible Tuesday morning twenty-one Septembers ago, they spoke so loudly that all these years later they continue to echo and to reverberate.  

May it be that they always do so. 

-AK