Honoring Welles Crowther
I’m sending this early this week. Friday is going to be heavy, and I’d rather you have it before the day than in the middle of it.
Friday is twenty-five years. 2,977 people were killed that morning. 343 of them were firefighters who walked into buildings while everybody was running out. Here’s the one I keep coming back to.
Welles Crowther was only 24 years old. Younger than any of my grown adult kids.He traded equities on the 104th floor of the South Tower. He was not a first responder. He had been a volunteer firefighter back home in Nyack, New York as a teenager, and he carried a red bandana his father gave him. That was the whole of his authority that morning.
When the plane hit, he came out of the smoke into the 78th floor sky lobby, where people were hurt and huddled and had already decided there was no way out. He had the bandana over his face. Survivors said his voice was calm. He told them to follow him, he knew the way. He carried a woman down seventeen floors on his shoulder. Then he climbed back up. He did that three times. As many as eighteen people walked out of that tower because of him. He was last seen going up.
They found him the following March, in the lobby, with the firefighters. He and the crew he was with had been headed back up with equipment to free people trapped under the debris. Nobody knew his name for eight months. His mother worked it out reading a newspaper account about a man in a red bandana.
Here’s why I’m putting him in a leadership newsletter.
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Welles Crowther had no title. No rank. No radio. Nobody assigned him that room or gave him permission to run it. He looked at a group of terrified people, decided he was the one, and opened his mouth. And they followed him. That’s leadership. Not the org chart. Not the badge. Somebody in the room decides to be the one, and everybody else can feel it happen.
I say bet on the jockey, not the horse. This is what I mean by it. The building didn’t get those eighteen people out. A twenty-four-year-old with a bandana did.
This past May he was named to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, posthumously. Twenty-five years on, and his name is still being called out loud. That’s what it looks like when a life keeps working long after it ends.
One more thing you should know about Friday. This year, for the first time, there will be a seventh moment of silence at the memorial. Six mark the planes, the towers, the Pentagon, and the field in Pennsylvania. The seventh is for the people who died afterward. The ones who spent weeks and months on the pile breathing whatever was in that air, went home, and got sick years later. The FDNY has now buried more members from those illnesses than it lost on the day itself. More than four hundred of them. They gave all of it too. Just slower, and with almost nobody watching.
So here’s what I’d ask of you on Friday. September 11th is a national day of service. If you want to do something with the day besides scroll past flag graphics, that’s your answer. Give a few hours of it away.
And check on your veterans. I coach through Project New Day and Stand Beside Them, and I can tell you the 25th anniversary is landing hard on the people who went to war because of that morning, and on the spouses who held everything together while they were gone. A text costs you nothing.
Twenty-five years. Say their names if you know any.
Honoring them with you, Donna
Bet on the jockey, not the horse.
