Nacogdoches Hero Foundation

Nacogdoches Hero Foundation

14 hours ago

Orio Palmer was a battalion chief with the New York City Fire Department, 45 years old, with about twenty years on the job. At home in Valley Stream he was a husband and a father of three, a lighthearted man his family called the Music Man. He was also a marathon runner, one of the fittest men in the department.

When the South Tower was hit, Palmer was among the first to respond, and he did something almost no one else managed that morning: he got high into the building. Trained as an engineer who had once worked on elevators, he helped restore the tower's radio links and got an elevator running again, riding it up to around the 40th floor. From there he climbed, flight after flight, in heavy gear, steady the whole way. Near the 75th floor he found a fire marshal, Ron Bucca, who had come up on foot, and the two kept going together.

Palmer reached the 78th floor, the sky lobby where the plane had struck, a place investigators had long assumed no firefighter ever got to. Over the radio, his voice calm, he reported what he found and began calling for hose lines, still working the problem, still trying to reach the people above him. "We've got two isolated pockets of fire," he said, believing they could be put out. His last message came through at 9:58. A minute later, the tower fell. He was doing his job to the very end.

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Nacogdoches Hero Foundation

22 hours ago

This week, we're remembering September 11 by telling the stories of real people, the ones who were there that morning, and the ones who gave everything so that others could go home. We begin with a young man many people came to know only by the red bandana he wore.

Welles Crowther was 24 years old. He worked as an equities trader on the 104th floor of the South Tower, and back home in Upper Nyack, New York, he had been a volunteer firefighter since he was 16. When he was a boy, his father gave him a red bandana, and he carried it with him for years.

After the tower was struck, Welles made his way to the 78th-floor sky lobby, where injured and frightened people had gathered with no clear way out. His face was covered by that red bandana. He spoke in a calm voice, pointed them toward a stairway, and led them down. Then he went back up, and did it again, making several trips before the building came down. He did not make it out. His body was found later in the lobby, alongside firefighters and rescue workers.

For months, the people he had guided out did not know his name, only that a young man in a red bandana had shown them the way. When his mother read one of their accounts, she recognized her son. He is credited with helping as many as eighteen people reach safety that morning. A coworker once asked him about the bandana he kept on his desk. He held it up and said, "With this red bandana, I'm going to change the world."

He was 24.

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