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by word of mouth and mass media and inspired the Tunnel-to-Towers Run
It's a residue of 9/11, as much as the perpetually half-staff flag at Ground Zero, the streams of tourists downtown, or the Tunnel to Towers Run itself.
Yesterday, Russ Siller was standing across from the big hole in the ground on West Street, tired from too little sleep and haggard from weeks of running from meeting to interview to fund raiser.
"Not my lifestyle," the retired high school teacher said quietly, while looking around for the nearest cup of coffee.
The 63-year-old's life has changed plenty since the day his youngest sibling, the brother he raised from the time he was 12, went down in the crush of steel and concrete that was the World Trade Center.
He never planned it that way, nor did any of his two surviving brothers or three sisters.
"It was a lot bigger than us," Siller was explaining yesterday.
He meant the story of his kid brother Stephen, 25 years his junior, whom he and his wife Jackie took in when Stephen lost both parents.
The teenager he worried over through all the wild high school years.
RAISED HIS BROTHER
The one with the big smile and wise remarks he couldn't stay mad at for more than a few minutes; the brother he cherished maybe most of all because of the way he blossomed and grew right there, before his eyes.
By now, just about everyone around here knows of the tale of the 34-year-old West Brighton firefighter who was off-duty and on his way home from work, but turned his car around on the Gowanus when he heard that a plane had crashed into one of the towers.
Of how the father of five ran through the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel hauling his gear on his back in an effort to get to the site, and of how he died that day when the buildings came down.
In the first days after the attack, the Siller story bubbled up out of the smoldering ruins by word of mouth. A worker at the scene, who heard what had happened over coffee at a Red Cross tent, would tell a neighbor over a backyard fence. That neighbor would retell the account around a water cooler at work, or in a saloon late at night.
And on-and-on it went, first around New York City and then on across the country.
Why not?
COMPELLING STORY
At a moment when America was looking everywhere to find something good and solid and hopeful, here was a story so pure it begged to be told. Pretty soon, the saga would crop up on television specials remembering the heroics of that day, or in speeches from politicians.
"It was so compelling," Russ Siller explained yesterday, "that we really didn't have to tell anyone about what happened. Other people took care of that for us."
And it was also part of the story how the six remaining Sillers -- from the consistently conservative to the lavishly liberal -- all managed to agree on just about everything when it came to finding a fitting way to remember the family's youngest.
"I think we just understood that this was more important than politics," Russ said.
And they were going to get plenty of support from people moved by Stephen Siller's actions.
Nowhere was that going to be more the case than right here, in his home town; this place that was hit so hard by the attacks, and where so many walking wounded were left in the days and months that followed.
For Islanders, those so close to the bone, the television specials and newspaper reports were almost too much.
They'd heard it all; seen a lot of it.
Now they wanted to do something.
And when the Siller family decided they'd try to institute a memorial run from Brooklyn through the Battery Tunnel and up West Street to the Twin Towers site, it was Islanders who responded first.
'IT'S ABOUT EVERYONE'
"Hundreds of them," Siller said yesterday.
And not just friends and extended family, either.
"People we'd never met," he said.
Some would become major players in the Stephen Siller 5K Tunnel to Towers Run/Walk, which is scheduled for Sunday.
So would Rudy Giuliani, who has spoken at the race's finish line in the past. And the current mayor, Mike Bloomberg, who has helped to make a wish a reality in terms of smoothing the way for an undertaking that basically shuts down segments of two boroughs for hours on a fall weekend.
But it isn't just politicians, or Islanders, who have taken this tale of one firefighter and used it as a snapshot of all the heroic acts of that day.
"Stephen's story is the story of 9/11," Russ Siller said yesterday, a few steps from Ground Zero. "It's not just about him. It's about everyone."
And that is another residue of the day.
(Those interested in more information regarding the Tunnel to Towers Run or the Stephen Siller Foundation can go on line at www.tunneltotowers.org.)
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