NY 1

Soon after the September 11th terror attacks, Steven Lowy and his wife Marina Belica metvRobert Beddia at the SoHo firehouse for Engine 24, Ladder 5 - where he worked for 23 years.

"Bobby and I hit it off,'" recalled Lowy. "I originally thought he was some kind of fire captain. He was a little bit older and everyone seemed to look up to him."

Beddia, who died in Saturday's fire at the Deutsche Bank building at 53, was not at work on September 11th, when his firehouse lost 11 men. Marina Belica says he never got over it.

"I know Bobby always felt very guilty, you know, why was he spared and they weren't,'" said Belica. "It was his day off.'"

Together Lowy and Beddia put together a charity project inspired by the disaster, and centered around a photo Lowy took in 2002. Lowy shot the photograph of the Towers of Light from the top of a building. He donates 20 percent of the sale of each print to two firefighter charities.

"Divided between the Engine 24, Ladder 5 emergency fund, which is like a widows and orphans fund, and the other half goes to the FDNY burn unit,'" said Lowy.

Lowy and his wife would often drop off the donations on the weekends at Chumleys, where Beddia moonlighted as a bartender.

"We'd have brunch and he'd make us bloody marys, so it was always like a little bit of a celebration, which was nice because it was for such a somber cause.

And Beddia became a part of their life.

"He really lived life with a lot of gusto and involvement,'" said Belica. "He was just, as I say, easy to like. He was very well loved by his company. We met him and became fast friends.'"

"He wanted to be the first person to put our children in the fire truck,'" said Lowy. "And we finally drove by and he came out and kind of said hello to them and said you ‘know, when you're a little bigger we're going to show you all the equipment here and make you honorary firefighters.''"

A promise Robert Bedia was unable to keep.