Nows and Forevers

I doubt there’s anyone in the Tri-State who didn’t know someone who was killed or wounded or survived Sept 11, 2001, at the World Trade Center. For as big and impersonal New York seems, here’s a secret: It’s not, really. The New York region is a lot closer-knit, with fewer degrees of separation, than I imagined growing up. It took Sept. 11 for me to understand.

The scope of the loss was staggering. Just about every town and village in New York and New Jersey and Connecticut within a 60-mile radius lost people at the Trade Center. That’s true in Orange County, New York, where I lived before and after Sept. 11, 2001. But the same can be said all through Long Island; up the Hudson Valley on both sides of the river; throughout northern and central New Jersey; Fairfield and New Haven counties in Connecticut; and of course, the five boroughs.

Many Orange County residents over the past five or six decades left The City for their suburban dream. Many of my neighbors in Monroe and Cornwall worked on Wall Street, on Madison Avenue, all over Manhattan. And significant number of Orange County residents either worked at the World Trade Center or served the FDNY, Port Authority police or the NYPD.

In Cornwall, New York, there’s a memorial to hero firefighter Kenneth Bruce Kumpel, who lived in town and was lost with the entire six-member Ladder Co. 25 when the South Tower collapsed at 9:55 a.m.

Kumpel was 42. He had a wife and two sons. According to the monument, he loved being a firefighter, and not only was 10-year FDNY veteran but a former NYPD officer, too, and a volunteer firefighter at the Highland Co. in Cornwall that is on the other side of the traffic circle. Kumpel and the 343 other FDNY firefighters — and the NYPD, Port Authority and EMS who also died — raced to the scene when everyone else fled.

I thought on a Sept. 11 impossibly far into the future when we lost Kumpel and nearly 3,000 other people in lower Manhattan, that it was worth sharing some of his story.

As the monument in Cornwall says in stone, “Lest we forget.”

We must not.