June 10, 2025 • 40 mins
9/11 firefighter Tim Brown helped save lives that fateful day, but he also lost 100 friends who chose to save others knowing it would likely be the last act of their lives. His mission is to honor this Army of Normal Folks and make sure that America never forgets them.
Support the show: https://www.normalfolks.us/premium
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
He said to me, Timmy, this is really bad. And
that is for us to say that to each other
is significant because we do bad every day. And he
was saying, this is exceptionally bad, right, And I said,
I know, Chris, be careful. I love you, and he
said I love you. And after he said that, he
turned around and he went in the stairwell and he
(00:23):
went up to save the lives of people he didn't know.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Welcome to an army of normal folks. I'm Bill Courtney.
I'm a normal guy. I'm a husband, I'm a father,
I'm an entrepreneur, and I've been a football coach and
Inner City Memphis. And the last part it somehow led
to an oscar for the film by our team that's
called Undefeated. I believe our country's problems are never going
(00:56):
to be solved by a bunch of fancy people in
nice suits using words that nobody ever uses on CNN
and Fox, but rather by an army of normal folks.
That's us, just you and me, deciding hey, maybe I
can help. That's what Tim Brown, the voice you just heard,
has done. Tim is a nine to eleven firefighter who
(01:20):
saved lives that faithful day, but he doesn't view himself
as a hero. Tim lost one hundred friends on nine
to eleven, each of whom chose to save others, knowing
it would likely be the last act of their lives.
I cannot wait for you to meet Tim right after
these brief messages from our general sponsors. Well, first of all,
(01:57):
I want to say, welcome to a lived recording of
an army of normal folks. What is as Alex number
six we've done to these loved ones, maybe six or seven.
Alex has no idea, he's we're at a brewery and
he's already had his first beer. So the production, the
production quality just went through the basement. But anyway, we
(02:19):
are here in Memphis and have a very special guest.
But first I want to say to everybody who came
down tonight to meet our guests.
Speaker 3 (02:31):
Thank you very much. Give yourself a round of applause.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Yeah, all right, So as you can hear, we've got
a number of folks here our guest today, Tim Brown.
If there's anybody in this room who listens to this
man for the next little bit and doesn't get a
lump in their throat or tearing their eye, you've missing
some of your humanity. Tim was a firefighter with the
(02:58):
FDN WIF for over twenty years. Tim responded to World
Trade Center bombing in nineteen ninety three as a member
of Rescue three, which is the Fire Department New York
Fire Department's version of the Navy Seals. To say that
Tim is high speed would be an understatement. In ninety five,
Tim joined New York Task Force one, which is a
(03:19):
FEMA urban search and rescue team, with whom he responded
to the Oklahoma City bombing that same year. In ninety eight,
Tim was detailed to the Mayor's Office of Emergency Management,
which was headquartered in seven World Trade Center. While Tim
helped to save the lives of many on nine to
(03:41):
one one, he does not view himself as a hero.
This man sitting next to me lost over one hundred
friends that day, including many Fire Department brothers who each
chose to save others, knowing, as you will hear soon,
that they went up the stairs expecting to die. During
this interview that we're really going to benefit from, Tim
(04:02):
will beautifully pay tribute to his heroic friends and share
a series of miracles, honest to goodness, miracles, y'all that
help this man survive hurricane force winds in a firestorm.
Before I say thank you and let him start, I
want to say something a little bit off script. I
think there's three occasions in our country's consciousness over the
(04:26):
last hundred years that we cannot forget. Certainly Martin Luther
King getting shot in Memphis, the Kennedy assassination, the Oklahoma
City bombing. Things like that are etched into history and
our memory, and they matter, But I don't think they
are transformative in the way that the three things that
I think are. One is the stock crash. It led
(04:50):
to the Great Depression, that led to countless suicides, and
today the Federal Reserve acts on economic princes taught to
us by the Great Depression of the crash one hundred
years ago.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
It's transformative.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
It's etched into the ethos of our American selves. The
second would be the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It's etched
into the ethos of ourselves. It could be argued that
our country would never have been in World War II.
Our island, protected by the Atlantic and Pacific was at
(05:26):
that time unreachable, and we were sucked into that war
as a result of Pearl Harbor. And I will tell
you that the relative peace we've lived in the last
seven decades a result of winning World War II and
our military and infrastructure being intact because all of Europe's
was destroyed, and our navy remaining intact, so as a
(05:49):
maritime power, the only maritime power, it was the time
after World War II that enabled the country, our country,
to be the world's sheriff, which led to what we
all recognize now or feel now is normalcy of globalization.
That doesn't happen. The world doesn't change without Pearl Harbor.
(06:14):
And I think that's etched into our memory. But you know,
you got to think about nineteen forty one. That's fifty nine,
seventy nine, eighty.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
Three years ago.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
If you were nine years old during Pearl Harbor, you
are today ninety two. If you're eighteen, you're one hundred.
There's very very few people walking the face of this
planet anymore that can tell us the realities of Pearl Harbor.
We live them through history, we live them through books,
we live them through documentaries, but we can't really talk
(06:48):
to anybody who knows it and feels it and understands it.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
And if we.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
Forget the lessons of the stock market crash, we're certainly
to repeat them in our banking system and are the
way we handle the FED. If we forget the lessons
of World War two, we're certainly going to pay for
that geopolitically one day. With that as a backdrop, If
(07:12):
we forget the lessons of nine to eleven, we will
certainly live to see it again. And it needs to
dawn on you that this may across our country. There
will be countless seniors graduating college. Who are the young
adults that are going to form the next three and
four decades of our policy and how our country works
(07:33):
that weren't even born on none one one. It doesn't
even feel that way to us, because we were all
alive as that's in our memory, but only a generation away.
Ask anybody twenty years younger right now, who sings your
favorite songs from the eighties, and they won't be able
to tell you. Ask who was in Saint Almo's Fire
(07:55):
and who was in Raiders of the Lost Arc and
these twenty something year old they won't even tell you.
And everyone in here knows the answer to that. Ask
them what happened on nine to eleven? And they won't
be able to tell you, and that is scary. It
is why Tim's story matters. Lest we forget, history will
repeat itself. And it is men like this who have
(08:17):
been through hors that most of us cannot imagine, that
will sit up here and courageously recount this for you,
not to be sensational, not to garner attention to himself,
but because men like him do not want you to
forget his friends who died in the service of their
fellow man. And it's men like him that don't want
(08:37):
us as a public to forget. Well, we must remember
lest we repeat it. Tonight will have a couple of laughs.
You will hear some somber stories. Most importantly, I hope
you're challenged to make sure we never forget Tim.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
Welcome to Memphis, Thank you brother. Happy to be here,
my first time, your first time.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Yes, well you got a beer.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
You're a New York firefighter. I think beer is part
of the diet. Well we're at a brewery, so yeah,
that's it. Here we go here in Memphis. That's it.
There is.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
I am typically very engaged conversationally, and I'll interject when
I'm like, hold it, what I don't understand, because I
think maybe our listeners might not understand something you said.
I typically open army and normal folks, So tell me
where you came, come.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
And all that. We're not going to do that.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
One thing I got to say is when Tim and
I finish our discussion, we have a microphone out here
and the floor is open for questions, and I hope
you guys have them, because you're not going to get
many opportunities to talk to a hero, So you all
have an opportunity to speak up. And if you do, Hey,
you're going to be on a podcast and thousands of
(09:51):
people are here you so you might as well ask questions. Tim,
maybe give us a little background, just a little on
your time in the fire department, how you ended up
in the position you were in and reading the paper,
and from that step forward the events of not eleven.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
Thanks for having me here in Memphis. It is my goal.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
We said never forget right every firehouse in New York City,
every fireman's car on the bumper was a bumper sticker
that said never forget. That is our mantra after nine
to eleven, and I live that every day of my life,
and I think it's very important that we continue, as
(10:35):
you said before, to live that mantra and pass it on,
especially now to the next generation.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
I was a bad kid. I was a bad kid.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
When I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen, my parents were getting divorced.
I got lost in the shuffle of five kids, and
I was lashing out. I guess I had no direction,
I had no mission. I had nothing that interested me
until I found out that I could be a junior
(11:06):
fireman at fifteen years old in Newington, Connecticut.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
And that changed my life.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
I stopped doing the bad things you can imagine, and
I started focusing on being a junior fireman and emt
And I say this because I encourage young people to
take this path, because it will give you direction and
meaning and mission and purpose, which is what it did
for me. And I was a volunteer fireman, and I
(11:33):
was a paid fireman in Connecticut. But then in night
am I allowed to say how old I am in
nineteen eighty four?
Speaker 3 (11:40):
Holy crap, your old?
Speaker 1 (11:44):
In nineteen eighty four, I was blessed by being hired
in the New York City Fire Department. I worked in
what some people might remember in the South Bronx as Ford,
Apache That was my first assignment for seven years, so
you can imagine we were pretty busy there with fires
and helping people that needed help. I went to Times
Square for a bit, and then I went back to
(12:05):
what I call the Bronx Harlem Special Operations Command Rescue
Company three. We were also the building Collapse company for
the entire city, so we were very busy with quite
a lot of emergencies and fires and such. But then
in nineteen ninety eight, I had become friends with Mayor Giuliani,
(12:25):
and he convinced me, he and his team convinced me
to go to his newly formed Mayor's Office of Emergency Management,
and I took off my fireman helmet and I put
on a tie, and I went to seven World Trade
Center on the twenty third floor, which was our office,
and I became a supervisor within.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
That group and our job.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Our job, my group was to respond to major disasters
and emergencies in New York City and represent the mayor.
So that's a very quick summary of how I got
there to the more of September eleventh, two thousand and one.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
Along the way, you lived with these guys, you eat
with these guys, You bathed with these guys. You literally
become brothers with firefighters. And even though you find yourself
in the mayor's office with a snazzy tie, you're still
at the heart of yourself, you're a firefighter. Give us
a sense of the relationships that exists. So I think
you nailed it there a bit. Like we did everything together.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
We went to horrific emergencies, fires, building collapses, car crashes.
We carried our own out of these disasters, our own
who heroically went in and got injured badly, and we
carried them out. We carried out little kids, you know,
innocent little kids. We carried out innocent grandmas. And we
(13:49):
did all this stuff together, and we worked together. All
talk in a little bit about firefighter Chris Blackwell in
September eleventh, But firefighters like Chris were exceptional, and Captain
Terry Hatton and Captain Patty Brown who saved dozens and
dozens and dozens of lives. And we would come back
(14:12):
from some horrible thing and and we would eat together,
we would sleep in the same room. We would you know,
we actually built a steam room because the smoke was
very bad for you. So we you know, we would
take a steam at the end of work and maybe
maybe have a beer after work.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
Or from maybe maybe, but.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
You could actually when you sit in the steam room,
you could actually see the the stream of black soot
draining out of your body. And and that was the
poisons leaving the poisons that we're going to give us
cancer leaving our body. So we would stay there after
work and we would hydrate and and and let this
(14:53):
poison out of our bodies, and we would talk about
the day. I mean, these guys were like my real brothers.
You loved them, every one of them.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Everyone. And now a few messages from our general sponsors.
But first allow me to throw throw an idea out
there for you guys. If you do a good deed
one time, or maybe it's weekly service that you do,
(15:27):
would you consider sharing it on social and including a
message like join an army of normal folks. Together we
can solve our problems and tag us in the copy
At an Army of normal folks. We hope to share
many of your posts on our accounts. Now, this isn't
(15:48):
about bragging about what you're doing, because then you'd be
a turkey person. But it's about sharing the power of
what normal folks can do so that more normal folks
can realize that they can do it too, and hopefully
grow the army. I hope you'll give it a try.
We'll be wiped back. What's that to stay morning look like?
Speaker 3 (16:17):
For me?
Speaker 1 (16:18):
So I go into work seven World Trade Center, and
I go in a little early, you know. I got
in around seven forty five or eight am. And I
always our office was a seven twenty third floor, and
I always went to the third floor first, and that
was our cafeteria floor. So I would go there into
the cafeteria, get my cheerios, my orange juice, and my
(16:40):
hot tea, and I would I would I say this
when there's a lot of young people in the audience.
We used to have something called newspapers back in the day,
because you couldn't get your information from anywhere else. You
didn't have a smartphone, And so I would have all
the local newspapers and I would sit there and eat
my cheerios and go through all of that, all those papers.
(17:04):
The power went out in the building all at once,
a bit unusual for the for a modern high rise
building in New York, and I knew something big had happened,
but I didn't hear or see anything. So the power
went out, and within five seconds the power came back on,
and I knew our backup generators for the building had
(17:25):
kicked in. And the people who were sitting at the
glass windows facing the North tower of one World Trade
Center all at once like jumped up and started running
toward the exit, running by me. And I had to
grab one young lady by the shoulders and like shake
her back to reality and look her in the eyes,
and I said, what happened is? She said, a plane
(17:47):
hit the tower. And that was the first that I
had or knew of it. You know, we call it
the big One. You know, we'd try to do our
best to train and drill and prepare as much as
we can for the big one. This one turns out
it was something you could not really prepare for. I
mean a little bit, but you could even imagine it
(18:08):
when you first hit it, when it first happened. And
you're there, are you thinking small plane, helicopter? I mean
you're not thinking. No, it's not even you can't even
fathom what's what we now know? Right, So what's going
through your head?
Speaker 3 (18:24):
Yeah? Small plane, maybe a helicopter.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
We had had that happen in New York City before,
and you know, you see now it still happens. So
I don't think anybody initially imagined that it was a
passenger jet, and so that's what I was thinking, you know,
I think, you know, it's a big thing, but we're
going to be able to take care of it.
Speaker 3 (18:44):
So what do you do? So it's my job to go.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
To the command post, not to be the incident commander,
but to support the incident commander who is the fire chief,
and support him with all things other than kind of
his primary focus, which is the firefighters and stuff like that, right,
so anything else he needed, the utility companies, the ems
a little bit, but you know, there's all kinds of
(19:08):
people we need when something like this happens. And so
it was my job to kind of stand there at
the command post, and the incident commander would turn to
me and say get me ABC, D and E, and
he would not have to worry about it, and we
would take care of it. What does command posts look like?
So there's an actual structural command post in the lobby
of both the North and South Tower, which the Fire
(19:29):
Department frequently uses and frequently practices and drills with a lot.
Because there are two hundred and ten story buildings. We
go to a lot of alarms there, we go to
a lot of emergencies. Each floor is at one acre big,
so that's one hundred and ten acres each tower. And
so you can imagine the number of people and the
(19:51):
number of emergencies and the number of problems that we
would go there for every day.
Speaker 3 (19:58):
I guess what I hear that.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
But if you have an emergency management center, there's got
to be I'm imagining maybe I've watched too many movies,
but I'm imagining about a thousand of those TVs and
cameras and connections and communications, almost a hub of information.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
So it's two different things. There's a command post inside
one World Trade Center, which is in the lobby, the
people setting up doing the work. Yeah, and right, the
fire chief, the incident commander says, one in the north tower,
is one in the South tower. Our oem command center
is what you're talking about with it's Star Wars. It's
(20:41):
five hundred screens, it's five hundred computers of workstations, and
that is to support a citywide emergency or disaster, in
support of the real incident commander in the end, who
is the mayor? Right, so everyone reports to the mayor.
So in the end for policy deciding, it was the
(21:01):
mayor and that's what our twenty third floor command center
was built for.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
Well at that time in the morning, was everybody at
a station or did you have no.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
We would call them in. Yeah, so we would manage it,
but we had to bring them in.
Speaker 2 (21:15):
So at this point the World Trade Centers got a
fire on it. You think a helicopter something said, But
it's still a big deal.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
Were so part of the story is that are what
we call Watch Command, which is our communications hub, has
to make up to one hundred and fifty or so
phone calls to bring people in from our federal, state, local,
and private sector partners to help us manage this disaster.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
And we had done this many times.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
Before citywide health emergencies, West Nile virus and things like that.
But this is more of an instant shock to the system.
But we knew the right people to call, we knew
the right people to bring in, and you know, we
had people on the world very quickly to come support us.
My job was to go into the North Tower to
(22:05):
that command post and assist the incident commander of the
fire chief there.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
So you're calling everybody in and you're saying, we're go
I'm coming up, making up.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
Words, but we're all in, all in, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
And then once you get that set up at your office,
you're headed to the trade site.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
They're doing that while I'm doing the while I'm running
to the World Trade Center. So I go to my
car and I took off my tie and my dress
shirt and my jacket, and I put on leather, heavy
leather boots, a jacket that said Mayor's Office on the
breast and on the back, and then they made us
wear this stupid green helmet, which was really embarrassing, really
(22:44):
embarrassing after wearing my fireman helmet for twenty years or whatever,
so they could identify us. So I put on the
stupid green helmet. And we're trained as firefighters when you
go into a building under destruction, before you go in,
you try and look at three sides of the building
to get a current size up of that building. And
(23:07):
I wanted to take a second that morning to do that.
So in order to do that, I had to go
up like one and a half stories from street level
to plaza level, the plaza that was in between the towers,
and in order to do that, I had to go
up a concrete staircase exterior. So I ran up that staircase.
It's an important part of the story because later that
(23:29):
concrete staircase becomes the biggest heaviest artifact in the nine
to eleven Museum. And they call it the Survivor's staircase
because I.
Speaker 3 (23:39):
Ran up early on.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
But later on in the morning, hundreds or thousands of
civilians ran down that staircase and ran away to live.
And I make that point really because it's what we
do our military, our first responders, our police officers, are firefighters,
are paramedics and others. When something happens, we run toward it.
(24:00):
We will run towards the problem because there are people
in trouble. And and that's how the morning started out
for all of us, all the firefighters and police officers
and EMTs and paramedics and and others.
Speaker 3 (24:12):
Authority.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
Yeah, well yeah, all of all of them, you know,
ran toward this impending disaster. So so I looked out
over the plaza, and why do you check three corners
to get a current size up of what's happening with
the three corners, tell you, well, it's hard, it's we
would do four, but then you have to run all
(24:34):
the way around the building and it takes too much time.
So very quickly you can kind of get three sides
of a building.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
Are you trying to see if it's structurally sound or
it's on fire?
Speaker 3 (24:45):
For both?
Speaker 1 (24:46):
So in the end, you know, I had to look
up like this ninety stories. You can't really see much.
So it was less helpful to me than it was
to my best friend, Captain Terry Hatton, who is coming
down the West Side Highway and rescue one. With binoculars,
he could see that there were seven or eight or
nine or ten floors that were already on fire.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
All right, I think this is a question a lot
of people have. Maybe other people know it, but hey,
it's my show and it's my question, sar get to
ask it, and I'm here for you. At this point,
you've got one hundred and ten story one of the
tallest buildings of the world with six some stores on fire.
Speaker 3 (25:28):
That's bad. It's very bad.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
Do you think a small plane or helicopter hit it?
And you know people are burning and dying and trapped
and that's bad. What I'm dying to understand is, did
you ever conceive at that time that this building could
fall down? Was that even part of the calculus at
this No. I mean, the question that was asked early
on was two things, who can we save? And is
(25:56):
it going to collapse?
Speaker 3 (25:57):
So that was a question. There was a question from
the mayor that why would they even conceive of it collapsing?
Speaker 2 (26:04):
Honestly, I think part of the collective nation's gasp was not.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
That it was on fire, but the damn thing fell down?
How you know? Now we know how?
Speaker 2 (26:15):
But I just so you're saying, even then people had
enough foresight to think.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
But the answer was no. The answer was no. The
answer was no, we collapse. Well, we've never had that
happen in a in a steel high rise building before
in America.
Speaker 3 (26:30):
So it's not going to happen. So well, we don't
think we.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
We are Our best judgment was that it was not
going to happen, and and the other the other answer
was we can save everybody below the point of impact.
And that was very sobering in the moment, very early on,
because basically I said that people at are above the
point of impact, we probably can't help them.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
You just said one guy's name, which which of your
friends did you say? Was looking through binoculars, Captain Terry Hatton, Okay,
I have my best friend. Yeah, we'll get to him.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
Okay, so you've checked the three corners. It's on fire.
We don't think it's going to collapse.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
I looked out over the the plaza and there were
a lot of building parts and plane parts that were
on fire and other debris, and I started to doubt
my initial assumption that it was a small plane, but.
Speaker 3 (27:45):
I couldn't prove it. You know, I didn't know.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
I didn't know, And so I went into the north
tower at that level, and in order to go to
the command post at the street level, I had to
go down an escalator inside the building, and there were
hundreds of civilians kind of like a funnel, trying to
get onto that escalator to go down. They were trying
to evacuate them underground. And something struck me as I
(28:14):
approached this group was that they weren't doing what you
might think. They weren't pushing each other out of the way,
they weren't trampling each other. In fact, for every person
who was disabled or obese, or injured or pregnant, there
were four or five civilians, not firefighters or police officers,
(28:34):
helping that person out. And it gave me hope because
I said, that's the truth of humanity, of ninety nine
percent of humanity. If someone if we go outside right
now and someone trips on the sidewalk, you'll see four
or five people reach down to try and help them,
because that's humanity. Is there evil in the world, Yeah, man,
(28:57):
there's evil, but there's a lot of good in the
world too. And it gave me hope that no matter
what happened that day, that we were going to be okay,
because that's the truth of humanity.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Kind of the power of an army of normal folks,
just normal people, right, they just came to work.
Speaker 3 (29:15):
They're just trying to do their job on a tower.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
They're doing that right, and they're and they're they're following
their heart, and they're they're following their kindness and their
love of their fellow humans. And and I and I
like that one example lifted me up. And it wasn't
firefighters or police officers. I could talk about them all
all this whole thing, but the regular people were doing
(29:43):
God's work, in my opinion, when when they were called
to it, and and I and I got into that
that crowd, that kind of funnel of people, and I'm
going down this big, long escalator.
Speaker 3 (29:56):
The lobby was like two stories tall. It was a
big lobby.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
And as the lobby revealed itself to me and I
looked out over the lobby, I could see hundreds of
firefighters awaiting their orders to go up.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
At the command post.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
And they all had their protective gear on with their
yellow reflective stripes and all their equipment. You know, they
say sixty pounds, It wasn't sixty. It was more than
one hundred, one hundred and twenty pounds, because they were
carrying extra equipment up.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
More way more than normal.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
And I had to actually do something that firefighters are
very reluctant to do. And I had to admit that
the cops were right, and we are very reluctant to
do that. And I had to admit to myself that
the cops were right because they called us, they called
(30:53):
us bumblebees. And now I'm looking out over the lobby
with all these firemen in their yellow stripes.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
They were right.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
It looked like a whole hundreds of bumblebees awaiting their
orders to go up. As I processed this in my mind,
I wind up giving it the nickname the Hive of Heroes,
because that's what I was looking at, at these firefighters
who were willing to go up and save the lives
(31:22):
of people they don't know. So I got to the
bottom of the escalator and I looked to my right,
and I saw it was a bumblebee. And I looked
up at his face, and it was my very good friend,
firefighter Chris Blackwell from Rescue three where at the Bronx
Harlem Rescue Special Operations Command where I worked. And I
worked with Chris for seven years on the same shift.
(31:44):
So as we said before, he was like a real
brother to me. I love this man with all my heart.
And we were the Bronx Harlem guys. We didn't follow
the rules so much.
Speaker 3 (31:54):
We didn't.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
We were very busy. We didn't have time to follow rules.
But he wouldn't shave all the time, and and and
and his face was smudge of smoke, and his reflective
stripes were kind of hanging off of his coat from
being burned up, and and his helmet would would sit
a little crooked on his head because of all the
fires that we went to in our careers. And and
(32:19):
I love I love this man. I love this man.
And so when I saw him, he saw me. We
always greeted each other the same way. And so we
turned toward each other like this, and we came to attention,
and he would reach around with his arm in a
big arc like this and take the unlit stub of
(32:40):
a cigar out of his mouth.
Speaker 3 (32:42):
This guy, Fault Flowers was a cigar. Oh yeah, oh yeah.
It was just an old school it was all. It
was all part of the character.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
And and and he took it out, and he put
it down to his side, and we both bent at
the hips and we leaned in and we kissed on
the lips. And we came back to attention, and he
went like this with a cigar, and he put the
cigar back in his mouth.
Speaker 3 (33:09):
And we did that. We did that.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
We did that every time we saw each other, because
we loved each other like brothers.
Speaker 3 (33:14):
We really did.
Speaker 2 (33:15):
I imagine people the firehouse are like, y'all are gross. Yeah, yeah,
well so we also The second reason we did it
is because it freaked out all the cops en frorement
around us, and we just loved watching the reaction. It
was a good it was a good, funny moment, but
also an expression of true love, you know, and true brotherhood.
(33:36):
And after we after we did that, he said to me, Timmy,
this is really bad.
Speaker 3 (33:42):
And that is.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
For us to say that to each other is significant
because we do bad every day. And he was saying,
this is exceptionally bad, right, And I said, I know, Chris,
be careful. I love you, and he said, I love you.
And after he said that, he turned around and he
went in the stairwell and he went up to save
the lives of people he didn't know, right, he had
(34:06):
free will, right, he said the words to me, Timmy,
this is really bad.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
He knew that he was possibly.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
Going to lose his life, or even likely going to
lose his life, but he still turned around and went
in the stairwell and went up. So why, Like the
question we ask is why why? Because he took an
oath fifteen years earlier, as all firefighters and police officers
and military and others do. And in that oath it says,
I'm willing to give my life for my friend for
(34:35):
my neighbor, even for someone I don't know. Firefighters and
police officers right around here take the same oath. You
never know when that moment is going to come, when
that challenge is going to come, right, But he took
the oath. So Chris chose to fulfill his words in action.
And indeed, he chose to follow his words to go
(34:59):
up and hel people he didn't know. He had free will.
He could have turned around and gone back to his
loving wife and children and lived. But that's not the
choice he made. So when I think about this and
what all these firefighters and police officers did that day,
they all, as the last act of their lives, perform
(35:21):
acts of the.
Speaker 3 (35:22):
Greatest love, as it says in the Bible.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
And every not one of them said no, not one
of them turned around and left. They all went forward,
and they all went up, And every one of them
deserves that to be known. It is the most courageous, brave,
selfless act that humanity knows. And each one of them
(35:50):
did that that day. And I use Chris as then example.
He's the first one I encountered. I encountered others. My
best friend carried Captain Terry Hatt and my friend firefighter
Michael Lynch, and many others who I witnessed.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
I witnessed with my own eyes. I want to hear
those two stories. Tell me about Dave.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
Woo Yeah, well, Dave Woolley, and I will say this
plainly because we have to tell the whole truth. Dave
Willie as all of these heroes and all the twenty
nine hundred and seventy seven innocent human beings from ninety countries,
by the way, every one of them was murdered intentionally
(36:31):
by Islamist al Qaeda terrorists, and that is the truth.
And all this other nonsense about the government did it,
conspiracy theory. They blew up, you know, George Bush, blew
up the buildings. It's all bs. And that angers me
(36:52):
to no end because it takes away from the truth
of who did it and why they did it, and
it's it's just that simple Ismus terras intentionally murdered twenty
nine and seventy seven people on American soil. So Dave
Woolley was my captain when I was in Times Square
for just under two years, and he was also a
ghetto fireman before he went up the ranks, and so
(37:15):
he understood my craziness and and my being very aggressive
in Times Square, which is a very different way to
fight fires in Times Square. And I got myself in
trouble one night because in midtown Manhattan there's a lot
of emergencies that you would never encounter in the outer
(37:38):
boroughs or anything. So we had a high pressure steam
leak in a sub basement of a high rise building.
And a high pressure steam is invisible. It's very loud,
but it's invisible. You can't see it. And there was
a report of an employee missing and trapped. And so
(37:58):
I'm the ghetto fireman.
Speaker 3 (38:00):
So I am.
Speaker 1 (38:01):
I am down down in the sub basement, and I'm
going for this guy. I didn't understand the high pressure
steam thing, and and Captain Woolley knew my act and
he grabbed me by the collar and he yanked me
back away from the steam.
Speaker 3 (38:20):
Look it was like a jet engine. You couldn't hear anything.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
And he put a wooden hook in my hand, the
hook we used to pull ceilings. And he said to me,
if this hook disappears out of your hands, stop and
turn around, because he knew that steam would chop me
in half.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
And as I understand it, you can't see it. You
can hear it, that's right. Well, because you can't see it,
it's such a strong steam that literally will slice you.
Speaker 1 (38:46):
That's right. It would have chopped my head off. It
would have chopped my head off. And I had no
clue about that. And and he saved my life.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
Did the hook disappear? The hook disappeared? No, kidd you?
Speaker 3 (39:02):
Oh and I stopped.
Speaker 1 (39:02):
Yeah, yeah, no it he saved my life. And uh,
the worker got out. There was a back door that
nobody really knew about it, that he worked there. He
knew about it, so he got out whatever, but we
didn't know about it. And but I would have been
you know, he would have been okay, and I would
have been dead if it weren't for Captain Woolley's heroic Like.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
How are you not brothers with people that literally cited life. Yeah,
to just enrich the understanding of the depth of your
love for one of them.
Speaker 1 (39:35):
I when when I after nine to eleven in the
in the hours, days and weeks, I had my younger
brother Chris with me. He was a firefighter in Providence,
Rhode Island, and my friend Paul Conway, who was a
chief in Milwaukee, fire department, so they came to spend
time with me and basically keep me alive after nine
(39:56):
to eleven, and they would know that I was going
to hear another name of a firefighter who I loved,
and they would come behind me under each arm because
they knew I was going to collapse. And that happened
a lot.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
And that concludes Part one of my conversation with Tim Brown,
and you don't want to miss part two. That's now
able to listen to you together. Guys, we can change
this country, but it starts with you. I'll see you
in part two
He said to me, Timmy, this is really bad. And
that is for us to say that to each other
is significant because we do bad every day. And he
was saying, this is exceptionally bad, right, And I said,
I know, Chris, be careful. I love you, and he
said I love you. And after he said that, he
turned around and he went in the stairwell and he
(00:23):
went up to save the lives of people he didn't know.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Welcome to an army of normal folks. I'm Bill Courtney.
I'm a normal guy. I'm a husband, I'm a father,
I'm an entrepreneur, and I've been a football coach and
Inner City Memphis. And the last part it somehow led
to an oscar for the film by our team that's
called Undefeated. I believe our country's problems are never going
(00:56):
to be solved by a bunch of fancy people in
nice suits using words that nobody ever uses on CNN
and Fox, but rather by an army of normal folks.
That's us, just you and me, deciding hey, maybe I
can help. That's what Tim Brown, the voice you just heard,
has done. Tim is a nine to eleven firefighter who
(01:20):
saved lives that faithful day, but he doesn't view himself
as a hero. Tim lost one hundred friends on nine
to eleven, each of whom chose to save others, knowing
it would likely be the last act of their lives.
I cannot wait for you to meet Tim right after
these brief messages from our general sponsors. Well, first of all,
(01:57):
I want to say, welcome to a lived recording of
an army of normal folks. What is as Alex number
six we've done to these loved ones, maybe six or seven.
Alex has no idea, he's we're at a brewery and
he's already had his first beer. So the production, the
production quality just went through the basement. But anyway, we
(02:19):
are here in Memphis and have a very special guest.
But first I want to say to everybody who came
down tonight to meet our guests.
Speaker 3 (02:31):
Thank you very much. Give yourself a round of applause.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Yeah, all right, So as you can hear, we've got
a number of folks here our guest today, Tim Brown.
If there's anybody in this room who listens to this
man for the next little bit and doesn't get a
lump in their throat or tearing their eye, you've missing
some of your humanity. Tim was a firefighter with the
(02:58):
FDN WIF for over twenty years. Tim responded to World
Trade Center bombing in nineteen ninety three as a member
of Rescue three, which is the Fire Department New York
Fire Department's version of the Navy Seals. To say that
Tim is high speed would be an understatement. In ninety five,
Tim joined New York Task Force one, which is a
(03:19):
FEMA urban search and rescue team, with whom he responded
to the Oklahoma City bombing that same year. In ninety eight,
Tim was detailed to the Mayor's Office of Emergency Management,
which was headquartered in seven World Trade Center. While Tim
helped to save the lives of many on nine to
(03:41):
one one, he does not view himself as a hero.
This man sitting next to me lost over one hundred
friends that day, including many Fire Department brothers who each
chose to save others, knowing, as you will hear soon,
that they went up the stairs expecting to die. During
this interview that we're really going to benefit from, Tim
(04:02):
will beautifully pay tribute to his heroic friends and share
a series of miracles, honest to goodness, miracles, y'all that
help this man survive hurricane force winds in a firestorm.
Before I say thank you and let him start, I
want to say something a little bit off script. I
think there's three occasions in our country's consciousness over the
(04:26):
last hundred years that we cannot forget. Certainly Martin Luther
King getting shot in Memphis, the Kennedy assassination, the Oklahoma
City bombing. Things like that are etched into history and
our memory, and they matter, But I don't think they
are transformative in the way that the three things that
I think are. One is the stock crash. It led
(04:50):
to the Great Depression, that led to countless suicides, and
today the Federal Reserve acts on economic princes taught to
us by the Great Depression of the crash one hundred
years ago.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
It's transformative.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
It's etched into the ethos of our American selves. The
second would be the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It's etched
into the ethos of ourselves. It could be argued that
our country would never have been in World War II.
Our island, protected by the Atlantic and Pacific was at
(05:26):
that time unreachable, and we were sucked into that war
as a result of Pearl Harbor. And I will tell
you that the relative peace we've lived in the last
seven decades a result of winning World War II and
our military and infrastructure being intact because all of Europe's
was destroyed, and our navy remaining intact, so as a
(05:49):
maritime power, the only maritime power, it was the time
after World War II that enabled the country, our country,
to be the world's sheriff, which led to what we
all recognize now or feel now is normalcy of globalization.
That doesn't happen. The world doesn't change without Pearl Harbor.
(06:14):
And I think that's etched into our memory. But you know,
you got to think about nineteen forty one. That's fifty nine,
seventy nine, eighty.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
Three years ago.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
If you were nine years old during Pearl Harbor, you
are today ninety two. If you're eighteen, you're one hundred.
There's very very few people walking the face of this
planet anymore that can tell us the realities of Pearl Harbor.
We live them through history, we live them through books,
we live them through documentaries, but we can't really talk
(06:48):
to anybody who knows it and feels it and understands it.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
And if we.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
Forget the lessons of the stock market crash, we're certainly
to repeat them in our banking system and are the
way we handle the FED. If we forget the lessons
of World War two, we're certainly going to pay for
that geopolitically one day. With that as a backdrop, If
(07:12):
we forget the lessons of nine to eleven, we will
certainly live to see it again. And it needs to
dawn on you that this may across our country. There
will be countless seniors graduating college. Who are the young
adults that are going to form the next three and
four decades of our policy and how our country works
(07:33):
that weren't even born on none one one. It doesn't
even feel that way to us, because we were all
alive as that's in our memory, but only a generation away.
Ask anybody twenty years younger right now, who sings your
favorite songs from the eighties, and they won't be able
to tell you. Ask who was in Saint Almo's Fire
(07:55):
and who was in Raiders of the Lost Arc and
these twenty something year old they won't even tell you.
And everyone in here knows the answer to that. Ask
them what happened on nine to eleven? And they won't
be able to tell you, and that is scary. It
is why Tim's story matters. Lest we forget, history will
repeat itself. And it is men like this who have
(08:17):
been through hors that most of us cannot imagine, that
will sit up here and courageously recount this for you,
not to be sensational, not to garner attention to himself,
but because men like him do not want you to
forget his friends who died in the service of their
fellow man. And it's men like him that don't want
(08:37):
us as a public to forget. Well, we must remember
lest we repeat it. Tonight will have a couple of laughs.
You will hear some somber stories. Most importantly, I hope
you're challenged to make sure we never forget Tim.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
Welcome to Memphis, Thank you brother. Happy to be here,
my first time, your first time.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Yes, well you got a beer.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
You're a New York firefighter. I think beer is part
of the diet. Well we're at a brewery, so yeah,
that's it. Here we go here in Memphis. That's it.
There is.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
I am typically very engaged conversationally, and I'll interject when
I'm like, hold it, what I don't understand, because I
think maybe our listeners might not understand something you said.
I typically open army and normal folks, So tell me
where you came, come.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
And all that. We're not going to do that.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
One thing I got to say is when Tim and
I finish our discussion, we have a microphone out here
and the floor is open for questions, and I hope
you guys have them, because you're not going to get
many opportunities to talk to a hero, So you all
have an opportunity to speak up. And if you do, Hey,
you're going to be on a podcast and thousands of
(09:51):
people are here you so you might as well ask questions. Tim,
maybe give us a little background, just a little on
your time in the fire department, how you ended up
in the position you were in and reading the paper,
and from that step forward the events of not eleven.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
Thanks for having me here in Memphis. It is my goal.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
We said never forget right every firehouse in New York City,
every fireman's car on the bumper was a bumper sticker
that said never forget. That is our mantra after nine
to eleven, and I live that every day of my life,
and I think it's very important that we continue, as
(10:35):
you said before, to live that mantra and pass it on,
especially now to the next generation.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
I was a bad kid. I was a bad kid.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
When I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen, my parents were getting divorced.
I got lost in the shuffle of five kids, and
I was lashing out. I guess I had no direction,
I had no mission. I had nothing that interested me
until I found out that I could be a junior
(11:06):
fireman at fifteen years old in Newington, Connecticut.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
And that changed my life.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
I stopped doing the bad things you can imagine, and
I started focusing on being a junior fireman and emt
And I say this because I encourage young people to
take this path, because it will give you direction and
meaning and mission and purpose, which is what it did
for me. And I was a volunteer fireman, and I
(11:33):
was a paid fireman in Connecticut. But then in night
am I allowed to say how old I am in
nineteen eighty four?
Speaker 3 (11:40):
Holy crap, your old?
Speaker 1 (11:44):
In nineteen eighty four, I was blessed by being hired
in the New York City Fire Department. I worked in
what some people might remember in the South Bronx as Ford,
Apache That was my first assignment for seven years, so
you can imagine we were pretty busy there with fires
and helping people that needed help. I went to Times
Square for a bit, and then I went back to
(12:05):
what I call the Bronx Harlem Special Operations Command Rescue
Company three. We were also the building Collapse company for
the entire city, so we were very busy with quite
a lot of emergencies and fires and such. But then
in nineteen ninety eight, I had become friends with Mayor Giuliani,
(12:25):
and he convinced me, he and his team convinced me
to go to his newly formed Mayor's Office of Emergency Management,
and I took off my fireman helmet and I put
on a tie, and I went to seven World Trade
Center on the twenty third floor, which was our office,
and I became a supervisor within.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
That group and our job.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Our job, my group was to respond to major disasters
and emergencies in New York City and represent the mayor.
So that's a very quick summary of how I got
there to the more of September eleventh, two thousand and one.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
Along the way, you lived with these guys, you eat
with these guys, You bathed with these guys. You literally
become brothers with firefighters. And even though you find yourself
in the mayor's office with a snazzy tie, you're still
at the heart of yourself, you're a firefighter. Give us
a sense of the relationships that exists. So I think
you nailed it there a bit. Like we did everything together.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
We went to horrific emergencies, fires, building collapses, car crashes.
We carried our own out of these disasters, our own
who heroically went in and got injured badly, and we
carried them out. We carried out little kids, you know,
innocent little kids. We carried out innocent grandmas. And we
(13:49):
did all this stuff together, and we worked together. All
talk in a little bit about firefighter Chris Blackwell in
September eleventh, But firefighters like Chris were exceptional, and Captain
Terry Hatton and Captain Patty Brown who saved dozens and
dozens and dozens of lives. And we would come back
(14:12):
from some horrible thing and and we would eat together,
we would sleep in the same room. We would you know,
we actually built a steam room because the smoke was
very bad for you. So we you know, we would
take a steam at the end of work and maybe
maybe have a beer after work.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
Or from maybe maybe, but.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
You could actually when you sit in the steam room,
you could actually see the the stream of black soot
draining out of your body. And and that was the
poisons leaving the poisons that we're going to give us
cancer leaving our body. So we would stay there after
work and we would hydrate and and and let this
(14:53):
poison out of our bodies, and we would talk about
the day. I mean, these guys were like my real brothers.
You loved them, every one of them.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Everyone. And now a few messages from our general sponsors.
But first allow me to throw throw an idea out
there for you guys. If you do a good deed
one time, or maybe it's weekly service that you do,
(15:27):
would you consider sharing it on social and including a
message like join an army of normal folks. Together we
can solve our problems and tag us in the copy
At an Army of normal folks. We hope to share
many of your posts on our accounts. Now, this isn't
(15:48):
about bragging about what you're doing, because then you'd be
a turkey person. But it's about sharing the power of
what normal folks can do so that more normal folks
can realize that they can do it too, and hopefully
grow the army. I hope you'll give it a try.
We'll be wiped back. What's that to stay morning look like?
Speaker 3 (16:17):
For me?
Speaker 1 (16:18):
So I go into work seven World Trade Center, and
I go in a little early, you know. I got
in around seven forty five or eight am. And I
always our office was a seven twenty third floor, and
I always went to the third floor first, and that
was our cafeteria floor. So I would go there into
the cafeteria, get my cheerios, my orange juice, and my
(16:40):
hot tea, and I would I would I say this
when there's a lot of young people in the audience.
We used to have something called newspapers back in the day,
because you couldn't get your information from anywhere else. You
didn't have a smartphone, And so I would have all
the local newspapers and I would sit there and eat
my cheerios and go through all of that, all those papers.
(17:04):
The power went out in the building all at once,
a bit unusual for the for a modern high rise
building in New York, and I knew something big had happened,
but I didn't hear or see anything. So the power
went out, and within five seconds the power came back on,
and I knew our backup generators for the building had
(17:25):
kicked in. And the people who were sitting at the
glass windows facing the North tower of one World Trade
Center all at once like jumped up and started running
toward the exit, running by me. And I had to
grab one young lady by the shoulders and like shake
her back to reality and look her in the eyes,
and I said, what happened is? She said, a plane
(17:47):
hit the tower. And that was the first that I
had or knew of it. You know, we call it
the big One. You know, we'd try to do our
best to train and drill and prepare as much as
we can for the big one. This one turns out
it was something you could not really prepare for. I
mean a little bit, but you could even imagine it
(18:08):
when you first hit it, when it first happened. And
you're there, are you thinking small plane, helicopter? I mean
you're not thinking. No, it's not even you can't even
fathom what's what we now know? Right, So what's going
through your head?
Speaker 3 (18:24):
Yeah? Small plane, maybe a helicopter.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
We had had that happen in New York City before,
and you know, you see now it still happens. So
I don't think anybody initially imagined that it was a
passenger jet, and so that's what I was thinking, you know,
I think, you know, it's a big thing, but we're
going to be able to take care of it.
Speaker 3 (18:44):
So what do you do? So it's my job to go.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
To the command post, not to be the incident commander,
but to support the incident commander who is the fire chief,
and support him with all things other than kind of
his primary focus, which is the firefighters and stuff like that, right,
so anything else he needed, the utility companies, the ems
a little bit, but you know, there's all kinds of
(19:08):
people we need when something like this happens. And so
it was my job to kind of stand there at
the command post, and the incident commander would turn to
me and say get me ABC, D and E, and
he would not have to worry about it, and we
would take care of it. What does command posts look like?
So there's an actual structural command post in the lobby
of both the North and South Tower, which the Fire
(19:29):
Department frequently uses and frequently practices and drills with a lot.
Because there are two hundred and ten story buildings. We
go to a lot of alarms there, we go to
a lot of emergencies. Each floor is at one acre big,
so that's one hundred and ten acres each tower. And
so you can imagine the number of people and the
(19:51):
number of emergencies and the number of problems that we
would go there for every day.
Speaker 3 (19:58):
I guess what I hear that.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
But if you have an emergency management center, there's got
to be I'm imagining maybe I've watched too many movies,
but I'm imagining about a thousand of those TVs and
cameras and connections and communications, almost a hub of information.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
So it's two different things. There's a command post inside
one World Trade Center, which is in the lobby, the
people setting up doing the work. Yeah, and right, the
fire chief, the incident commander says, one in the north tower,
is one in the South tower. Our oem command center
is what you're talking about with it's Star Wars. It's
(20:41):
five hundred screens, it's five hundred computers of workstations, and
that is to support a citywide emergency or disaster, in
support of the real incident commander in the end, who
is the mayor? Right, so everyone reports to the mayor.
So in the end for policy deciding, it was the
(21:01):
mayor and that's what our twenty third floor command center
was built for.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
Well at that time in the morning, was everybody at
a station or did you have no.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
We would call them in. Yeah, so we would manage it,
but we had to bring them in.
Speaker 2 (21:15):
So at this point the World Trade Centers got a
fire on it. You think a helicopter something said, But
it's still a big deal.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
Were so part of the story is that are what
we call Watch Command, which is our communications hub, has
to make up to one hundred and fifty or so
phone calls to bring people in from our federal, state, local,
and private sector partners to help us manage this disaster.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
And we had done this many times.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
Before citywide health emergencies, West Nile virus and things like that.
But this is more of an instant shock to the system.
But we knew the right people to call, we knew
the right people to bring in, and you know, we
had people on the world very quickly to come support us.
My job was to go into the North Tower to
(22:05):
that command post and assist the incident commander of the
fire chief there.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
So you're calling everybody in and you're saying, we're go
I'm coming up, making up.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
Words, but we're all in, all in, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
And then once you get that set up at your office,
you're headed to the trade site.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
They're doing that while I'm doing the while I'm running
to the World Trade Center. So I go to my
car and I took off my tie and my dress
shirt and my jacket, and I put on leather, heavy
leather boots, a jacket that said Mayor's Office on the
breast and on the back, and then they made us
wear this stupid green helmet, which was really embarrassing, really
(22:44):
embarrassing after wearing my fireman helmet for twenty years or whatever,
so they could identify us. So I put on the
stupid green helmet. And we're trained as firefighters when you
go into a building under destruction, before you go in,
you try and look at three sides of the building
to get a current size up of that building. And
(23:07):
I wanted to take a second that morning to do that.
So in order to do that, I had to go
up like one and a half stories from street level
to plaza level, the plaza that was in between the towers,
and in order to do that, I had to go
up a concrete staircase exterior. So I ran up that staircase.
It's an important part of the story because later that
(23:29):
concrete staircase becomes the biggest heaviest artifact in the nine
to eleven Museum. And they call it the Survivor's staircase
because I.
Speaker 3 (23:39):
Ran up early on.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
But later on in the morning, hundreds or thousands of
civilians ran down that staircase and ran away to live.
And I make that point really because it's what we
do our military, our first responders, our police officers, are firefighters,
are paramedics and others. When something happens, we run toward it.
(24:00):
We will run towards the problem because there are people
in trouble. And and that's how the morning started out
for all of us, all the firefighters and police officers
and EMTs and paramedics and and others.
Speaker 3 (24:12):
Authority.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
Yeah, well yeah, all of all of them, you know,
ran toward this impending disaster. So so I looked out
over the plaza, and why do you check three corners
to get a current size up of what's happening with
the three corners, tell you, well, it's hard, it's we
would do four, but then you have to run all
(24:34):
the way around the building and it takes too much time.
So very quickly you can kind of get three sides
of a building.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
Are you trying to see if it's structurally sound or
it's on fire?
Speaker 3 (24:45):
For both?
Speaker 1 (24:46):
So in the end, you know, I had to look
up like this ninety stories. You can't really see much.
So it was less helpful to me than it was
to my best friend, Captain Terry Hatton, who is coming
down the West Side Highway and rescue one. With binoculars,
he could see that there were seven or eight or
nine or ten floors that were already on fire.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
All right, I think this is a question a lot
of people have. Maybe other people know it, but hey,
it's my show and it's my question, sar get to
ask it, and I'm here for you. At this point,
you've got one hundred and ten story one of the
tallest buildings of the world with six some stores on fire.
Speaker 3 (25:28):
That's bad. It's very bad.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
Do you think a small plane or helicopter hit it?
And you know people are burning and dying and trapped
and that's bad. What I'm dying to understand is, did
you ever conceive at that time that this building could
fall down? Was that even part of the calculus at
this No. I mean, the question that was asked early
on was two things, who can we save? And is
(25:56):
it going to collapse?
Speaker 3 (25:57):
So that was a question. There was a question from
the mayor that why would they even conceive of it collapsing?
Speaker 2 (26:04):
Honestly, I think part of the collective nation's gasp was not.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
That it was on fire, but the damn thing fell down?
How you know? Now we know how?
Speaker 2 (26:15):
But I just so you're saying, even then people had
enough foresight to think.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
But the answer was no. The answer was no. The
answer was no, we collapse. Well, we've never had that
happen in a in a steel high rise building before
in America.
Speaker 3 (26:30):
So it's not going to happen. So well, we don't
think we.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
We are Our best judgment was that it was not
going to happen, and and the other the other answer
was we can save everybody below the point of impact.
And that was very sobering in the moment, very early on,
because basically I said that people at are above the
point of impact, we probably can't help them.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
You just said one guy's name, which which of your
friends did you say? Was looking through binoculars, Captain Terry Hatton, Okay,
I have my best friend. Yeah, we'll get to him.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
Okay, so you've checked the three corners. It's on fire.
We don't think it's going to collapse.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
I looked out over the the plaza and there were
a lot of building parts and plane parts that were
on fire and other debris, and I started to doubt
my initial assumption that it was a small plane, but.
Speaker 3 (27:45):
I couldn't prove it. You know, I didn't know.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
I didn't know, And so I went into the north
tower at that level, and in order to go to
the command post at the street level, I had to
go down an escalator inside the building, and there were
hundreds of civilians kind of like a funnel, trying to
get onto that escalator to go down. They were trying
to evacuate them underground. And something struck me as I
(28:14):
approached this group was that they weren't doing what you
might think. They weren't pushing each other out of the way,
they weren't trampling each other. In fact, for every person
who was disabled or obese, or injured or pregnant, there
were four or five civilians, not firefighters or police officers,
(28:34):
helping that person out. And it gave me hope because
I said, that's the truth of humanity, of ninety nine
percent of humanity. If someone if we go outside right
now and someone trips on the sidewalk, you'll see four
or five people reach down to try and help them,
because that's humanity. Is there evil in the world, Yeah, man,
(28:57):
there's evil, but there's a lot of good in the
world too. And it gave me hope that no matter
what happened that day, that we were going to be okay,
because that's the truth of humanity.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Kind of the power of an army of normal folks,
just normal people, right, they just came to work.
Speaker 3 (29:15):
They're just trying to do their job on a tower.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
They're doing that right, and they're and they're they're following
their heart, and they're they're following their kindness and their
love of their fellow humans. And and I and I
like that one example lifted me up. And it wasn't
firefighters or police officers. I could talk about them all
all this whole thing, but the regular people were doing
(29:43):
God's work, in my opinion, when when they were called
to it, and and I and I got into that
that crowd, that kind of funnel of people, and I'm
going down this big, long escalator.
Speaker 3 (29:56):
The lobby was like two stories tall. It was a
big lobby.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
And as the lobby revealed itself to me and I
looked out over the lobby, I could see hundreds of
firefighters awaiting their orders to go up.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
At the command post.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
And they all had their protective gear on with their
yellow reflective stripes and all their equipment. You know, they
say sixty pounds, It wasn't sixty. It was more than
one hundred, one hundred and twenty pounds, because they were
carrying extra equipment up.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
More way more than normal.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
And I had to actually do something that firefighters are
very reluctant to do. And I had to admit that
the cops were right, and we are very reluctant to
do that. And I had to admit to myself that
the cops were right because they called us, they called
(30:53):
us bumblebees. And now I'm looking out over the lobby
with all these firemen in their yellow stripes.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
They were right.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
It looked like a whole hundreds of bumblebees awaiting their
orders to go up. As I processed this in my mind,
I wind up giving it the nickname the Hive of Heroes,
because that's what I was looking at, at these firefighters
who were willing to go up and save the lives
(31:22):
of people they don't know. So I got to the
bottom of the escalator and I looked to my right,
and I saw it was a bumblebee. And I looked
up at his face, and it was my very good friend,
firefighter Chris Blackwell from Rescue three where at the Bronx
Harlem Rescue Special Operations Command where I worked. And I
worked with Chris for seven years on the same shift.
(31:44):
So as we said before, he was like a real
brother to me. I love this man with all my heart.
And we were the Bronx Harlem guys. We didn't follow
the rules so much.
Speaker 3 (31:54):
We didn't.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
We were very busy. We didn't have time to follow rules.
But he wouldn't shave all the time, and and and
and his face was smudge of smoke, and his reflective
stripes were kind of hanging off of his coat from
being burned up, and and his helmet would would sit
a little crooked on his head because of all the
fires that we went to in our careers. And and
(32:19):
I love I love this man. I love this man.
And so when I saw him, he saw me. We
always greeted each other the same way. And so we
turned toward each other like this, and we came to attention,
and he would reach around with his arm in a
big arc like this and take the unlit stub of
(32:40):
a cigar out of his mouth.
Speaker 3 (32:42):
This guy, Fault Flowers was a cigar. Oh yeah, oh yeah.
It was just an old school it was all. It
was all part of the character.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
And and and he took it out, and he put
it down to his side, and we both bent at
the hips and we leaned in and we kissed on
the lips. And we came back to attention, and he
went like this with a cigar, and he put the
cigar back in his mouth.
Speaker 3 (33:09):
And we did that. We did that.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
We did that every time we saw each other, because
we loved each other like brothers.
Speaker 3 (33:14):
We really did.
Speaker 2 (33:15):
I imagine people the firehouse are like, y'all are gross. Yeah, yeah,
well so we also The second reason we did it
is because it freaked out all the cops en frorement
around us, and we just loved watching the reaction. It
was a good it was a good, funny moment, but
also an expression of true love, you know, and true brotherhood.
(33:36):
And after we after we did that, he said to me, Timmy,
this is really bad.
Speaker 3 (33:42):
And that is.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
For us to say that to each other is significant
because we do bad every day. And he was saying,
this is exceptionally bad, right, And I said, I know, Chris,
be careful. I love you, and he said, I love you.
And after he said that, he turned around and he
went in the stairwell and he went up to save
the lives of people he didn't know, right, he had
(34:06):
free will, right, he said the words to me, Timmy,
this is really bad.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
He knew that he was possibly.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
Going to lose his life, or even likely going to
lose his life, but he still turned around and went
in the stairwell and went up. So why, Like the
question we ask is why why? Because he took an
oath fifteen years earlier, as all firefighters and police officers
and military and others do. And in that oath it says,
I'm willing to give my life for my friend for
(34:35):
my neighbor, even for someone I don't know. Firefighters and
police officers right around here take the same oath. You
never know when that moment is going to come, when
that challenge is going to come, right, But he took
the oath. So Chris chose to fulfill his words in action.
And indeed, he chose to follow his words to go
(34:59):
up and hel people he didn't know. He had free will.
He could have turned around and gone back to his
loving wife and children and lived. But that's not the
choice he made. So when I think about this and
what all these firefighters and police officers did that day,
they all, as the last act of their lives, perform
(35:21):
acts of the.
Speaker 3 (35:22):
Greatest love, as it says in the Bible.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
And every not one of them said no, not one
of them turned around and left. They all went forward,
and they all went up, And every one of them
deserves that to be known. It is the most courageous, brave,
selfless act that humanity knows. And each one of them
(35:50):
did that that day. And I use Chris as then example.
He's the first one I encountered. I encountered others. My
best friend carried Captain Terry Hatt and my friend firefighter
Michael Lynch, and many others who I witnessed.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
I witnessed with my own eyes. I want to hear
those two stories. Tell me about Dave.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
Woo Yeah, well, Dave Woolley, and I will say this
plainly because we have to tell the whole truth. Dave
Willie as all of these heroes and all the twenty
nine hundred and seventy seven innocent human beings from ninety countries,
by the way, every one of them was murdered intentionally
(36:31):
by Islamist al Qaeda terrorists, and that is the truth.
And all this other nonsense about the government did it,
conspiracy theory. They blew up, you know, George Bush, blew
up the buildings. It's all bs. And that angers me
(36:52):
to no end because it takes away from the truth
of who did it and why they did it, and
it's it's just that simple Ismus terras intentionally murdered twenty
nine and seventy seven people on American soil. So Dave
Woolley was my captain when I was in Times Square
for just under two years, and he was also a
ghetto fireman before he went up the ranks, and so
(37:15):
he understood my craziness and and my being very aggressive
in Times Square, which is a very different way to
fight fires in Times Square. And I got myself in
trouble one night because in midtown Manhattan there's a lot
of emergencies that you would never encounter in the outer
(37:38):
boroughs or anything. So we had a high pressure steam
leak in a sub basement of a high rise building.
And a high pressure steam is invisible. It's very loud,
but it's invisible. You can't see it. And there was
a report of an employee missing and trapped. And so
(37:58):
I'm the ghetto fireman.
Speaker 3 (38:00):
So I am.
Speaker 1 (38:01):
I am down down in the sub basement, and I'm
going for this guy. I didn't understand the high pressure
steam thing, and and Captain Woolley knew my act and
he grabbed me by the collar and he yanked me
back away from the steam.
Speaker 3 (38:20):
Look it was like a jet engine. You couldn't hear anything.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
And he put a wooden hook in my hand, the
hook we used to pull ceilings. And he said to me,
if this hook disappears out of your hands, stop and
turn around, because he knew that steam would chop me
in half.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
And as I understand it, you can't see it. You
can hear it, that's right. Well, because you can't see it,
it's such a strong steam that literally will slice you.
Speaker 1 (38:46):
That's right. It would have chopped my head off. It
would have chopped my head off. And I had no
clue about that. And and he saved my life.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
Did the hook disappear? The hook disappeared? No, kidd you?
Speaker 3 (39:02):
Oh and I stopped.
Speaker 1 (39:02):
Yeah, yeah, no it he saved my life. And uh,
the worker got out. There was a back door that
nobody really knew about it, that he worked there. He
knew about it, so he got out whatever, but we
didn't know about it. And but I would have been
you know, he would have been okay, and I would
have been dead if it weren't for Captain Woolley's heroic Like.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
How are you not brothers with people that literally cited life. Yeah,
to just enrich the understanding of the depth of your
love for one of them.
Speaker 1 (39:35):
I when when I after nine to eleven in the
in the hours, days and weeks, I had my younger
brother Chris with me. He was a firefighter in Providence,
Rhode Island, and my friend Paul Conway, who was a
chief in Milwaukee, fire department, so they came to spend
time with me and basically keep me alive after nine
(39:56):
to eleven, and they would know that I was going
to hear another name of a firefighter who I loved,
and they would come behind me under each arm because
they knew I was going to collapse. And that happened
a lot.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
And that concludes Part one of my conversation with Tim Brown,
and you don't want to miss part two. That's now
able to listen to you together. Guys, we can change
this country, but it starts with you. I'll see you
in part two
Host
Bill Courtney
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
Ridiculous History
History is beautiful, brutal and, often, ridiculous. Join Ben Bowlin and Noel Brown as they dive into some of the weirdest stories from across the span of human civilization in Ridiculous History, a podcast by iHeartRadio.