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Winchester Town Hall clock bell began marking 10 a.m. across the square Friday. A short distance away, outside the Winchester Public Safety Building, firefighter Joe Amaro, 21, struck the Fire Department's ceremonial bell five times, followed by a lingering pause, then struck it five times more.
Between the two bells, along the red-brick walkway on Mt. Vernon Street, police officers, firefighters in turnout gear, town officials and residents stood in a line and held their salutes or hands to hearts.
Above them, the aerial ladder of Winchester Ladder 1 was fully extended over the street with a large American flag hanging from it. At ground level, firefighter Nicholas Adragna worked the halyard and brought a second flag down to half-staff, the hardware clinking against the pole. Two firefighters stood at a granite memorial inscribed "Duty, Dedication, Honor."
Neither the bell nor the flag was assigned to the chief. Fire Capt. Daniel Balestrieri, 47, called it "detail responsibility."
Lt. Tim Helgesen read a prayer of remembrance written for the 25th anniversary. The morning was bright and clear, and the sun threw long shadows across the brick.
"Twenty-five years have passed since a clear September sky was broken," Helgesen read, "and still we remember."
He read the toll: nearly 3,000 people killed at the World Trade Center, at the Pentagon and in a field in Pennsylvania. He read the number from the New York City Fire Department — 343 firefighters "who climbed into the smoke and did not come home." He read a line about the families "who have carried an empty chair for a quarter of a century."
Across Massachusetts, Gov. Maura Healey directed flags to be lowered to half-staff and asked residents, schools, businesses and organizations to observe a moment of silence at 8:46 a.m., when American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower. At the State House, the names of 206 people with ties to Massachusetts who were killed in the attacks were read aloud, CBS News Boston reported.
One of the 206 lived here. Patrick J. Currivan, 52, of Winchester, was aboard Flight 11, which departed Logan International Airport that morning. Born in Ireland, Currivan had lived in Winchester for about a decade.
What children carried home
Among the firefighters who carried out Friday's honors were not firefighters in 2001, two were in fifth grade. One was a college senior. One had not been born.
Adragna was in homeroom at his school in Wakefield. "My teacher was Miss Reardon," he said. Homeroom ran from 8:30 to about 8:45.
The principal came over the speakers. "There's been a situation in New York City," Adragna remembered him saying. "We don't really know what's going on."
The school went into lockdown. Officials were worried that Logan, or Boston generally, might be a target, he said. Then the students were released, and his father came to get him.
"I was just sitting in my parents' kitchen, and we had this — at the time was a super cool 12-inch Trinitron Sony TV mounted underneath the counter," Adragna said. "I was just watching the news."
There was no phone in his pocket and no video on demand. What he saw was what his parents had on. He did not see footage of people falling from the towers until years later, online.
Firefighter Erica Poitras was also in fifth grade, in Beverly. Nothing was announced in her classroom. As far as she could tell, nothing was happening at all.
"And then my teacher said, 'Your mom's here to pick you up,'" Poitras said.
Her mother ran a day care out of their home. When Poitras came outside, the day care children were already loaded into the car.
"I was like, 'Why am I going home?'" she said. "And she was like, 'I just want you home with me.' And she wouldn't explain why. So I had no idea why I was going home or what happened."
She remembers little else from the day.
"All I remember is her waiting at the door for me to come out of class," she said.
Balestrieri was a senior at the University of Massachusetts, studying English and headed to a 10 o'clock class. By the time he reached campus, the second plane had hit. No one knew whether classes would be canceled.
"We just all kind of left and went home," he said. "Watched it unfold on TV."
Amaro was not yet born. What he has instead of a memory of that morning is a memory of what the morning did to the adults around him.
"You can feel sorrows, but growing up, you would see grown adults cry," he said.
Standing outside the station Friday, he described the ceremony as the closest he expects to come to the event itself.
"That's the closest I'll truly ever be to that," he said.
What 343 means here
For firefighters, Balestrieri said, the number that lands hardest is 343.
"You go to an emergency, and 343 lost their lives that day, trying to save others," he said. "And that could be us today."
He put the figure in local terms: roughly four or five entire fire departments the size of those serving towns around Winchester.
The attacks also reshaped the service itself, Balestrieri said. With commanding officers among those killed, departments had to confront a basic question about what happens when leadership disappears during an emergency: "Then who's next in charge?"
Asked what he had been thinking about during Friday's ceremony, Adragna did not describe his fifth-grade classroom or the television beneath his parents' kitchen counter.
"I was thinking about my friend's dad who died from cancer," he said.
The man was a New York City firefighter. Adragna met him while he was in college, when the man was already sick. Adragna said the firefighter underwent nine surgeries before dying not long afterward, and he attributed the cancer to the man's service after the attacks.
An estimated 400,000 people were exposed to toxic contaminants, physical hazards and physically and emotionally stressful conditions in the days, weeks and months after the attacks, according to the World Trade Center Health Program, administered by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Fires in the debris continued through the end of December 2001. The federal program covers cancers and other illnesses associated with World Trade Center exposures.
Helgesen's prayer had remembered them, too: those "who have died since from wounds the dust never finished making."
Lives still entrusted to their care
When the formation broke, the firefighters went back inside, into the older half of a building whose cornerstone, Adragna said, dates to 1908 or 1909.
The department keeps its history there: old helmets, framed photographs and material from the 1999 Worcester Cold Storage and Warehouse fire, which killed six Worcester firefighters.
On another wall is a section of steel from the World Trade Center.
It is smaller than a person expects and much heavier.
"It's insanely heavy," Amaro said. It takes two firefighters to hold it up.
Helgesen's prayer had ended with the bell: When it is sounded, he read, let it speak not only of those who fell, "but of the lives they saved and the lives still entrusted to our care."
By late morning, the bell outside was quiet again. The firefighters went back inside, where the steel is kept.
Will Dowd is a Massachusetts journalist who covers municipal government and community life for Winchester News. He is also the founder and editor of The Marblehead Independent, a reader-funded digital newsroom.
