NEW YORK — When FDNY firefighter Dave Fenton came home from ground zero after the Sept. 11 attacks, there was one thing he would not do.

He would not touch his infant son, Taylor, until he had showered off the dust that covered him.

Fenton spent four months searching through the rubble of the World Trade Center.

Taylor was too young then to understand where his father had been, what he had seen or why that dust mattered.

Twenty-five years later, he understands much more.

For much of the world, Dave Fenton’s story became inseparable from Sept. 11. He was an FDNY firefighter who responded to ground zero and remained there for months afterward.

The experience also followed him home. In a 2021 interview with 69 News, Fenton spoke about his struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder and depression in the years after the attacks.

For his son, though, those are not the memories that first define Fenton.

Taylor remembers watching “The Sandlot” together. He remembers Marvel and “Star Wars,” Boy Scouts and sleepovers. He remembers his father being there as he grew up and eventually went off to college to play lacrosse.

They are ordinary memories of childhood — and, for Taylor, that is precisely what makes them important.

Sept. 11 made Dave Fenton part of a history shared by millions of Americans. Taylor’s memories preserve something more personal: the man whose life existed beyond the uniform and beyond what happened at ground zero.

Taylor has also found a way to carry his father’s commitment to first responders into his own work.

Through his work with the Lehigh Valley IronPigs, Taylor has helped with the team’s First Responders Night, an event recognizing firefighters, police officers and other emergency personnel.

For Taylor, the connection is personal. What his father represented in uniform has become something his son now helps honor for others.

Twenty-five years after the attacks, the legacy Dave Fenton left his son is no longer simply something Taylor remembers. It is something he is helping carry forward.

And there is a physical piece of that legacy he can still hold.

Today, Taylor can hold the FDNY jacket his father once wore — the uniform of a firefighter who spent months searching the rubble, but also the jacket of the father who came home.

WATCH THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH TAYLOR BELOW: