Twenty-five years after the September 11th attacks, a local coach is still asking himself whether he has done enough to keep the memory of his best friend alive.<\/p>\n
For Joe Stellato, the story begins with two phone calls from the 102nd floor of the World Trade Center.<\/p>\n
His friend and former roommate, Marty Wortley, who was a graduate of East Stroudsburg University, worked for Cantor Fitzgerald and called his brother shortly after the first plane struck the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe called his brother,\u201d Joe recalled. \u201c\u2018I\u2019m okay. I\u2019m gonna head downstairs. Tell Karen I\u2019m fine.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
About 20 minutes later came another call.<\/p>\n
This one was much different.<\/p>\n
\u201cScreaming on the phone, devastated,\u201d Joe said. \u201cHe couldn\u2019t breathe.\u201d<\/p>\n
Marty would not make it out of the World Trade Center.<\/p>\n
For Joe, however, Marty was much more than a name associated with one of the darkest days in American history.<\/p>\n
He remembers a friend nicknamed \u201cGrumpy,\u201d despite being anything but.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was fun-loving, easygoing, laid-back,\u201d Joe said.<\/p>\n
The two had been football teammates, with Marty playing offensive tackle.<\/p>\n
Searching for Marty at Ground Zero<\/p>\n
Joe\u2019s world changed again with a phone call around 2 a.m. on September 12.<\/p>\n
He remembers arriving to see Marty\u2019s father, a man Joe had always known as the fun-loving and \u201ccool\u201d dad.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you walked in, you saw him devastated,\u201d Joe said. \u201cI\u2019ll never forget that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Two days after the attacks, Joe and several former teammates traveled to New York to search for their friend.<\/p>\n
Joe brought a disposable camera. The photographs he took documented what he encountered as the group made its way toward Ground Zero.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn the ferry, you could see this stream of smoke,\u201d Joe recalled.<\/p>\n
The devastation became clearer as they got closer.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou turn, and you see Ground Zero, and it was disaster as far as the eye can see,\u201d Joe said. \u201cIt was just like, \u2018Let\u2019s go find Marty.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Joe joined others searching through the debris.<\/p>\n
\u201cI looked down in those buckets a few times and saw some things that were pretty gruesome,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
They never found Marty.<\/p>\n
For roughly a decade afterward, Joe rarely spoke about what he had experienced. The memories were simply too painful to describe.<\/p>\n
Eventually, his thinking changed.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m thinking, \u2018What good am I doing by keeping this story and not telling them and educating them?\u2019\u201d Joe said.<\/p>\n
So, Joe started talking.<\/p>\n
Turning memory into a lesson for students<\/p>\n
As a coach and educator at Freedom High School in Bethlehem, Joe began sharing his firsthand experiences with students, including what he witnessed during those days in New York.<\/p>\n
And students listened.<\/p>\n
Their reactions convinced him that telling the story mattered.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen they come up and hug me afterwards, say, \u2018Coach, I\u2019m sorry,\u2019\u201d Joe said. \u201cThat right there alone means everything to me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now, approaching the 25th anniversary of the attacks, Joe is taking that effort another step.<\/p>\n
Students will participate in a 2,200-step climb, designed to represent the height of the World Trade Center towers and help a generation with no personal memory of September 11th better understand what happened that day.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat do you want kids to take from step one to 2,200?\u201d 69 News Reporter Bo Koltnow asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cI want them to know what the firefighters went through, what the people in those towers went through,\u201d Joe said.<\/p>\n
Proceeds from the event will benefit the Tunnel to Towers Foundation.<\/p>\n
For Joe, though, the climb is part of something that began long before the first step.<\/p>\n
A quarter century later, he continues to measure what he is doing to keep Marty\u2019s memory alive.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat have I done in 25 years to keep Marty\u2019s memory alive?\u201d Joe asked. \u201cOne, two, to educate kids about not forgetting. Have I done enough?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Twenty-five years after the September 11th attacks, a local coach is still asking himself whether he has done…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":281771,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[115842,119,121,120,16850,35135,227,11558,115843,41242,88333,117749,58222],"class_list":["post-281770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-9-11","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news","tag-charity-event","tag-coach","tag-education","tag-friendship","tag-ground-zero","tag-memory","tag-remembrance","tag-tunnel-to-towers-foundation","tag-world-trade-center"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281770"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281770\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/281771"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}