By Leon Korn
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Richard Allen Pearlman was working the least dramatic job imaginable. He was 18, working as a messenger for a Manhattan law firm that summer. He was dropping off papers at 1 Police Plaza when the first plane hit the Twin Towers.
He was about half a mile from the World Trade Center. He had a job, a boss and every reason to stay put. His employer told him to come back. He didn’t. He went toward the towers instead.
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Richie was one of ours. He joined the Forest Hills [New York] Volunteer Ambulance Corps at 14, in the Junior Corps. A lot of kids sign up that way — not because they’ve found a calling, but because their mother wants them off the street corner. For Richie, it took. He worked his way up to dispatcher, moved into the Senior Corps at 18, and started training for his medical certifications. He was months away from being the EMT he already acted like.
He never got there. A photograph in Newsweek’s special edition, “America Under Attack” shows him at Ground Zero, treating the injured, in the last hour of his life. He was inside a tower, helping a man in cardiac arrest, when the South Tower came down. It took a week to bring him home. At 18, he became the youngest first responder to die on September 11.
Our corps lost more than Richie that day. One of our ambulances was crushed under the South Tower. There’s a photo of it we still put out at every memorial. Members who made it home carried what they saw for the rest of their lives. Some carried more than that: we’ve since buried members who died of 9/11-related illness. Twenty-five years is long enough for the losses to keep arriving.
What a small corps can and can’t do
Here’s the part that doesn’t make the anniversary coverage. When you’re a volunteer corps, nobody handles the remembering for you.
There’s no press office. No memorial committee. No line item in a city budget. There’s a building on Metropolitan Avenue, a fleet you maintain yourself, and a membership that turns over as people finish school, take paying jobs and move away. Everything that keeps a name alive gets done by people who are also covering shifts.
Richie’s mother spent years fighting to have her son formally recognized as a responder who died in the line of duty. That fight dragged on well after the anniversaries had become routine for everyone else. The street outside our quarters carries his name now. So does the award we give for outstanding service. None of that happened on its own.
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The 9/11 memorial “Run for Richie” motorcycle parade
In 2016, the Corps teamed up with the NYC Punishers Law Enforcement Motorcycle Club to try something. They’d put together a memorial motorcycle ride, name it after Richie, and see who showed up.
Enough people showed up that it became a permitted, NYPD-escorted event, the 9/11 memorial “Run for Richie” motorcycle parade.
In good years, it’s been thousands of bikes. They stage in a parking lot at dawn, roll out behind hundreds of emergency vehicles, ride into Lower Manhattan past the site and loop back through the city. One year, 411 commemorative coins were struck — one for each first responder lost. Some years, it’s rained the whole route and nobody has left.
It’s also a fundraiser, and I want to be honest about that, because it’s how volunteer EMS actually survives. The money goes back into the Corps: equipment, fuel and the unglamorous cost of keeping an ambulance on the road in a city that assumes someone else is paying for it.
This September 19 will be the 25th anniversary commemorative ride, back at Aqueduct Racetrack.
Why we keep doing it
Most of the people riding this year never met Richie. A good number of our current members weren’t born when he died. To them, he’s a photograph on the wall, a name on a street sign, a name on a plaque.
That’s exactly the point. Twenty-five years on, remembering him isn’t really grief anymore. It’s closer to a lesson. We tell the 16-year-old in our Junior Corps today about a kid who was in that same program — a messenger with a delivery to make, ordered to safety, who went the other way instead. It’s the clearest thing we can say about what this Corps expects a member to be.
Big agencies have a machine for remembering their dead: the memorial wall, the annual ceremony, the department historian. A small volunteer corps has to choose to do it, every year, with people who are tired and short-handed. Twenty-five years of choosing it isn’t sentiment. It’s the work.
Kickstands up at 11:30.
Learn more about the 25th anniversary 9/11 memorial “Run for Richie” motorcycle parade
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Leon Korn is 2nd lieutenant, Forest Hills Volunteer Ambulance Corps.
