Kenneth Joseph Marino Day Began With a 'Perfect
Visit' From His Family September 20, 2001 Less than an hour before
New York City firefighter Kenneth Marino was called down to the
World Trade Center, his
wife and two small children surprised him with a visit to his
firehouse. It was Tuesday morning, Sept. 11, and the three were
on their way to 24th Street, where Marino's daughter, Kristin,
who sometimes models, had a photo shoot. But Kristin, 4, had cried
about the shoot the night before, so Marino's wife, Katrina, thought
seeing Daddy might cheer her up. Besides, she said, their son,
Tyler, 1, just loves the big red trucks. The men of Rescue One,
on West 43rd Street, were asleep upstairs, but Marino, 40, was
working desk duty, so he lifted the kids into a truck and placed
them at the wheel. He sat Kristin on his lap and whispered into
her ear. "He must have been telling her that if she took a pretty
picture he would give her a prize," Katrina said. Maybe bubble
gum stashed behind the clock back home in upstate Monroe. That
was their special game. Daddy's baseball gum. Her husband looked
so handsome in his shorts, she thought. Six-foot-five with those
long, muscular legs. He'd run cross-country track at Oceanside
High School, fast enough to make the school's hall of fame. He
played on baseball teams, too. Those legs were every bit as lean.
"Bye, sexy guy," Katrina called out
as they left, and watched him walk bashfully back inside. "It
was just the perfect visit," Katrina recalled yesterday. On their
way downtown, Katrina, a former flight attendant, heard the loud
engine of an airplane overhead, and thought it must be flying
low. Through a window of her daughter's modeling agency, Katrina
watched the first plane crash into the World Trade Center. Then
came the sirens. "Daddy's probably there," she recalled thinking.
"I had chills about it, but you don't think any further than him
going to save people and help out. You would never think the worst."
Nine men responded from Rescue One after two hijacked planes slammed
into the World Trade Towers, including four who were off duty
at the time. Two of their bodies were later recovered from the
stairwell of Tower One. But seven, including Marino, are still
missing. Pat Marino and his wife, Mary Ann, who live with Marino's
sister, Lynda in Oceanside, figure their son was probably racing
up the stairs. "If I know Kenny, he was right in the middle of
it," his father said. Kristin knows the towers collapsed when
her Daddy was still inside, Katrina said. At night she focuses
on it more, when the two sit down to color with crayons. On Tuesday
night, she wrote her Daddy a letter. It said: 'I love you so much.
Please come home and where's my prize." "That's when I realized
what he had whispered," Katrina said yesterday. "I know he hadn't
gotten it yet, because he always gets it on the way home." --
Samuel Bruchey (Newsday)
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