Terence
A. McShane Building for Life October 5, 2001
John McShane, 33, recently moved back from upstate to Long Island
and is staying temporarily with his oldest brother, Kieran, 45,
in West Islip. Now a newly hired teacher's assistant in Massapequa,
John was at work at an upstate software company when he heard
the first horrific reports about the World Trade Center attack.
He knew that Kieran worked in downtown Manhattan, for Moody's
Investors Service, so first he called Kieran's wife, Anne. She
said Kieran was on his way home; he was OK. "He was at the Downtown
Athletic Club," John said. "His office is north of the World Trade
Center, and he was going to go through the tunnels to get there.
Once he saw a jet engine in the street, he knew he had to get
out." John next called Cathy, his brother Terence's wife. Terence,
37, also of West Islip, is a former New York City police sergeant.
He
was with the department for 12 years, until 1999, when he switched
and joined the fire department, thinking he would be able to spend
more time with Cathy and their sons: Aidan, 7, and 4-year-old
twins, Sean and Colin. Terence started out in Engine 308 in Queens,
but because of a relatively new system of rotating young firefighters
through different assignments in different parts of the city,
he most recently was working out of a firehouse in the Red Hook
section of Brooklyn, with Ladder 101, on the opposite end of the
Brooklyn- Battery Tunnel from the World Trade Center. Cathy began
telephoning the firehouse at 9:15 a.m. Sept. 11. There were false
reports, at first, that everyone was accounted for, but soon,
Terence was listed among the missing. "Seven firefighters are
missing from Ladder 101," Cathy said yesterday. "Six are married
with children. Last Sunday, we all got together for lunch on Staten
Island, because that's where four of them live. We all kind of
felt that we were trying to be realistic, but we still were hoping
for a miracle. The men were on their trucks at the mouth of the
Battery when they saw the second plane hit, and they were inside
the building when Tower Two collapsed." Cathy and Terence first
met at Babylon Town's Overlook Beach, where Terence was a lifeguard.
Like all his siblings, a graduate of St. Anthony's High School
in Huntington, Terence by then was a student at Siena College.
"I worked at Macy's in the Sunrise Mall," Cathy said, "and one
of my best friends at the Este Lauder counter grew up at Overlook
and knew all the lifeguards. She introduced us." Once a business
major at Hofstra and later an employee of the accounting firm
KPMG Peat Marwick, Cathy later quit the business world, resumed
her education and earned permanent certification to teach secondary
school, though she and Terence decided to postpone her teaching
career until they could avoid a full-time babysitter. Terence
and Cathy bought their West Islip house six years ago. It was
a fixer-upper, according to John. The arrival of twins hastened
by a year or two the scheduling of the actual fixing-up. In order
to be better able to finance the work, the McShanes had hired
a part- time home improvement contractor (also a New York City
firefighter) to do the structural alterations and framing, figuring
that Terence and his father-in-law, Bob Watt of Massapequa (a
retired New York firefighter), could install the insulation and
the sheetrock. They thus would add a bedroom upstairs, expand
the smaller bedrooms and enlarge and renovate the kitchen. Eventually,
probably a few years hence, Terence would tackle a re-do of the
upstairs bathroom, too. While the house was being dismantled,
the Terence McShanes moved into the Deer Park house where all
the McShanes had grown up: Kieran; another brother, Brian, 43,
a physical education teacher who lives in upstate Stanfordville;
Maribeth Eccleston, 39, of Islip, a nurse at Winthrop-University
Hospital; and John. The house was readied for sale, but the siblings
agreed to make it available to Cathy and Terence. A 1993 stroke
had required that their mother, Jeanne, move to a nursing care
facility in Northport. Their father, John McShane, died in 1978.
"So, in the midst of all this," said Anne McShane, "the horror
of September 11 was further complicated by the fact that Cathy
and the boys are not even in their own home." However, about four
days after the attack, people started showing up at the West Islip
renovation site. "I just went there to get out of the house,"
said John, "and more and more people started showing up, all day,
sometimes, too many." Watt and Terence's lifelong friend, Keith
Higgins of Babylon, a New York City cop, wound up coordinating
a steady stream of volunteer workers who currently are nearing
the completion of the work that Terence didn't expect to finish
until early winter. Terence was a rugby player for years, and
former club members, both skilled and unskilled in the building
trades, have volunteered regularly, as have former colleague lifeguards,
police officers, firefighters, neighbors and total strangers.
"I know I bought a little sheetrock to do something," John said,
"but I don't even know where the flooring material came from.
I only know that the floor guy is a professional, and that he
didn't even know my brother. The upstairs bathroom has been completely
redone. People stop by and say, 'I don't know how to do anything,
but can I clean something, or just take out the garbage?' I think
it might be all done in a few weeks." Cathy fluctuates between
gratitude, distraction, grief and waning hope. "My oldest, Aidan,
is not really asking a lot of questions, now," she said. "I think
he's afraid. Colin wanted to know if there was going to be a war
at the trade center, and Sean said, 'The people who drove those
planes must be from hell.' It's amazing. They know more than you
think they know." -- Ed Lowe (Newsday)
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