by Westwood Mayor Ray Arroyo
Westwood NJ, on Monday 7/15, three Westwood residents were recognized as Congressional District 5’s 2024 Hometown Heroes by Congressman Josh Gottheimer: Congratulations to Marc Fedorchak, Dan Olivier and Andy Scallo.
Westwood’s entire Mayor and Council were in attendance at the Fort Lee venue to witness, and cheer, the well deserved honor bestowed upon our three constituents.
Councilman Bicocchi had nominated Marc for his work in securing free health screenings for his fellow Volunteer Firefighters. One of those screenings caught a life threatening condition that, if undiscovered, would have ended tragically for one of our firefighters. Moreover Marc was critical in placing defibrillators on our fields after having saved a referee’s life. Marc, having served 25 years with the Oradell Police Department, is also a thirty-two-year veteran of the Westwood Volunteer Fire Department, serving as chief from 2009-10 and present secretary on Westwood’s Board of Fire Officers. I had the pleasure of inducting him into the WFD hall of fame back in 2022.
I had nominated Andy and Dan as Hometown Heroes for their work on the 911 monument dedicated to the union iron workers and first responders who’d dug through the smoldering rubble of the twin towers searching for survivors.
Andy was one of those ironworkers. He’d salvaged a section of I beam and brought it to his backyard where it sat for 20 years, until August 2021 when Andy asked Dan to help him find a fitting public site to display it in Westwood.
Dan invited me to Andy’s yard and they showed me where it lay. Nestled in the tall grass. It was a rusting hunk of steel, at rest. But it was adorned with kinetic cruciform shapes, carefully torched out of its flanges by the iron workers during breaks from searching for the missing. They appeared as tangible, three dimensional prayers of hope, redemption, and resurrection.
The three of us, along with Andy’s wife, Dianne, gazed silently upon this totem-like relic as it elicited a powerful sense of reverence. A reverence for the once iconic structures, for how proudly they once stood, for all the people they’d sheltered, for the ones who’d built them and for the ones who’d sifted through their remains where they’d fallen.
It spoke to me, probably the same way it called to Andy, inspiring him to lug it back to Westwood in 2001.
Andy and Dan knew that this experience should be shared with the community. So with the help of volunteers : A.J and Michael Greco, Rusty Miller, Rick Woods, Westwood DPW, Sean O’Callahan, Sean Flaherty, Danny O’Brien, and the Westwood Police Department Police Officers Association, Dan skillfully designed and installed the monument that now sits upon a stone base in Veteran’s Park.
It faces the Memorial dedicated to the five Westwood residents who’d fallen with the towers on Sept. 11, 2001. In a sense, it completes the story – a story of terrible, unimaginable loss, but also one of unparalleled bravery, resiliency and hope.
Our community comes together every year, in numbers strong, to remember the five we’d lost that awful day in lower Manhattan. And now there is a piece of that place, placed fittingly atop a boulder of blast rock. A tribute to the anonymous iron workers and first responders – the searchers, who’d left no stone unturned, as they toiled relentlessly to recover our people.
Moving forward, they will always be well remembered in Westwood, alongside the memorial to our loved ones for whom they were searching.
So bravo to Westwood’s Hometown Heroes, Andy Scallo and Dan Olivier, for making it so.
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