Rambusch said he was “touched and honoured” his family firm was chosen for the commission to design and produce the memorial. In creating it, he was inspired by values inculcated during his years at the University of St. Michael’s College. Rambusch was one of scores of American students in the 1940s and ’50s enrolled at St. Mike’s in its “Western” course — a year giving the Americans an equivalency Grade 13, the entrance requirement for the University of Toronto.

“I chose St. Mike’s because I liked the idea of a Catholic education in a secular university — something like Cardinal Newman’s idea.” His brother, Leonard, is also a graduate of St. Mike’s.

The American Rambusch firm, founded by his grandfather 108 years ago, has won acclaim in both the United States and Canada. Specializing in decorative metal work, stained glass and lighting, clients include several Canadian Catholic churches, the Byzantine Mother and Child (considered a masterpiece) composed of five million miniature tiles in Markham’s Slovak Church of the Transfiguration, the Canadian Senate, the chapel of Toronto’s Basilian Seminary on St. Joseph Street and the stained glass rose windows in Washington’s Immaculate Conception Cathedral.

To be assigned the task of producing a memorial for the firefighters required great sensitivity and creativity. Measuring 18 metres in length and about two metres high, it’s dedicated to the 343 dead firefighters from 10 House, the home of Engine Company 10 and Ladder Company 10, located directly across Liberty Street from the World Trade Centre. When the Rambusch firm was first approached, the firefighters’ spokespeople were interested in a display case with memorabilia related to the tragedy.

“I told them we don’t do display cases. For one reason, they’re eventually subjected to vandalism,” whereupon the officials asked Rambusch what he might suggest. “Immediately there sprang to my mind Trojan’s Column in Rome. Part of it is a big bronze bas-relief depicting Trojan’s conquests. I met with Captain Harry Meyers and his team and we talked for two hours. As we did so, my associate Joseph Oddi was making sketches, attempting to capture what we were tossing around. Captain Meyers asked him what he was doing. When Joe told him, Captain Meyers asked to see these draft sketches. When he looked at them, tears came to his eyes. ‘That captures exactly what our vision was.’ So from that point on, we had our direction.”

The project took up to three years to complete. It took six months alone to make the clay models. It was installed, then covered with cloths, by the firefighters on the brick outer wall of Engine Company 10/ Ladder Company 10 the night before its unveiling. The upper part of the memorial consisted of three panels — two brass end sections of two tons each, and one middle brass section weighing 375 kilograms. The middle section depicts the two flaming towers at the instant the second jet plane hit the second tower. The two end sections show firefighters laying down hose lines, weary firefighters washing their faces at a hydrant and a fireboat on the horizon. Everything is in perfect detail, right down to the equipment the firefighters are carrying and the uniforms they are wearing. Below is a brass strip about 45 centimetres off the ground, with the inscribed names of the heroes in hierarchical order, as is the department’s custom.

“One of the most memorable incidents occurred just before the firemen affixed the right hand section,” Rambusch recounts. “One firefighter spontaneously wrote a note on the back of that section addressed to a dead buddy. Within minutes all the firemen present had written their own personal messages there. Then that section was affixed to the wall, with those messages never to be viewed by anyone else again.”

Hundreds attended the unveiling the next day, the fourth anniversary of the cessation of recovery operations at Ground Zero. “It was a very emotional day,” Rambusch recalled. “Within the first 48 hours, over 320 names out of the 343 along the bottom brass strip had been ‘rubbed’ by relatives or friends.” Then he adds thoughtfully, “I wonder about those other 20 or so names. Has anyone come since then to remember them?”