Andrew Curry Green

Boston Globe, published on September 10, 2001

by Joyce Pellino Crane

NORTHWOOD, NH – The Boy Scouts at summer camp this August looked no different than the images of a young Andrew Curry Green some 20 years ago when he sailed on the same New Hampshire lake whose banks will memorialize his life and not the tragic circumstances of his September 11 death.

No granite. No copper. No bricks. This memorial will be a wooden boathouse on the lake’s waterfront where Andrew Peter Charles Curry Green of Chelmsford spent many joyous summers first as a Scout in his early teens, and then as a camp staff member as a young adult.

It is a way for his widow and those who grew up with him each summer at Scout Reservation Wah Tut Ca to sweep his spirit away from the crumbled cement, fractured steel, tumbling towers, and violent hearts that claimed him, back to the flowing waters of Northwood Lake where he practiced kindness and community service.

A born leader with a dynamic personality, his sudden death at age 34 seemed inconceivable.

“The way he died was so unique in this country,” said his widow, Shannon Curry Green. “It’s hard to wrap your brain around it.”

Camp Wah Tut Ca is located just outside of Concord, NH, off Route 4, which briefly runs alongside Northwood Lake. One of a handful of area Scout camps, it draws troops from throughout the Merrimack Valley to participate in weekly summer activities. The camp’s rustic tent sites are sheltered under groves of pine trees and its lakefront access is deep inside–a beautiful azure clearing to a dark and wooded pathway.

The 1980`s photographs of Andrew as a teenager, wearing swimming trunks, towering over the other boys, sun streaked waves and mischievous smile, could have been shot this summer. Little has changed at the camp where Boy Scouts work toward qualifying for their Eagle badges—the Holy Grail of Scouting—and swim and sail as the sun browns and bleaches.

Yet, outside the camp’s boundaries, the world changed five years ago when United Airlines Flight 175 and American Airlines Flight 11 with Andrew on board, smashed into New York City’s World Trade Center.

One of 92 people on the plane, he was returning to his Santa Monica home after spending September 10, 2001, in Burlington on business. Hired in the late 1990`s by Cambridge-based Cahners Business Information (now New York-based Reed Business Information) to do business development, Curry Green had spearheaded the acquisition of a small Los Angeles-based online publishing company and then transitioned to eLogic as its business development manager. In early 2000 he began commuting weekly from his Dorchester home to California, taking Flight 11 out of Logan Airport regularly.

Finally, in fall 2000, Andrew and Shannon, Chelmsford High School sweethearts, moved to California and the routine long distant traveling ended. But in September of the next year, Curry Green visited the Boston area to encourage officials of a key corporate client to renew a contract with eLogic Corporation, said Shannon Curry Green. Without the contract, a threat of lay-offs was reverberating throughout the company, and Curry Green hoped to spare the handful of employees who would be affected. She was uncertain whether he was successful, she said.

The next day, he flew out of Logan at 7:59 a.m. after spending the evening with his mother Pat Green in Chelmsford.

“That was a gift,” she said. “I got to say goodbye…even though I didn’t know it then.”

“…sudden death is so traumatic,” said Shannon Curry Green, a self-employed visual artist who now lives in New York City. “Your whole world shifts and they’re gone.”

Andrew Curry Green edged toward death earlier in his life. In June 1985 when he was 18, Curry Green prevented his family’s Chelmsford home from burning but in the process severely injured himself. A frying pan with oil was left on a burner and caught fire. A nearby fire extinguisher malfunctioned, so he grabbed the pan and walked a few steps to the door. As the air hit the flames, they morphed into a fireball, and Curry Green, the second of four children, was burned over 90 percent of his body. He languished at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston for two months, at one point coming close to succumbing to his injuries, according to his mother. Ultimately, he healed, said Shannon, but the skin that tanned each summer was now scarred.

“From then on we were cemented together,” she said. “We were a solid couple.”

They were married on September 8, 1990 in Bedford, NH.

From the rubble of Ground Zero, no physical particle was recovered of Andrew’s 6 foot, 4 inch frame, but members of the Key Foundation of Lowell are determined that every Scout who attends Wah Tut Ca will know that Andrew did good things there and they want him remembered for the way he lived and not how he died.

“Andrew was full of life,” said Brian Lobao, who mentored Curry Green through an elite class of Scouts called the Order of the Arrow. “He loved the outdoors. His death was really the antithesis of his life. To die in such a violent way, it just doesn’t fit the person.”

Lobao, 50, spent 23 years as Lowell’s Wannalancit Lodge 451 advisor for the Order of the Arrow, the national honor society of Boy Scouts begun in 1915. A Lowell native, Lobao grew up attending Boy Scout Troop 3 in the Highlands section. In Curry Green, he found some symmetry to his own life. Curry Green’s parents eventually separated and Lobao was raised by a single mother. Both were elected by their peers to the elite order—Lobao in 1972, and Curry Green in 1981.

Curry Green, an Eagle Scout, was a founding member of the Key Foundation, formed in 1987 by about 50 alumni of the Wannalancit Lodge. He became its executive director in 1993 until 1998. Lobao assumed the presidency in fall 2001.

Over the years, the Foundation has evolved into an organization that supports programs that had been important to the members during their youth, Lobao said.

“The experiences that were there for us, we support in the present,” he said.

It will take about $100,000 to build Andrew’s 1400 square foot boathouse, Lobao said.

So far Foundation members have raised about $60,000 in less than two years, through a fundraising celebration of Andrew’s birthday on March 22, when he would have turned 39, and two swimming events held at Northwood Lake in 2005 and 2006.

Over the next week, Lobao said the Foundation members will decide whether to break ground this year or next, depending on material costs. The existing 1937 boathouse has long needed to be replaced, according to Lobao, because of rotting wood and inadequate space.

Lobao said the Scouting experiences led to enduring relationships among Andrew’s friends.

On August 5 about 22members of the camp’s staff, the Key Foundation, and the Boy Scout organization, swam the lake’s three-mile length for pledged amounts of money and another 80 watched. The event raised more than $10,000 toward the boathouse. His mother attended and Shannon participated.

“The important thing is to enjoy your child every day you’ve got him because you never know when he’ll live the last day of his life,” said Pat Green, who expressed gratitude for the 18 years he lived beyond the burn injury.

For Shannon Curry Green, the life shift was dramatic. She returned to her parents’ Chelmsford home after Andrew’s death and through group therapy with three other 9-11 widows, began to heal. Part of her recovery, she said, was to muster the courage to move to New York City—the last place where Andrew had existed.

“I just wanted to be where he was last,” she said. “…I wanted to be a part of the rebuilding.”

When the Boy Scouts who attend Wah Tut Ca—which stands for brother and friend–enter the boathouse named in Andrew’s memory, they, too, will be a part of the rebuilding.

A Key Foundation video presentation written and produced by Lobao about Curry Green ends with these words:

“We don’t know what lies in their future, yet while these boys are at Wah Tut Ca they can, for a brief yet important time, be just boys…there will be smiles and laughter…Andrew’s name will be about summer, water, and boats, sunsets and pine trees…”

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