An old newspaper clipping from across the country helped a cancer patient prove he was at the World Trade Center on 9/11 — and receive a six-figure award decades later.
Spencer Cullum told The Post he remembers being a terrified 9-year-old and covered in dust while with his family on vacation in downtown Manhattan when the Twin Towers collapsed after being struck by planes.
“There was one middle-aged man who had a handkerchief he was breathing through, and he ripped it in half and gave one half to me and my brother,” Cullum said.
He said he had no way of knowing at the time that the dust clouding the air would be blamed for the leukemia that ravaged his body nearly two decades later — or that he would struggle to prove he was at the scene to get government benefits.
But Cullum was saved in part by an old article in his hometown paper in which his father griped that his son was kicked off a junior football team because it took the family so long to get home to the West Coast after Sept. 11, 2001.
On the day of the attacks, Cullum, his parents, 12-year-old sister and 10-year-old brother were downtown waiting to take the ferry ride to the Statue of Liberty when the first jet, hijacked by terrorists, struck the North Tower. Onlookers including the family weren’t sure what had happened, so they moved in closer to take a look, he recalled. Then, they saw the second hijacked plane hit the South Tower.
“We suddenly heard this really loud noise, it flew right over our heads,” Cullum recalled. “Even though it was 50, 60 stories up, it was so loud that I thought it was scraping the ground, like that’s how loud the engines were.”
At that point, everyone started back up into Battery Park, he said, trying to figure out what was going on.
“My brother and I were watching, we could see human figures jump from the buildings,” he said. “We were asking about them. My mom kept trying to keep us from looking.”
When the towers fell, the family joined others inside a downtown business looking for refuge. That’s where the man offered him a piece of cloth to breathe through.
“We were completely covered in gray, like stage makeup or something,” he recalled.
The family finally made it back to their Times Square hotel on a city bus later that day. They had plane tickets, but the airports were shut down amid the emergency. So the family rented a car and drove to Canada where they had relatives and could hunker down until a flight back to the West Coast was available, Cullum said.
They stayed up north for several days, he said, “until everything started to go back to normal and we could fly home again.”
While Cullum was gone, he missed his football team’s two first games and was automatically disqualified for the rest of the season, a fact his father angrily shared with a local paper at the time – not realizing how important the story would become to his son in the future.
Fast-forward nearly two decades to 2019, when Cullum had just finished up grad school at St. John’s in New Mexico and started a junior-high-school teaching job. That’s when he became gravely ill and was diagnosed with leukemia.
The illness put him in the ICU at Vanderbilt Hospital in Nashville, Tenn., for six weeks.
“I had hundreds and thousands of dollars in medical debt,” he recalled.
Cullum applied to the Sept. 11 Victim’s Compensation Fund, but he was denied.
The program wanted him to have non-relatives vouch that he was in Lower Manhattan on Sept. 11. But he only had family with him.
That’s when the newspaper story about his father venting that he got kicked off his team became crucial.
“No one could have predicted, you know, 20 years later, that we were going to need that proof to corroborate the story,” said Cullum’s lawyer, Beth Jablon, of Sullivan Papain Block McGrath Coffinas & Cannavo PC.
The fund issued Cullum a six-figure award March 28, Jablon said.
The lawyer has since amended Cullum’s original claim to get him money to cover the wages he could have made if he had been able to work right out of college.
Collum declined to reveal the exact award amount but said that so far, it has been enough money to buy property and build a house where he lives with his wife in Santa Fe, NM.
He said he is still suffering the effects of the attacks and expects to get a knee replacement soon.
But he added that when he thinks being at the World Trade Center that day, he feels like he’s a better person because of it.
“When I look at who I am, as a son and a brother and a husband, and a person, I’m very thankful,” he said.
“I think that the suffering that I endured has really sharpened and changed my view of my life and my purpose. I don’t know that I have the strength to say that I would choose to go through it again. But having gone through it, I’m thankful for many of the ways that it’s affected me.”
Additional reporting by Desheania Andrews
