9/11 Stories: School Administrator Remembers ‘Father Figure’

Searching most lists of 9/11 victims, such as this one, will turn up surprisingly few names of Fort Lee residents who lost their lives on Sept. 11, 2001, given the borough’s relatively close proximity to Ground Zero.

Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich has pointed out in the past that such lists only tell part of the story, listing victims’ places of residence at the time of the tragic events, and not where they may have been born, grown up or spent the majority of their lives.

One of the names that will come up however as having been a resident of Fort Lee at the time of his death is perhaps an unfamiliar one to many in the borough.

Marco Motroni had only been living in Century Towers in Fort Lee for a few years when he died in the World Trade Center on 9/11. He had come to the borough by way of Montvale, North Bergen, Queens, Harlem and Havana, Cuba, where he was born. His wife Emily and son Christopher moved to Hoboken shortly after his death. Neither of his other two sons, Mark or George, lives in Fort Lee either.

But in addition to his neighbors at the time who may remember him or others who may have crossed paths with Motroni during his relatively short residence in town, his memory is kept very much alive in Fort Lee.

Mention the name Marco Motroni to Fort Lee Assistant Superintendent of Schools Steven Engravalle, and he’ll tell you all about him. Engravalle will even produce a picture of Motroni he carries around in his wallet with him wherever he goes—a picture inscribed with the following words from Shakespeare’s Hamlet:

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,

Absent thee from felicity awhile,

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain

To tell my story.

Engravalle, whose own parents were divorced when he was just three years old and whose own father was essentially absent from his life, is proud to tell the story of his best friend’s father.

“In the absence of a father figure, Marco was a kind enough person to take me under his wing,” Engravalle said.

Engravalle met Christopher Motroni in middle school Math class in his hometown of Montvale when the boys were 12 years old. The two became best friends, and Christopher’s father became like the father Engravalle never really had.

“He was very much a father figure,” Engravalle said. “Marco was one of the kindest people you’ve ever met. His mantra was, ‘Do good today.’ What he meant was do an act of good everyday. He would say that to all of us, and we took it to heart.”

Growing up essentially without a father, it was Motroni, among others, who Engravalle firmly believes helped shape the man he is today.

“You can really go two ways when you’re a floundering kid,” Engravalle said. “The metaphor I use is you’re on a fence. On one side of the fence is the green grass, the pasture where everything’s beautiful.”

What’s on the other side of that fence, Engravalle said, is a pigpen and everything that entails.

“And you don’t want to fall into the pigpen, but some people do,” he said. “And it was the good people [like Motroni] that didn’t let me fall into the pigpen and pulled me into the pasture when I sure could have.”

Marco Motroni’s story as told by Engravalle

“Marco’s story was remarkable,” Engravalle begins.

He came from Cuba at the age of 12 with his brother, Hector. He could not read or write English. His mother couldn’t speak English. His father was left in Cuba, and he never really knew the true story about what had happened to him—only that he never made it to the U.S.

Marco’s mother really couldn’t work, so he and Hector had to clean dance halls in Harlem at night for whatever money that might earn them.

“He’d shine shoes; he’d do whatever he had to do to pay the bills,” Engravalle said.

Marco ultimately became a very respected executive on the New York Mercantile Exchange after trading crude oil, gold and natural gas for several years. Hector became one of the most successful Cuban-American businessmen in the country, serving as Chief Staff Officer and Senior Vice President of Xerox Corp. since 1999 and as Chief Ethics Officer since 2003.

All three of Marco’s sons followed in their father’s footsteps. Christopher, for example, became what Engravalle called “one of the most prominent traders on the NYMEX floor.”

“Talk about where you start is not where you finish,” Engravalle said. “Here’s a guy who came over with nothing and became everything. Everybody knew him on the NYMEX. Because of his mantra [‘Do good today’], he went to church every morning before work, and he stopped by the same homeless man and gave him money every single day. We said he’s going to use it to buy liquor, and he said, ‘That’s not for us to decide. You do good today. If you do one act of good today, you’re better than 98 percent of the people in the world.’ He was just the kind of person who never said anything bad about anyone.”

Marco didn’t work in the World Trade Center; the NYMEX wasn’t even close.

Engravalle said he was “murdered” because “he was going there for a twice-a-year meeting to voluntarily take a pay decrease to not have to fire his staff.”

“We believe he was on about the 93rd floor, near the impact zone,” Engravalle said. “I said to his wife and son, ‘You know why this happened. God needed a social director. He did what he had to do here. He left his legacy in us, and we’ll carry that on.’”

Engravalle said Hector’s eulogy to his brother, which can be found on a website dedicated to his memory, gives him chills.

“Hector’s speech was so powerful, and he’s such a dynamic man,” Engravalle said, becoming uncharacteristically emotional when discussing Marco Motroni. “[The speech] is actually featured in the Smithsonian as part of the 9/11 artifacts.”

The eulogy begins, “My brother was a good man, and he was killed by evil people.”

Those words resonate throughout the speech, which Engravalle says, "gives a positively and absolutely accurate depiction of what kind of person this guy was."

"Hector got it right," he said. "We were angry. Everybody was angry. That’s just the way it was. But Hector explained that that’s not what his brother would want—that we need to not be that way.”

Hector Juan Motroni’s speech, delivered on Sept. 26, 2001, goes on to read, “In his memory, I ask that we act as he would have asked us to act and that we practice the kindness and generosity of spirit that we have seen this last week not just today, but tomorrow, and the day after, and all the days of your lives.”

A few years ago, on the seventh anniversary of the events of 9/11, Engravalle was Superintendent of Schools in Hamburg. He shared some of Marco Motroni’s story with his students as part of a program called “words of wisdom,” emphasizing “the ways he lived out the phrase he chose to live by: ‘Do good today.’”

Remembering a “father figure” on the 10th anniversary of 9/11

Engravalle, who keeps in touch with his best friend from Math class but doesn’t get to see him as often as he’d like these days—Christopher is now the father of a young child and has a baby on the way, and Engravalle says he himself is “married to Fort Lee”—will do what he usually does on the anniversary.

“I’ve always stopped what I was doing to pay attention when his name was read at the service,” Engravalle said. “And in some way, I like to make sure that he is remembered. I pause at that moment so there’s nothing more important than that reading that’s taking place, and I listen for it.”

He also said he always lets Motroni’s family know that he’s thinking about them, though he says the family, to his knowledge, doesn’t attend any of the ceremonies.

“I just make sure that he’s not forgotten,” Engravalle said. “But it’s always a difficult time; it’s a wound that will never heal. But knowing who he was and knowing how he would be—by my sharing that story—I’m hopeful that I can inspire someone else to do what he says and ‘do good today.’”