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Inside Out
Lost Friend By Kostya Kennedy George Willig's May 26, 1977, ascent of the south tower of the World Trade Center has been the great achievement of his life, so his reaction to the tower's crumbling, which he watched on television while vacationing in China, comes as some surprise. "My first impulse was, 'I wish I'd never climbed it,'" says Willig, 52. "I had this sudden thought that what I did called attention to the building and humanized it, and if that had anything to do with making it an appealing target, I was regretful." Willig, who lives in Los Angeles, says that by the time he got home, eight days after the attack, he had regained his fond memory of the ascent and come to terms with the fact that his feat certainly did humanize the Twin Towers. Willig plotted his stunt for more than a year, constructing a set of steel clamps, a special harness and other equipment that at 6:30 on what would be a historic spring morning he wedged into scaffolding tracks on the northeast corner of the building. By the time a policeman arrived and shouted for Willig to get down, he was already some 35 feet off the ground. Crowds gathered below, and he could hear some shouts of encouragement and others of "That guy is nuts!" It was a sunny day with a gentle breeze, and Willig recalls feeling more relaxed the higher he went, often pausing to rest in his harness and take in the scope of his attempt. He was 27 at the time, and though he'd been making technical rock climbs for several years, he had never attempted a height anything close to the tower's 1,350 feet, let alone a face so sheer. "I started thinking about my life and what led me from being a boy who liked to climb trees to being a speck on the side of the World Trade Center," Willig says. "I thought about it for a long time up there, and I tell you, I found no answers. Who does something like that? I guess I loved the extravagance of it." When Willig reached the 66th floor, he came upon a scaffold with two policemen on it. "We've got to stop meeting like this," one said. Rather than trying to stop him, the cops offered to give him a lift to the top. Willig declined and continued his ascent with the policemen hovering nearby. By now the cops realized that Willig was on the verge of fame and, 35 floors short of the top, they asked if he would give them his autograph. Willig did so patiently. "Best wishes to my fellow ascenders, from the 75th floor," he wrote. At 10 a.m. Willig pulled himself onto the top of the tower. He could make out car horns and a swell of cheering from the street. On the roof he accepted congratulations from a crush of policemen and security workers who were there to greet him. Then he was handcuffed and arrested on a reckless endangerment charge that would be thrown out. That was a glum time in New York City, a season of fiscal misery and high crime; on that day many New Yorkers spoke about how uplifting Willig's feat had been. They called him the Human Fly and praised his courage. The city announced it would sue Willig for $250,000 for the time and money it had spent ensuring his safety, but Mayor Abe Beame wasn't having it. The next day he called a press conference to say the city was dropping the suit. Instead, he fined Willig $1.10 -- a penny for each floor he had climbed -- and shook his hand. Willig never again made headlines as a climber. He embarked on a career in telecommunications construction and engineering -- he's now a project manager -- and over the years has visited the Twin Towers many times. He intends to go to ground zero this week. "I need to be there," he says. "I have such mixed feelings, bitter and sweet. There's a building that in many ways defined who I am. I had a real relationship with it, and now it's gone." Issue date: October 15, 2001 For more news, notes and features from the world of adventure sports, call toll free to order SI Adventure at 1-888-394-5427.
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