Long before the red bandana became a national symbol, it was a small connection between a father and his son.

Welles grew up in Upper Nyack, a community north of New York City along the Hudson River. His parents, Jefferson and Alison Crowther, raised him with his sisters. The red handkerchief entered the family story when Welles was six.

Jefferson carried bandanas himself. Alison later explained that the cloth reminded Welles of his father and became a kind of personal trademark. Welles wore or carried one through many parts of his life. It appeared beneath athletic uniforms and traveled with him beyond childhood.

The habit was memorable but not theatrical. No one could have known that it would one day allow strangers to reconstruct the final hours of his life.

Welles was also drawn early to service.

As a teenager, he joined the junior ranks connected with his local fire company. He later became a volunteer firefighter. The work gave him practical familiarity with emergencies: the need to locate exits, communicate clearly, assist injured people, and keep moving when others were disoriented.

That training did not make him invulnerable. It did not give him advance knowledge of what would happen inside the South Tower. But it helps explain why witnesses later described behavior that seemed organized amid devastation.

At Boston College, Welles played lacrosse and graduated in 1999. The school would later preserve his memory through service awards, an annual run, and football uniforms patterned after the red bandana. In the years before 9/11, however, he was simply a young graduate beginning his working life.

He joined Sandler O’Neill & Partners in the World Trade Center. The company occupied offices high in the South Tower. Welles worked on the 104th floor, far above the 78th-floor sky lobby where his actions would later be described.

The job placed him in finance, but family accounts indicate that firefighting remained important to him. His father later recalled Welles considering a change of career toward the New York City Fire Department.

That plan never had time to become a completed application, appointment, or uniform.

Yet the skills and values behind it were already present.

This is one reason the story should not be reduced to the idea that an ordinary office worker suddenly transformed into someone else. Welles did something extraordinary, but he drew on a life that had prepared him to recognize what frightened people needed.

He understood fire service.

He understood teams.

He understood that the injured could not always move without help.

And he was familiar with the object that would cover his face.

Family stories sometimes acquire polished lines after tragedy. One statement associated with Welles at Boston College says that he would change the world with his red bandana. The phrase is now part of the school’s public remembrance of him.

But the bandana’s historical importance does not depend on a prophecy.

It depends on witnesses.

On September 11, survivors did not know Welles’s childhood, his college number, his family, or his career plans. They did not know the history of the cloth across his mouth.

They saw only what he did.

The story of the boy and his bandana would come later, when a mother began fitting one unmistakable detail to the son she had lost.

First, the South Tower had to be struck.

And Welles had to make his way from the 104th floor toward a sky lobby where hundreds of lives had just been changed.