by Tom Archdeacon, Dayton Daily News

Brendan Ryan met Kristy Irvine when they both were 12. Although they'd gone to different grammar schools in this Long Island town 25 miles from Manhattan, Brendan found out from his buddies that "this gorgeous girl" on the swim team at the local Bay Club would be joining their class when they got to St. Anthony's High School.

"I worked as a cabana boy at a different place and when I heard about her, I started thinking up excuses to go to where she was," Brendan said Tuesday. "Soon we'd walk out to the beach and talk for hours. By ninth grade, I knew this was the girl I was going to marry."

When Kristy and her four sisters would come to Sidney each summer to visit their grandparents and cousins -- "we didn't go to Disney World, we went to Sidney," said older sister Tracy, who lives in Kettering -- she didn't let the Shelby County boys turn her head. Brendan always was her guy, the one who took her to dances and games and the high school prom.

When she came to the University of Dayton -- as had nearly a dozen other relatives -- and Brendan went to Providence, they didn't forget each other. After Tracy and her husband, Brian Jannes, hosted Kristy's graduation party at their house near the UD campus, Kristy headed off to Europe and a six-month back-packing trip -- only to be met by Brendan on her return to JFK Airport. He held a bouquet of roses . . . and her heart.

A few years earlier they had made a pact.

"They decided when they graduated from college, if they both were still single and in the same town, they'd get together," Tracy said. "They know then they belonged together."

And eight days ago -- on that Tuesday of twin-tower infamy -- they were together when the World Trade Center was hit by that deadly terrorist attack.

Kristy, a 30-year-old vice president of equity trading for Sandler O'Neill & Partners, was working in the investment banking firm's 104th floor offices in the WTC's South Tower.

Brendan -- who had married Kristy on June 9 -- was back at their new Greenwich Village apartment.

The first of the suicide airliners hit the north tower at 8:45 a.m. and about 10 minutes later Kristy called Brendan. "She told me the other tower had been hit by a plane and that's when I put on the news," he said. "I asked her if she was evacuating and she said 'not yet', that they were being told they were OK. I asked her what she could see outside and she said just black smoke. Then she told me she had to go."

Kristy then phoned her father, 65-year-old Stuart "Stu" Irvine, who is retired after a long career at both 3M and then AOL Time Warner. He was alone on Revere Drive in Huntington. His wife, the former Toni Wagner from Sidney, died eight years ago from cancer.

"I had the honor of talking to my daughter one last time," Stu said with wounded softness as he sat in the shaded backyard of the family home Tuesday afternoon. "She called and said she was all right. But as she was telling me about the plane hitting the first tower, she started to get very hysterical. She was watching people jump from the windows of the other tower. Then she said she had to go. They were going to evacuate. Before she hung up, she said, 'I love you, dad!' ''

Back in Greenwich Village, Brendan was watching in horror when the phone rang again: "It was Kristy and she was pretty calm. She told me they were going to head downstairs. She promised she'd call and she told me she loved me. We were still talking, when I watched the second plane slam into her building . . . and the phone went dead."

Stu was watching, too: "When I saw the second tower get hit, my heart just stopped. Flames engulfed the building up to the 104th floor and I just couldn't move."

Kerry, another sister, also lives in Greenwich Village. She was working out at a gym when she heard what was happening and quickly ran to her sister's apartment: "Brendan and I watched and we felt so helpless and then . . . the South tower collapsed. I ran out onto the sidewalk and kept looking, hoping to see Kristy coming up the street. She never did and the day just kept getting worse and worse and worse."

Of the 167 people working at Sandler O'Neill & Partners last Tuesday morning, 67 are missing and presumed dead. According to a few reports, some employees who had worked there during the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center had fled as soon as the first plane hit the North Tower. They made it out.

"All the people in Kristy's area -- they call it a desk -- did not survive," Stu said quietly. "All of them were at her wedding just three months ago. One was a bridesmaid. They're all gone . . . all of them."

As Stu and his family sat there talking about "Kristy the Bride" -- that's what Tracy and Brian's two little daughters, both flower girls in the wedding, called their aunt -- the conversation brought tears, a little laughter, plenty of sadness and a whole lot of love. And this day needed it. In a few hours, the family was going to a memorial service at St. Patrick's, their local Catholic church.

"Our parish lost 21 people last Tuesday," Stu said. "We had people working in several of the offices. And who knows how many people the other churches and temples lost here. Our town is hurting."

On this day, the only salve for the sorrow came from each other. The five Irvine sisters -- Tracy, Wendy, Kerry and Kristy, all in their 30s, and Michelle, at 27 -- have always been an especially close bunch. "There's a lot of identity wrapped up in five sisters," Kerry said. "And taken together, it makes a strong family bond."

Tracy and Brian -- they're both UD grads and he runs Spinners Pilot Shop in Kettering and also serves as a Kettering volunteer fireman -- drove to Huntington from Dayton on Wednesday. Brian brought his fire gear and when he went down to help in rescue efforts, he randomly was put into a volunteer group that included six firemen from Washington Twp. who had come here on their own. Meanwhile, Wendy and her husband Dennis Toomey drove in from Raleigh-Durham, N.C., while Michelle drove from Tucson. All the girls came to help prop up their pop. And it worked some, Tuesday, because he managed to pull a smile or two from his pain:

"People would say, 'Stu you ever going to remarry?' And I'd just shrug and say 'Why? I've already got five women running my life now.' All these years with nothing but women in the house, I've done my tour of duty. I'm an honorary member of the women's lib. Even their pets were female.''

"You had a male dog," Tracy remembered.

"Yeah and remember?" Stu said. "He had to be neutered."

Although all the girls were close -- Kristy was coming out to Dayton Oct. 12 to visit Tracy and her family -- she was especially tight with Kerry. They were just 20 months apart and while they would spend almost eight years living together in Manhattan, they had been playmates from the start.

"We used to play this game called 'Sis,' '' Kerry said. "We used to pretend we were sisters."

"You were sisters," Stu said.

"No, this was more than that," she said. "Sometimes were were like Charlie's Angels. We'd be back here in the yard, imagining we were taking care of the bad guys. Helping everybody who needed it."

In real life, it was the same with Kristy. When she went to UD -- following in the footsteps of her granddad, Joseph "Chief" Wagner, a UD football player and one of the school's first engineering grads -- she got a degree in communications while especially making her mark away from campus.

She interned at Womanline of Dayton and the Samaritan Health Foundation at Good Samaritan Hospital and Health Center. When she came back to New York -- after getting a job at Sandler O'Neill & Partners, which was co-founded by the father of her best friend, Meredith O'Neill -- she looked for ways to help people far removed from her world of high finance.

"To be an equity trader, you've got to be tough and there's a lot of stress, but she handled it perfectly," Tracy said. "And the real Kristy was a gentle, serene spirit who went out of her way to put other people first."

Dennis, her brother-in-law, agreed: "I heard someone else say this, but this puts it best. Her physical beauty was so apparent, but she was even more beautiful inside. That smile of hers was inside and out."

In fact, she, Meredith and another friend founded an organization called Secret Smiles. Meredith is a Harlem school teacher and she saw students' moms and other women who needed help, whether because they were on their own, in an abusive relationship or just needed more support than they got at home. "They had fund-raisers and got things to help these women set up their own households," Tracy said. "And they did it anonymously. The women never found out where the help came from."

Secret Smiles was the perfect name for Kristy's group. "When you think of her, you think of that beautiful smile," Kerry said. To prove it, Stu showed pictures of her as a baby, as a schoolgirl and finally from her wedding. You saw her being serenaded by Brendan, an accomplished musician. You saw her walking on the beach with him and you saw her holding him. And always she smiled.

"You know, before Mom died she had it right," Tracy said. "She said, 'I'm not worried about Kristy. She's met her soulmate. Brendan will always be there for her.' ''

And Tuesday, he was.