Kevin Williams, Caddy Who Won A Dream Job

As a caddy at the world-renowned National Golf Links of America in Southampton, Kevin Williams was well known to some of the titans of America’s business and investment industries.

As he neared graduation from Boston College — magna cum laude — and began thinking about a business career, he decided to seek out an internship in finance. One of the club’s members for whom he had caddied regularly happily obliged.

As fate would have it, the company was shuttered before the summer. But the club member who had promised Mr. Williams the post asked another member if his company had a spot for the eager young caddy.

Earlier this summer, that partner, Jimmy Dunne, gave the commencement speech at his alma mater, the University of Notre Dame. He recalled when Mr. Williams came to him the year after that internship at his company, Sandler O’Neill, having just graduated from Boston College and hoping to continue at the revered boutique investment firm.

“He had a hustle to him,” Mr. Dunne recalled of the interview that had taken place 22 years earlier. “He had in his eyes this desire to succeed. It was like a refined desperation.”

In his speech to graduates, Mr. Dunne recalled Mr. Williams’s lighthearted confidence with one of the company’s co-founders and senior partners even as a brand new employee — trading barbs about his Boston College Eagles bona fides in a company run by a devout Fighting Irish alum.

What Mr. Dunne didn’t tell the graduates in South Bend this past June, was that the young man he spoke of had been at the company’s offices two and a half years after that job interview — on September 11, 2001.

Kevin Williams was among the 68 employees of Sandler O’Neill who died when Two World Trade Center collapsed.

His father, Michael, was teaching his high school math class that morning. Like so many from the East End who couldn’t reach loved ones that were in the building that day, the elder Mr. Williams headed for the city.

By a stroke of luck, when he hit the roadblock set up at the bridges into Manhattan, a police officer happened to ask him to shuttle an EMT into Lower Manhattan.

Mr. Williams met up with his son’s fiancée — they had been due to be married that December — and began the sad chore of going hospital to hospital, like thousands of other families, in hope of finding Kevin.

“Then Bellevue Hospital actually called my daughter at one point and told her Kevin was there,” Mr. Williams recalled this week. “So I ran over there. Turned out, it was a different Kevin Williams — he was Black. It was like somebody just ripped your guts out.”

Kevin Williams had been a star athlete at Shoreham-Wading River High School, earning the school’s MVP honors in three sports — golf, baseball and basketball — his senior year.

His father, Michael, who still works part time at National Golf Links, started a foundation in his son’s honor that uses the money it raises each year from a charity golf tournament and private donations to send underprivileged kids from around Long Island to summer sports camps at Hofstra University, and runs a “Christmas Angels” program over the holidays, filling the Christmas lists of dozens of families.

Members of the golf club — which also lost another longtime caddy who had gone to work for a company in the building — are among the biggest donors to the foundation.

And Kevin Williams’s younger brother, Jamie, now works for Mr. Dunne’s company.