Connections count.

Some more than others.

It was a couple of weeks after 9/11 when the phone rang in Bob Gullickson's home. His brother Joe's high school buddy Jim McGuire was on the line from the West Coast.

McGuire had heard that Joe, a firefighter and Moore Catholic classmate of 25 years earlier, had gone missing in the attacks at the Trade Center.

He'd read that the classmate he'd played ball with and ate cafeteria food with and dreamed dreams with at Moore all those years ago had rushed into the lobby of the South Tower and had not come out. And that was true enough.

Ladder 101 and Engine 202 from Red Hook, the house right at the mouth of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, lost seven men in the building collapses that day.

Joe Gullickson was one of them.

In eight days of searching through the steaming ruins, all Bob Gullickson found of his brother was a cell phone in the crushed cab of a fire truck on West Street.

There was nothing else to save.

The 9/11 news moved McGuire, who, by 2001, was a Silicone Valley computer executive and a long way from his roots as one of a family of 10 boys raised in Travis.

The two ran together on the Moore track team back in the mid-70s.

HOW IT STARTED

And when Dan died in an automobile accident in 1976, it was the teenaged Bob Gullickson who mourned with the McGuire family.

Two families, two tragedies 25 years apart.

That was the history that compelled McGuire to jump on a New York-bound plane. There were no arguments about his coming home, or debating of the pros and cons. He simply said he was heading to Staten Island to be with the family of his childhood buddy.

That was that.

"He showed up at my door," said Bob Gullickson, a construction engineer who works a few blocks from Ground Zero. "It was amazing."

That gesture was the beginning of what would become The Maverick Foundation.

Oh, there were some things to take care of along the way. Like memorials for the fallen firefighters. And some long conversations about what they'd like most to accomplish in Joe Gullickson's memory.

They'd do something. And they'd make sure it was fitting.

"It wasn't going to be about doing something to make ourselves feel better," said Gullickson.

Their idea wasn't to make anyone famous.

BASIC PRINCIPLES

Or to push any kind of public agenda in the name of the people who died that day.

That wouldn't have been Joe.

Instead, they came upon a couple of bedrock principles for anything that they'd undertake.

First, the two men wanted to reach out to kids in some way. And they also agreed that, considering the world situation, it would be a sound idea to promote good citizenship.

After some thought, they decided to award a scholarship to incoming freshmen at their alma mater, Moore Catholic; something that would help kids and reward community effort.

They named the scholarships in memory of the two former Mavericks, Joe Gullickson and Dan McGuire.

The notion seems almost quaint, doesn't it, in this day when talking heads who have accomplished nothing of consequence in their lives attack 9/11 survivors and their families in order to sell a few books?

But that was the decision.

Gullickson did the paperwork to get things started.

What was McGuire's initial contribution beyond just being there? One day the successful businessman sat down in Gullickson's house and quietly wrote out a personal check that ended in a bunch of zeroes.

EXTENDED FAMILY

That act of charity put the foundation on solid financial ground.

Then, looking for more support, McGuire and Gullickson called around to their extended families. Pretty soon they had relatives showing up from literally every corner of America to write a check, attend an annual picnic and remember the two lives that had been lost all those years apart.

The firefighters who worked with Joe Gullickson became involved, too.

People who hadn't seen each other in decades were renewing friendships with the kind of bond that went beyond what they'd known before.

These days the group accepts nominations for scholarships from around the borough. Grammar school kids fill out resumes and have teachers and coaches and people they volunteer for send letters of support. Some of the applicants are jocks (Danielle McLaughlin, a senior at Moore this year, also happened to play hoops at the school). Some aren't.

But they all have to be involved in something positive within the community to be considered.

"We want to see service," said Gullickson.

"It's been great for everyone," said the co-founder of the Maverick Foundation.

And it was clear he wasn't talking only about the kids.

(The Fifth Annual Maverick Foundation Memorial Picnic will be held June 24 at Nansen's Park, Travis. For further information check www.themaverickfoundation.org on the web or call 908-541-0656.)