What is a “coincidences” involving helicopters, Budweiser ads, the NYPD, 9/11, and a published book.The same helicopter she helped build in Texas ended up documenting one of the most historic days in American history — and years later I was helping get those images published from an office in Rockefeller Center.
Before becoming a bestselling author, storyteller, and comedy-club-owner-turned-ice-skater and Zamboni driver, I was a paralegal. When I moved to NYC in 1999, I started working in Rockefeller Center as a legal assistant at a firm handling IP and trademark work for famous sports figures and celebrities. In 2001, we began representing the FDNY and NYPD in their landmark efforts to trademark their logos.
Months later, on 9/11, terrorists flew planes into the Twin Towers, and suddenly their logos were everywhere. Protecting those trademarks became critically urgent and the ensuing months were spent at Ground Zero confiscating counterfeit items which became headline news.
Our legal team also helped the NYPD with the publication of the book Above Hallowed Ground, A Photographic Record of September 11, 2001. Since air traffic was grounded, the only aerial photos taken in Manhattan that day came from Detective Dave Fitzpatrick who was riding in an NYPD helicopter. Wanna take a wild guess as to who built that helicopter?
My mom.
Mom was born hard of hearing to Deaf parents and as the little hearing she had deteriorated, she started attending the State School for the Deaf and began learning electronics at a young age thanks to Century Electronics in Tulsa, Oklahoma which hired deaf and disabled workers. Years later, she would become an avionics expert at Heli-Dyne, a division of Bell Helicopter, in Texas. This work would include wiring two helicopters for the NYPD, one with a new invention nicknamed a “bambi bucket” that would aid in aerial firefighting.
Around this time, Budweiser captured her and her colleagues for a commercial during the “For all you do, this Bud’s for you!” ad campaign and paid them with cases of beer.
After the helicopters were completed, the NYPD gave everyone at Heli-Dyne baseball hats with the NYPD logo on it — the same logo I would go on to help ensure was licensed right before 9/11.
My dad once tried using that hat to get out of a traffic ticket. We’d been pulled over for a missing license plate while I sat in the passenger seat interpreting for him. Dad slapped on the NYPD hat and pointed at it proudly like it’d give him some brownie points. He told me the truth in sign language, and I translated a much more polished version to the officer. We drove away without a ticket.
In 1988, Mary Lowery became the first woman assigned to the NYPD Aviation Unit. Her promotional photo shows her sitting inside a Bell helicopter wired by another trailblazing woman: my mom.
I’ve always loved that my mom didn’t have a traditional “woman’s” job. She didn’t go to the 1977 National Women’s Convention when it swung through town, she didn’t talk about feminism or equal rights. She simply lived it. In the middle of conservative Texas in the 1980s, a Deaf woman walked into hangars full of men as the avionics expert everyone relied on. She completed intensely complex systems for aircraft that are still in operation today. She succeeded and gained respect in spaces not designed for women or even deaf people.
Watching that shaped me more than I realized at the time. My understanding of feminism didn’t come from slogans or theory. It came from seeing my mother quietly master difficult work, support our family, and refuse to shrink herself to fit other people’s expectations. She showed me that independence could look practical, capable, and unglamorous. It could wear work boots and carry wiring diagrams.
What makes all of this feel almost impossible to explain is where I came from. I grew up deep in the woods of East Texas surrounded by instability, poverty, and domestic violence. For a long time, I thought survival meant escaping — getting as far away from my childhood as possible, reinventing myself in entirely different worlds.
And I did.
I moved to New York. I built careers in law, entertainment, storytelling, hospitality, comedy, and live events. I found myself working in Rockefeller Center helping the NYPD publish photographs taken from a helicopter my mother had helped build decades earlier.
I spent years believing I had outrun my past.
But somehow, my mother was already there hovering above me.
Maybe it’s coincidence. Maybe it’s synchronicity. But I think the deeper truth is that Mom modeled possibility for me before I even had language for it. A deaf woman wiring avionics for helicopters in the 1980s was already defying expectations. I just followed that example in my own way — leaving Texas, reinventing myself over and over, and finding my way into rooms and stories I was never “supposed” to be part of.
Inheritance. Ambition. Timing. Resilience. Chance. Sometimes they all collide into one story.
Build your own helicopter and fly.
Kambri Crews 