Sunday marks the 20th anniversary of the largest act of domestic-borne terrorism in the United States.

On the morning of April 19, 1995, a bomb exploded at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City, killing 168 individuals and injuring more than 680 others, many of them federal employees.

A large outpouring of public support for the victims and their families occurred in the days and weeks following the explosion. Among those reaching out to help were fellow federal employees.

“The day after the bombing, I was in Oklahoma City with a lot of the folks who had people in the building who had not yet been identified or found,” said Steve Bauer, executive director of the Federal Employee Education & Assistance Fund. “We literally lived with them at the First Christian Church, where we were all housed for 10 days as they dug through the rubble. The miracles that we all hoped for never occurred. No one was pulled out alive from that rubble, but they were going through it very slowly, very carefully. For those of us who were around then, we remember every night there would be pictures of their progress and the assistant fire marshal of Oklahoma City was there with us, updating the families and actually doing the newscasts each evening, showing what was happening.”

Founded in 1986, FEEA is a “feds helping feds” charity and part of the Combined Federal Campaign. It makes emergency loans and scholarship grants, and it is the only charity specifically dedicated to helping civilian federal employees.

“We actually provided on-the-spot assistance to families that needed help with, literally, burials, flying relatives in,” Bauer said. “Some people needed, what I would call, simple tasks. The most important thing to them was that somebody went and mowed their lawn, because they had relatives coming in. And we had volunteers doing all those kinds of things, a lot of volunteers from Tinker Air Force Base, particularly the Federal Managers Association chapter out there. So, they were all very helpful out there.”

FEEA spent approximately $100,000 in those first 10 days helping people.

“I wasn’t even sure I had $100,000 in the bank, but I knew we could raise it,” Bauer said. “But money started coming in from all over. America really came to the forefront and said, ‘These people need help and we’re going to help them.’ And they started making donations, and it became obvious very early on that I was going to collect a lot more than I was going to spend.”

Among the fatalities were 19 children, who were in the building’s day care center when the bomb exploded. Other children were orphaned. In total, 200 children lost a parent that day.

Knowing that FEEA was going to be collecting a lot of money and that part of its mission was to provide scholarship assistance for federal employees and their families, the charity committed to making sure that all of those children’s college education would be paid for.

“It was the least that we could do with the extra money that we took in that we were not going to expend,” Bauer said. “So, we said we would put these kids through college, not knowing at the time how many there really were.”

Two other organizations stepped up to help FEEA fulfill its commitment to the children of the Oklahoma City bombing — The Heartland Regions Fund and The Oklahoma City Community Foundation.

“Between the three of us, we managed to put all these kids full-ride scholarships through college, any college they could get into, no limitations,” Bauer said. “I didn’t realize at the time how many of the kids would stay in Oklahoma. That was kind of a blessing, because Oklahoma state universities are much cheaper than Ivy League schools, although we’ve had kids at schools all over the country, some very expensive. But, bless their hearts, we were able to handle it and put them through.”

FEEA’s investments over the years performed so well that it was able to provide stipends for 30 of the students to attend graduate school.

“Most of these kids … seemed to be interested in what I would call ‘helping professions,'” Bauer said. “Just amazing. I think part of it is the fact that they were getting a free education. Part of it was that their parents were public servants and that carried over to them. Not that many went into government, but what they did do were special ed teachers, physical therapists, theologists, things where they were giving back to their community, which I thought was just so fitting and so beautiful.”

Listen to Mike Causey’s full interview with Steve Bauer, executive director of the Federal Employee Education & Assistance Fund, on Your Turn, Wednesday, April 22, at 10 a.m. EDT, on Federal News Radio. The interview will be archived here.

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