eorge Steinbrenner witnessed his first police officer’s funeral more than 20 years ago. And because of the deep impression the experience made on him, the survivors of police officers and firefighters killed in the line of duty in the tri-state area have had a shield since then while getting on with their lives. A Silver Shield, to be precise.

As Jim Fuchs, chief executive officer of the Silver Shield Foundation since its inception in 1982, recalls, he was lunching with the New York Yankees owner in 1981 when the conversation turned to that police officer’s funeral. “George was talking about how they fold the flag at the end of the ceremony and present it to the children. And he suddenly looks at me and says, ‘Okay, but now what? What happens to those kids who took the flag? What about their schooling? Who takes care of all the things like that?’”

Before he knew it, according to Fuchs, Steinbrenner was not only asking him about the practical steps for setting up a foundation and pledging his own full cooperation for such an initiative, but also insisting that his luncheon partner act as point man. “At first, I kept saying things like, ‘But George, I have my business and I’m on so many boards already that I don’t know if I’d have the time needed for such an undertaking.’ But he wasn’t going to be discouraged. And I guess the fact that I’ve been president, chairman, and/or executive director since the beginning tells you what my decision was.”

The foundation’s original mission was to help with the high school or college tuitions for the children of fallen New York City police officers and firefighters. In contrast to other charities, the Silver Shield has never given money directly to those in need, but only to the institutions where the money is required. Cases are brought to the attention of the foundation by liaison people in the police and fire departments, which assume all the preliminary application work.

The very first beneficiaries of the aid were the families of NYPD officers James Whittington, shot off-duty on October 29, 1982, and James Rowley, an aviation unit officer who died in a helicopter accident on July 22, 1983. By Fuchs’s estimate, the Whittington and Rowley children were the first of more than 200 helped by Silver Shield between 1982 and 2001. Then, with the September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, what had been a steady stream of assistance cases predictably turned into a flood. “In the immediate aftermath of 9/11,” Fuchs notes, “we added 700 children and students in a single day — more than triple what we had been doing in all the years up till then.”

Along the way, there have been expansions both geographically and in the content of the assistance program. By 2004, aid applications were being received not only for the widows and children of New York City police officers and firefighters, but also for those surviving the deaths of Port Authority police officers; state troopers in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut; members every police department within a (more or less) 75-mile radius of New York City; members of every police department in Connecticut; and emergency medical technicians.

And while education needs have accounted for most of the Silver Shield interventions, they have hardly been alone. In listing the organization’s top seven priorities, for example, Fuchs notes that three of them go well beyond schooling considerations. He names the seven as:

Tuition assistance. Payments have been made to prep schools, colleges, graduate schools, vocational schools and technical schools.

Tutoring. Because of the emotional traumas suffered by children who have lost fathers or mothers on duty, there is frequent need for special tutoring to keep them on track academically. Here, as in other areas, the foundation insists on rigorous standards and oversight procedures, insuring, for instance, that the tutor selected is not just some crony of the student eager for extracurricular cash.

College prep. The foundation sponsors guidance counseling services and courses for College Board exam preparations.

Counseling and bereavement services. Through the New York University Child Study Center and a number of independent psychologists, the foundation pays bills for trauma counseling.

Health care. The foundation underwrites thorough physical examinations at New York Presbyterian’s Iris Cantor Women’s Health Center for widows and widowers.

Outreach. The foundation tries to assure survivors that their loss does not get forgotten with the passing of the years through such initiatives as regular holiday gift baskets and the sponsorship of an annual luncheon for widows.

Programs for widows. The spouses of fallen police officers and firefighters are helped in tuition for their own schooling as well as for that of their children.

Fuchs is particularly proud of the program underwriting the medical exams for widows. When the idea was first broached, he says, Vina Drennan, an advisory board member whose firefighter husband was killed in the line of duty, volunteered to go to the Cantor Center to see first-hand exactly how thorough the examination would be. As Drennan related the experience: “You can ask any and every question and you get full answers from professional, sensitive doctors.

"My doctor called me with test results within two days and was openly available to any further questions I had. When my husband died, my children needed constant reassurance that I would be there for them. The greatest gift I could give them was to be able to tell them that the doctor said I was fine.”

The foundation president also cautions against “timetable traumas.” “When a parent is lost,” he notes, “there is a tendency to think that, okay, the kids are going to have a real bad time for this many months, but after that, they’ll begin getting their lives back on track. It doesn’t always work out that neatly. Some traumas can almost be like time-capsule pills — breaking out years later. When we take on a case, we automatically set aside $20,000 for tuitions, tutoring fees and the like.”

As for the source of the foundation’s funding, much of that is indicated by its letterhead and organizational chart. Steinbrenner remains the first name under Board of Trustees, with most of the other board members representatives of New York financial houses and advertising agencies. “When we were getting started,” Fuchs says, “George set aside the net proceeds from a Yankee Stadium game for the foundation. It came to something like $157,000. Recently, though, we haven’t really needed that. So what he’s done instead is to reward the foundation backers with special evenings at the stadium, giving them his box or something of the sort.”

The Silver Shield has capped a busy career for Fuchs in athletics and business. His first splash was as an Illinois high school track star. A knee injury that curtailed that activity also proved to be the door to greater athletic achievements. “When I was convalescing, I started doing shot-put exercises. One of the first things I realized was that the shot-putters of the day were practically undermining their own spring because of a swing-stop-sweep approach. Because I couldn’t afford to make that stop with my knee, I developed a much more fluid catapult motion that completely eliminated that cocking mechanism.”

One result of this new approach was a slew of medals in international competitions. In both the 1948 London Olympics and the 1952 Helsinki games, Fuchs captured bronze medals for the United States. In the first Pan-American games, in 1951, he took home the gold for both the shot-put and the discus. For one stretch between the late forties and early fifties, he won a then-record 88 consecutive shot-put competitions. Almost as gratifying, he says, was the realization that his technique of eliminating the cock motion was soon being emulated by other shot-putters around the world. “The first time I noticed it was in Lisbon, when I went down on the field and saw all these Europeans — Portuguese, French, Belgians — doing what I had been doing mainly as physical therapy for my knee! They started calling it a revolutionary technique, but all I’d been concerned with had been keeping undue pressure off my leg!”

Fuchs’s business odyssey has included significant stop-offs with the National Broadcasting Company, the Curtis Publishing Company, the Mutual Broadcasting Company and Culligan Communications. Between 1971 and 1994, he was chairman and chief executive officer of Fuchs, Cuthrell & Co., an international human resource consulting firm specializing in corporate executive placement, post-career planning and executive consulting. Through it all, the Yale graduate has also been a familiar board presence — for the U.S. Olympic Overview Commission, the International Sports Committee of the United States Information Agency, the Madison Square Garden Boys and Girls Club, the President’s Council on Physical Fitness, the National Art Museum of Sports and the People to People Sports Committee.

In more recent years, however, the father of five daughters and two sons and six-time grandfather has centered his activities on the Silver Shield Foundation. “Put it this way,” he says. “Before 9/11, I’d spend about a day a week on the foundation. Now it’s more like seven days a week.”

His most satisfying moment?

“Well, there have been many. But how are you going to top the fact that the daughter of one of the first fallen policemen brought to our attention recently graduated from law school?”