Flight 93 Remembered
LAST, JONATHAN V.
Flight 93 Remembered While government dithers, Americans build their own memorials BY JONATHAN V. LAST Union City, California Last Saturday, America’s fi rst major memorial to Flight 93 was...
...At the entrance to the federal memorial will be a “Tower of Voices” that will feature 40 wind chimes designed to whisper constantly on behalf of the departed...
...Emerson did his best to reconcile with the unhappy families and assuage their concerns...
...And then he went begging, faxing requests for donations all over the country...
...The asking price was $18,900...
...They even recommended a landscape architect, Robert Mowat, who volunteered his time to help Emerson create a design...
...In September 2004, Jim Boyd, who owns a quarry in Elberton, Georgia, received one of Emerson’s faxes...
...Emerson had no personal connection to 9/11, but was struck by the heroism of the passengers and crew of Flight 93...
...The local Fremont Argus reported that O’Hare “said some of the families were upset because Emerson contacted them directly by email and did not follow protocol for contacting them...
...When he approached the city, both the mayor, Mark Green, and the city council were receptive, provided Union City wouldn’t have to spend any money on the memorial...
...As Father Al explained in an essay about the chapel’s founding, “reflecting on the experience of the Heroes on board Flight 93, in their prayer together, it seemed that the simplest way to memorialize faith, and especially the faith manifested by the Heroes on board the plane, was to do it privately...
...Price, whose parents were on Flight 93, explained, “The key is a process that includes all family members, one that is done respectfully and doesn’t make people upset or uncomfortable...
...At the meeting the next evening, some of the Flight 93 families showed up to complain...
...Finally, his brother-in-law, an antiques dealer, bought his extensive collection of Christmas ornaments for $6,400, giving him enough to cover closing costs and the down payment...
...They worked around the clock for ten days, using the sketches he had drawn on Christmas as their blueprints...
...In a San Francisco Chronicle story about the council meeting, Jennifer Price, president of Flight 93 Families, Inc., was quoted as lamenting, “This was the fi rst we heard about [the Union City memorial...
...He looked for a nearby town with a suitable space and a good parks department, and he quickly settled on Union City...
...During his drives to and from town, Father Al noticed a rundown building on Stutzmantown Road...
...Emerson was not the fi rst person to create a permanent tribute to Flight 93...
...Father Al told him about his plans for the chapel...
...So the stones were shipped back to Georgia for repair, causing further delay...
...The walls and ceiling needed to be torn out and rebuilt...
...As of April 2006, Emerson had only $15,000 of the $50,000 he needed for the bond...
...Like many residents of the county, he sprang into action on 9/11, volunteering to help feed and house the hundreds of local, state, and federal workers who descended on Shanksville...
...Situated at the corner of two major roads and just across from a gargantuan shopping center, Sugar Mill Landing wasn’t much more than a thin, rectangular strip of green space buffering a residential neighborhood from the vast expanse of big box stores and chain restaurants...
...Many others lined up to donate time and equipment, too, from sod to expensive lighting...
...At one end stands a fl agpole with hand-painted tiles decorating its base...
...He sketched out a design and planned to solicit donations and volunteers to build it—all he needed was a city willing to host it...
...Father Al was buying supplies $50 at a time at the local lumber yard, whenever he could spare the cash...
...On December 14, 2004, the council unanimously approved the memorial...
...The protocol for such communication, evidently, is not to contact family members directly, but instead to go through a group called the National Organization for Victim Assistance in Alexandria, Virginia...
...But the story of Union City’s Flight 93 memorial is worth telling in full, because—unlike most serious public monuments—it was conceived, paid for, and built by private citizens...
...One of these bears a list of donors to the project, one tells the tale of Flight 93, and the third gives a brief account of the memorial itself...
...Mowat and Luboviski pointedly did not mention Emerson’s name in their speeches...
...I wish there were a memorial in every state,” Nacke said, “but this gentleman didn’t reach out to all the family members...
...It was donated by a friend, and Father Al has rechristened it “Thunder Bell...
...Emerson was eventually able to put $28,000 into a trust for the memorial’s upkeep, leaving the city with virtually no ongoing costs...
...The same Chronicle story reported that “feelings were bruised further when a Chronicle columnist wrote about the project and mentioned fi ve passengers who stormed the hijackers, leading some to believe that Emerson’s memorial would highlight only them...
...That August, she came by the church to visit and saw how truly desperate the condition of the place was...
...But the day before the council meeting, two Flight 93 families called the city manager to voice concerns about Emerson and the project...
...It was the Mizpah Evangelical Lutheran Church, built in 1901...
...They told Emerson that if he could hammer out the details and raise a $50,000 bond to pay for upkeep, he could build the memorial at Sugar Mill Landing...
...We just want to know what’s going to be said about our loved ones,” said Carole O’Hare, whose mother, Hilda Marcin, was on Flight 93...
...Ken Nacke, the chair of the Flight 93 Families Memorial Committee, was equally disturbed...
...Jonathan V. Last is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...The pathway ends at a circle, where an American sweet-gum is planted and three larger slabs of blue granite stand...
...Emerson, who creates fi nancial trusts for a living, is something of an enthusiast...
...Its sound can be heard at the crash site, three miles away...
...Carole O’Hare even spoke at the ceremony, quoting lyrics from the Enya song “Fallen Embers” in her remarks...
...And then there are people like Michael Emerson and Father Al who insist that these are heroes to be celebrated...
...He closed on the property a few days later and set to work restoring it by himself...
...Father Al cobbled together $100 to hold the property and then tried to fi gure out how to come up with the down payment...
...One day the manager noticed the priest who kept coming back and buying bits of this and that...
...bad feelings developed as well with Mowat and the city manager...
...And while no one would confuse it with Lincoln’s grand temple on the Mall, the Union City memorial has a certain majesty...
...A retired Catholic priest, Father Al was living in the nearby town of Somerset on September 11, 2001...
...It was the perfect size for the memorial Emerson envisioned...
...And in October 2001, the property was for sale...
...By October 2004, the project was solid enough that the city council was ready to approve it...
...Emerson found a local engraver willing to fi x them, but he was from a nonunion shop...
...For all of this, the memorial itself bears few scars...
...There are people who view the passengers and crew of Flight 93 as victims to be mourned...
...Initially, the dedication was planned for Memorial Day 2006, but 6 of the 40 rose stones were incorrectly measured—a mistake noticed only after they had been delivered to Union City...
...Not all of the families were upset, but the city council postponed the vote nonetheless...
...As Father Al tells it, at 4:00 P.M...
...He told her that he wanted to build a memorial to Flight 93...
...In 2002, Emerson began corresponding with Alice Hoglan, the mother of passenger Mark Bingham...
...on September 10, 2002, “the artist applying gold leaf paint to the trim in the sanctuary put his brush down and the work was complete...
...Tension grew between the unions and Emerson...
...Hardy Magerko immediately gave Father Al a $23,000 grant toward materials for the restoration...
...There was only one electrical outlet, which had to provide power for both lighting and tools...
...Emerson approached Hayward fi rst, but the city council wasn’t interested...
...Thunder Bell hangs in a new 44-foot-high steel-frame belfry and can be rung by anyone who visits the Flight 93 Memorial Chapel...
...he’s never offi cially contacted our board...
...That distinction goes to Father Alphonse Mascherino, who in 2002 built the Flight 93 Memorial Chapel in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, just three miles from the crash site...
...She sent out a call to carpenters and craftsmen and put a small army of professional builders at Father Al’s disposal...
...Flight 93 Remembered While government dithers, Americans build their own memorials BY JONATHAN V. LAST Union City, California Last Saturday, America’s fi rst major memorial to Flight 93 was dedicated in a small town 20 miles north of San Jose...
...The Flight 93 Memorial Chapel has a voice, too, a half-ton bell cast in 1860...
...The proposed national memorial in Shanksville has yet to break ground, but it will commemorate Flight 93 in a lessthantriumphal manner...
...He’s a devoted Star Trek fan whose home boasts an impressive array of sports memorabilia, as well as a collection of swords used in fi lms from Spartacus to Rio Grande...
...he succeeded on a scale that no one had reason to expect...
...The church had operated for 68 years, until it was dissolved in 1969 and converted into a seed distribution center...
...And Emerson and his girlfriend, Mary Greenlee, spent scores of hours outside the local Wal-Mart soliciting donations for the upkeep fund...
...Tom Albanese, who has owned a concrete business in San Jose with his brother since 1948, volunteered to supply 200 tons of concrete...
...Michael Emerson set out to build a tribute to the heroes of Flight 93...
...The union workers volunteering on the memorial refused to continue if Emerson used him...
...Barry Luboviski, an offi cial with the local AFL-CIO, stood ready to organize hundreds of union volunteers to do the construction work...
...There wasn’t much money...
...But at least the rift with the families had been repaired...
...After two months, he had $1,500...
...A gently winding path stretches 135 feet north...
...At noon on Christmas Day 2001, Father Al went down to the basement of his mother’s house and began sketching out his vision for the old church...
...It had a healthy commitment to public parks, and one park in particular, Sugar Mill Landing, looked promising...
...Union City’s purposeful wall of stones couldn’t be more different...
...When Robert Mowat, the architect, agreed also to act as the construction manager, however, the city lowered its requirement to $20,000...
...The Union City memorial and Flight 93 chapel have more in common than their private origins...
...So he bought the old Mizpah Church...
...The Flight 93 Memorial Chapel was fi nished...
...In a Handelesque fury, he worked for 24 hours straight, compiling detailed plans for a renovation that would turn the old church into a chapel dedicated to the heroes of Flight 93...
...Set in a park roughly the size of a football fi eld, the memorial is elegantly simple...
...By the time of the dedication ceremony, many of the parties on the stage together were barely on speaking terms...
...Many families made the trip to the dedication, some coming from as far as Florida...
...He began selling whatever possessions he could...
...It’s mainly a landscaped park, including a “healing” wetlands area and 40 groves of trees laid out in a giant circle...
...Emerson sent another letter to Alice Hoglan, explaining his plans and asking that she forward it to the rest of the Flight 93 families...
...He asked what sort of project he was working on...
...There were delays and problems...
...The manager called Maggie Hardy Magerko, who owns the 84 Lumber Company, and relayed the story...
...it would not look out of place on the Mall in Washington...
...The idea for the memorial began with Michael Emerson, a 44-year-old retired Marine who lives in nearby Hayward...
...Forty rose-colored one-ton granite slabs are arranged along the path, each polished surface engraved with the name, age, and hometown of one of the passengers or crew members of Flight 93...
...It took some doing...
...He volunteered to procure and ship the granite and to fi nd stonecutters and engravers who would donate their time to carve it...
...The same contrast can be seen between the private projects and the government’s own memorial plans...
Vol. 13 • December 2007 • No. 15
