The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland (24 page)

Hannah, Kevin, and Dennis O’Rourke, FDNY Medal Day, 1988.
Courtesy of the O’Rourke family

O
n September 23, firefighter Kevin O’Rourke’s body was recovered amid the 1.8 million tons of debris that had once been the World Trade Center. Officials believe O’Rourke was in a stairwell inside the North Tower, somewhere between the sixty-fifth and the seventieth floors, when it collapsed. After he was found, his body was placed onto a stretcher, draped in an American flag, and carried out by a team of his fellow firefighters, including his captain, Phil Ruvolo.

The next afternoon, when Kevin’s remains were positively identified, a delegation from the fire department drove to his home in Hewlett, Long Island. When Maryann saw the men standing on her front stoop, in their full dress uniforms, she knew in her heart why they were there. “Maryann, we found Kevin,” Ruvolo said.

Through tears, she thanked the men for finding her husband. Everyone in the family was still praying for a miracle and that Kevin would be found alive, but after so many days, Maryann had steeled herself for the possibility that he was dead. Privately she feared they would never find his body and that Kevin would not receive a proper funeral Mass and burial.

Patricia O’Keefe, Kevin’s sister, was also at the house when the news was delivered. It would fall upon her to tell her parents, Hannah and Dennis. As Ruvolo and the others comforted Maryann, Patricia drove to her parents’ home in nearby Cedarhurst. She tried to compose herself on the ride over, but realized that telling her parents Kevin was dead would be the most difficult thing she had ever done in her life. When she walked in the house, her father was in the living room. “They found him, Dad,” Patricia said. “He’s gone, though. Kevin’s gone.”

The two held each other and cried. They stopped when they realized they still had to tell Hannah, who was upstairs getting ready to drive over to Maryann’s house. As Patricia and Dennis reached the top of the stairs, Hannah was waiting for them in the hallway. She could tell what had happened by their expressions. “Oh no,” she cried, “not my Kevin. Not my Kevin.” Patricia had never seen her mother, who was always so strong, in so much pain. It startled her. And this anguish is an image she will never forget.

The funeral was held on September 28 at St. Joachim’s Church on Long Island. It was one of eight funerals and memorial Masses held for firefighters that day. The mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani, attended Kevin’s funeral, as did hundreds of firefighters. There was even a Canadian Mountie, who came to pay his respects on behalf of the people of Canada. Kevin’s captain offered a eulogy, as did his sister and brother. Kevin’s older daughter, Corinne, spoke about how her father had always been a hero to her.

Since the funeral, Hannah goes to St. Joachim’s every day and quietly cries through morning Mass. She tells her family that as she kneels and prays, she can see Kevin as a young boy receiving his first Holy Communion, and she can see him years later being confirmed. She cries in the church and then she goes home and tries not to cry again during the day.

Through it all, she has not forgotten the kindness of the people in Gander and continues to write and talk to both Beulah Cooper and Tom Mercer. She hopes to return to Gander during the next year with the rest of her family.

E
arly Saturday morning, a few hours after George Vitale’s flight landed in Newark, the New York State trooper was back to work, coordinating dignitary access to the site of the Trade Center collapse. Vitale couldn’t bring himself to visit the site, working instead from the governor’s offices in midtown Manhattan. By now he realized there was little hope of his friend David DeRubbio being found alive.

Vitale worked sixteen-hour days, and rather than going home, he slept either in the office or at a nearby hotel. Truth be told, he didn’t want to go home. He didn’t want to be alone. He’d sleep for a few hours and then go for runs through the streets of Manhattan. Eventually, he returned to his apartment in Brooklyn, and his first morning back, he went for his normal run along the bicycle path near the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. This time, though, instead of seeing the towers in the distance, he saw only the smoke, which was rising from the fires still burning at the Trade Center site.

Once again he felt overwhelmed by emotion. He cut over to the road above the bike path. It was lined with trees, which obscured his view of southern Manhattan and the gaping void of the towers site. He’d always taken great solace in running—it was like therapy for him—and now a part of that daily routine was forever spoiled. He knew he would never be able to run along that path again, even though it was something he loved doing. He was angry and sad and depressed and still feeling guilty that there wasn’t more he could be doing.

The tensions at work were constant. One day he would have to bring in inspectors to test the governor’s office for signs of anthrax. The next he would arrange to take a vanload of state senators to Ground Zero so they could see the devastation for themselves. And on another day he’d be working with distraught family members of victims who needed help getting a death certificate for their lost loved one.

Several weeks after he left Gander, Vitale felt himself coming apart. He was sitting at his desk, talking on the phone and dealing with yet another bureacratic problem, when he received a call on his other line. Normally, he never places a person on hold. He just allows the second call to go to his voice mail. Something about this call was different, however. When he answered the second line, he heard a familiar voice. It was Derm Flynn, the mayor of Appleton, Newfoundland, Flynn and Vitale had become friends during the trooper’s stay in Appleton. “Just thinking about you, buddy,” Flynn said. “How’s she going?”

Flynn’s voice brought back all the good memories Vitale had about the people in Newfoundland. Their kindness, their strength, their support. He could feel his hands shaking. They spoke for several minutes. Flynn talked about his wife and how everyone in town missed having the passengers around. Flynn asked how everything was going in New York, and Vitale told him. By the time they finished, Vitale felt better than he had felt in weeks. Over the next few months Flynn seemed to call him at just those moments when he was feeling his lowest.

In February, Vitale and another passenger from his flight, Tom McKeon, returned to Newfoundland, where they were the guests of honor at Appleton’s annual Winterfest, an event that includes snowmobile races, ax-throwing contests, and a musical production featuring local singers. Vitale plans on going back again in the near future.

A memorial Mass was held for firefighter David DeRubbio on November 10, 2001 at St. Agatha’s Roman Catholic Church in Brooklyn. His body was never recovered.

I
n the weeks following the diverted flights, several towns in Newfoundland held local elections. Gander Mayor Claude Elliott easily won. And in Glenwood, not only was Janet Shaw—the woman who’d scolded Bill Fitzpatrick for staying out late when his mother was worrying about him—reelected to the town council, but because of her tell-it-like-it-is style, she received more votes than any other council member, which promoted her to the position of mayor.

T
hrough the fall of 2001, Texan Deborah Farrar and Marine lieutenant Greg Curtis talked by phone and exchanged notes. They had hoped to get together before the end of the year and see if their budding romance would pick up where it left off in Gambo, but in December, Curtis was sent to Afghanistan. The events of September 11 had brought the two of them together. And for the time being, the subsequent war on terrorism was going to keep them apart.

When the Afghan capital city of Kabul was captured from the Taliban, Curtis was part of the force assigned to protect the newly reopened U.S. embassy. Farrar and Curtis traded e-mails while he was in Kabul, and Farrar sent him care packages. In one, she packed magazines and food and other items she knew he would like. She also added something special. A little inside joke from their time together. She threw in a pack of bikini underwear—the kind Curtis jokingly told her he had bought at Wal-Mart.

In April, George and Edna Neal flew down to Houston to visit their former houseguests—Farrar, Winnie House, Lana Etherington, and Bill Cash. The Houston tribe feted the Neals, taking them on trips around Texas, hosting parties for them, and generally trying to show them as enjoyable a time as they themselves had had in Gambo. They all remain close friends, and in May 2002, Farrar even flew to England to attend House’s wedding.

C
leaning up after the passengers had left, a teacher at Lakewood Academy in Glenwood discovered something amazing on the blackboard of the sixth-grade classroom. Using various colored chalks and crayons, someone had drawn a picture depicting a human body in flight. It was at least three feet by four feet and at the bottom of the blackboard it was signed,
MANY THANKS, CLEMENS
.

Clemens was a passenger, Clemens Briels, and when teachers at the school did a little further checking, they learned that he was a renowned Dutch artist. In fact, Briels was one of the official artists for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. The drawing he crafted on the school blackboard was a version of his piece
A Jump for Joy
. one of the paintings he created especially for the Olympic Games and which was on display in Salt Lake City. The principal had the blackboard removed from the wall, framed, and covered with Plexiglas. It now hangs in the school’s library.

B
efore leaving Gander, the Tent Girls, Lisa Zale and Sara Wood, donated all of their equipment to the Knights of Columbus and spent part of the day scrubbing all of the bathrooms in the hall. They just wanted to do something tangible as a way of thanking their hosts. Zale made it home to Dallas in time to take one of her sons to his Little League baseball game, and that night she attended her high school reunion.

Lenny and Maria O’Driscoll spent their last night in Gander gathered around a piano in Doug and Rose Sheppard’s home, playing and singing songs. Maria, a classical violinist who toured Europe before moving to the United States, is also well trained on the piano. For the Sheppards, she played a mix of Irish music and a bit of ragtime and then performed a beautiful classical piece by Enrico Toselli: “Toselli’s 78.” Lenny didn’t have the time to look up any of his old relatives in Newfoundland, but his time in Gander rekindled his love for his native land and he promised to return soon.

Lufthansa Captain Reinhard Knoth asked his passengers if they wanted to continue on to New York or return to Frankfurt. Not surprisingly, the Americans on the plane wanted to go on to the states and the Europeans wanted to turn around.

Knoth, however, was starting to feel the same way about this journey as his passenger, Werner Baldessarini, the Hugo Boss chairman. In Knoth’s mind this was such a unique event, such a special moment in time, he believed the passengers and the crew should see it through together. On Saturday. Lufthansa Flight 400 was given clearance to proceed on to New York and Knoth had made special arrangements with the airline. When the flight landed Saturday afternoon at JFK, the American passengers were free to leave, while the European passengers walked off the plane, across the terminal, and immediately onto a waiting Lufthansa plane that would take them directly to Frankfurt. For his part, Baldessarini wasn’t bothered by having to first fly to New York. Touching down in the city and then flying home to Germany, gave him time to reflect, and symbolically at least, it helped close the circle of events from the last week.

A
fter the last plane left Gander, wild rumors circulated around town about who had actually stayed there. Several people would swear that former vice president Al Gore was on a private plane that landed up the road in Stephenville, where he was secretly whisked aboard an American military jet and flown to the United States. Another rumor had Gore being led under heavy security onto a ferry in the town of Port aux Basques.

As it turned out, Gore had spent September 11 in Europe, not in Newfoundland. And he flew home several days after the tragedy. He never stopped in Newfoundland.

Another urban legend: fashion guru Calvin Klein was in Gander. The rumor had him sleeping inside the auditorium for the College of the North Atlantic at night and wandering the town by day. He reportedly didn’t want anyone to know who he was, so he always wore a hat and sunglasses.