by Dan Barry
This is just the ranger’s way of buckling you in. Helping some to remember what we already know. Helping others, especially those who were not yet born, to envision a beautiful, calamitous day now nearly 15 years in the past.
His name is Robert Franz, he is 61, and his title is “interpretive park ranger,” which means that his job is to tell the story of what happened in that color-dappled field behind him, again and again and again.
This is the Flight 93 National Memorial, by far the most removed of the three 9/11 crash sites. A visit requires a roller-coaster journey through the arresting Allegheny Mountains, up and down and up and down, past a Confederate flag here, a Trump sign there, to a 2,200-acre field set aside for reflection.
“Mayday! Mayday! Get out of here!” the ranger says, echoing the alarm that was heard by air traffic controllers. The words chill the late-summer air, as children fidget and bees buzz about.
He continues the story of United Airlines Flight 93, bound for San Francisco from Newark. How four hijackers redirect the jet southeast, most likely to crash into the nation’s capital. How many of the 40 crew members and passengers fought back. How this hurtling jetliner nearly flipped before crashing at 563 miles an hour into the soft, strip-mined earth, killing all.
“The crew and passengers put democracy in action,” Mr. Franz says. “They take a vote”—to storm the cockpit and regain control of the plane.
We connect to that day in our own way, and the storyteller in the broad-brimmed ranger’s hat is no different. He was born into the military, his father an Army lifer who served in World War II’s European theater, his mother a daughter of the French underground. They were married at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, and went on a short honeymoon in an Army jeep.
Their son Rob spent the better part of two decades flying Army Hueys and Black Hawks and training other soldiers how to fly helicopters. He left the service in early 2001, and was at home on Cape Cod, Mass., that Tuesday, watching the news. He thought of those he had trained, and felt guilt for not being among them for the deployments sure to come.
Mr. Franz focused on a real estate career, volunteered with the local veterans’ committee and worked briefly as a police officer. Then, in late 2011, he spotted a listing on a government website for a seasonal job as an interpretive park ranger at the Flight 93 Memorial. He quickly applied, he recalls, sensing a chance to “complete the circle.”
Soon he was driving about 600 miles west to Shanksville every April, and staying until October. He proved to be such a powerful storyteller, his presentation informed by his knowledge of aeronautics, that he was recently offered permanent employment, which he accepted.
“He told this story unlike anyone I had heard,” says Stephen Clark, the superintendent for the national parks in western Pennsylvania. “And, of course, being a veteran makes it all the more special.”
Sometimes Mr. Franz stands at the memorial plaza, answering questions about the time of the crash and the location of the bathrooms. He commiserates as people recount their own connections to the day, and keeps his counsel as conspiracy theorists question whether such a crash even occurred. “If somebody’s made up their mind, there’s nothing I can do,” he says.
Sometimes he distributes Flight 93 Junior Ranger handbooks, explaining to young visitors what activities they need to complete before receiving a Junior Ranger badge. The 22-page booklet is a thoughtful study in trying to find the right words: Early in the flight, their plane was hijacked by four men. To hijack a plane means to take control over it. These hijackers were angry at the United States of America…
But there are words, and then there are words. When children ask about the recovery of bodies, Mr. Franz redirects, ever so slightly. Since there were only remains, no bodies, he explains that a spot out there, beyond the wildflowers, is now “a final resting place.”
And sometimes, Mr. Franz is standing before another 11 o’clock crowd, as he is now, telling an American epic in less than a half-hour, all the while reminding himself not to get emotional again when he comes to a certain point.
The more familiar narrative of Flight 93 focuses on those Mr. Franz calls the “big guys”—Todd Beamer, for example, the young software salesman who helped to organize the passenger revolt and whose last recorded words of “Let’s roll!” became a national rallying cry. But the park ranger makes the gentle point that the revolt was “a group effort.”
“Let me tell you about Sandy Bradshaw,” he says, recalling the 38-year-old flight attendant who, in a furtive call to her husband, explained how she was boiling water to hurl at the hijackers.
“Let me tell you about Honor Elizabeth Wainio,” he says, recalling the up-and-coming business executive known as Lizz who, in a moment of supreme compassion, called to comfort her stepmother about what was to happen, and who was part of the revolt. She was 27.
“No, it’s not looking good,” Mr. Franz says. “But they weren’t going to give up.”
The park ranger, the father of two adult daughters, looks down and takes a long, unscripted pause. As he struggles to regain his composure, the wildflower setting becomes church-quiet, the bikers and the Amish now silent congregants in outdoor pews.
Soon these people will wander off, some over to the bone-white memorial wall, some up to the new visitors center, where Flight 93 shirts and mugs are sold, and an interactive display includes recordings from the fatal flight.
Soon, a Korean War veteran will tell Mr. Franz that he thinks the federal government “overdid it” with this park, and a 9-year-old boy in a tank top and a Penn State ball cap will ask for a Junior Ranger handbook so that he can learn about this place and earn his plastic badge.
But right now, Mr. Franz is taking a brief private moment in public that seems to him like an hour. Sandy Bradshaw. Lizz Wainio. Democracy in action…
His emotions in check, Mr. Franz acknowledges his awkward pause and returns seamlessly to his story. How the airplane flew right over Route 30, “the road you came in on.” How this elevated ground is a place to reflect on the tragic loss of life, yes, but how it is also a place to honor the courage of the passengers and crew of Flight 93. And that, he says, “is a good story.”
It’s 11:30.
“Thank you,” the ranger says. “Have a great day.”
A Trip Down Obama Highway in an Old Dixie Town
RIVIERA BEACH, FLA.—OCTOBER 24, 2016
The rechristened road runs beside a railroad freight line, slicing across a modest corner of Palm Beach County and a considerable section of the Southern psyche. It used to be called Old Dixie Highway.
But now this two-mile stretch, coursing through the mostly black community of Riviera Beach, goes by a new name. Now, when visitors want to eat takeout from Rodney’s Crabs, or worship at the Miracle Revival Deliverance Church, they turn onto President Barack Obama Highway.
Our national journey along this highway is nearing its end, these eight years a blur and a crawl. That historic inauguration of hope. Those siren calls for change. The grand ambitions tempered or blocked by recession and time, an inflexible Congress and a man’s aloofness.
War, economic recovery, Obamacare, Osama bin Laden. The mass shootings, in a nightclub, in a church—in an elementary school. The realization of so much still to overcome, given all the Fergusons; given all those who shamelessly questioned whether our first black president was even American by birth.
His towering oratory. His jump shot. His graying hair. His family. His wit. His tears.
The presidency of Mr. Obama, which ends in three months, will be memorialized in many grand ways, most notably by the planned construction of a presidential library in Chicago. But in crowded and isolated places across the country, his name has also been quietly incorporated into the everyday local patter, in ways far removed from politics and world affairs.
You can find a trapdoor spider (Aptostichus barackobamai) inching across certain parts of Northern California, or see a bright orange spangled darte
r (Etheostoma obama) swimming in a Tennessee river, or come upon a lichen (Caloplaca obamae) the color of gold on Santa Rosa Island, off the California coast.
You can visit the Barack Obama Academy in Plainfield, N.J., or the Barack Obama Male Leadership Academy in Dallas, or the Barack Obama Academy of International Studies in Pittsburgh. You can drive down Barack Obama Avenue in East St. Louis, or Obama Way in Seaside, Calif.—or President Barack Obama Highway here in Riviera Beach, just 10 miles and another reality from the stately pleasure-dome Mar-a-Lago.
This Obama road runs through the complex reality of America: the family-owned businesses and the ghostly vacant storefronts, a church here, a liquor store there, gas stations, convenience stores, a football field, a day care center, a medium-size manufacturing business that is expanding and hiring.
“Everything the president fought for and is fighting for—it’s there,” says the mayor, Thomas Masters.
Older black residents of Riviera Beach recall a time, not so long ago, when you avoided the east side of Old Dixie Highway after dusk because that was the white side of town, and no good would come from lingering.
West of the tracks was for black residents, the men who worked mackerel down at the docks, the women who worked as domestics in swanky Palm Beach homes. The only slice of white on the black side was a subdivision called Monroe Heights, which was bordered, or protected, by a high cinder block wall built in the 1940s. If your ball bounced over that wall into whiteness, you found yourself another ball.
“They put the wall up to keep us from looking at them,” says Dan Calloway, 78, a former deputy sheriff and athlete revered in Riviera Beach for his half-century of mentoring and coaching local children.
The glaucoma affecting Mr. Calloway’s sight has not dimmed the vividness of the Riviera Beach of his youth: the guava and mango trees, the chickens, the horse-riding lawman who would snap his whip at black people; that is, until a man named Shotgun Johnny pulled him from his horse and beat the hate out of him. Mr. Calloway remembers, too, how the “black” beach was moved up to Jupiter when Singer Island suddenly became desirable, and how the Ku Klux Klan occasionally announced itself.
“They burned those crosses,” Mr. Calloway says. “We had to blow the lamps out and hide under the bed.”
Dora Johnson, 88, remembers one cross that set Old Dixie Highway aglow. It was around 1948, and she was married with two babies.
“My God, it was way up in the air,” she says of the symbol of her faith set aflame. “It was very upsetting. I’m a deep Christian, but seeing it, you’d break down and want to do something you shouldn’t do.”
With time came change. In 1962, F. Malcolm Cunningham Sr. became the first black person elected to the City Council—and, some claim, the first black elected official in the South since Reconstruction. By the end of that decade, the city was predominantly black, and by 1975, it had its first black mayor.
The notion of renaming the highway after the country’s first black president popped up at a City Council meeting shortly after Mr. Obama’s 2008 victory. A citizen raised the prospect before moving on to discussing a local supermarket. The suggestion went nowhere.
It was resurrected a couple of years ago by the indefatigable Mayor Masters, 64, who has followed a circuitous path to politics. A bishop in a nondenominational church, he began preaching at the age of 4—he was once known as the “Wonder Boy Preacher”—and has demonstrated a talent for publicity ever since.
Mr. Masters is not a Riviera Beach native; he moved here from California nearly 30 years ago. But as a black man, he was bothered that a constant celebration of “Old Dixie” ran through the center of his predominantly African-American city. “Dixie meant slavery, bigotry, the K.K.K.,” he says.
While researching the history of his adopted city, the mayor says, he spoke with a white-haired woman in a wheelchair, Ms. Johnson, who dearly wanted to fill him in. “I wanted to tell him about the cross burnings, because there’s not many of us left,” she says. “So much had happened on Old Dixie.”
Mr. Masters resolved to have the stretch of the highway in his city renamed, gathered community support and put it to the City Council. The vote was 4-to-1 in favor, and the sole dissenting member was also the sole white member: Dawn Pardo. But do not prejudge.
Ms. Pardo, who grew up in New York, says she voted against the plan because she envisioned a grander, more ambitious tribute, perhaps at the city’s recently renovated, multimillion-dollar marina. The monument or renaming could also honor various black trailblazers in Riviera Beach’s past.
“If we’re going to honor him, let’s make it great,” she remembers arguing.
But the mayor prevailed. At a ceremony in December, residents cheered as workers in bucket trucks took down the old and put up the new. This meant, among other things, that traffic would flow through an intersection of Riviera Beach streets named after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mr. Obama.
“It made me feel real good,” Ms. Johnson, an honored guest at the event, says. “Now I don’t have to think about Old Dixie.”
But the reality of America again imposed. News of the name change had spread well beyond Florida, and now came the emails and telephone calls.
If you want to honor a Black man then Honor Black Men who are fighting for our Country and Not against it…
“This One” is lucky that I am not standing in judgment…
Why is everyone so bent on changing this road’s name? I do not get it.
A lot of southern blacks are wrapped up in the past…
And there was much, much worse. Bad enough for Mr. Masters to alert the Secret Service.
“Hating on the president just for who he is,” the mayor says. “It got so bad, they were making direct or indirect threats: ‘He needs to be hung from the street sign.’”
The angry calls and emails became distant shouts, leaving Riviera Beach to incorporate into its lexicon a street name that was nearly the opposite of “Old Dixie.” It has meant changes to stationery, of course, but also challenges for businesses trying to direct customers.
“Everybody from here knows Old Dixie, you feel me?” says Rodney Saunders. He owns Rodney’s Crabs, a takeout restaurant on the highway, a few dozen yards from where the gray cinder block remnants of the old Monroe Heights decline in the shadows of sea grape trees.
“When people ask me for directions,” Mr. Saunders continues, “I say, ‘Old Dixie—but now it’s President Barack Obama Highway.’”
Some along the highway call the renaming a nice but benign gesture. Some say they never took umbrage with Old Dixie; it was just a name. Some simply shrug, as if to suggest the new street name means more to out-of-towners than it does to locals.
But Mr. Calloway, the legendary coach and mentor with failing vision, says he can see into the future—20, 30, 40 years from now—when a long-ago decision will have children wanting to know the story behind the name on a sign.
EPILOGUE
In the Middle of Nowhere, a Nation’s Center
BUTTE COUNTY, S.D.—JUNE 2, 2008
The mesmerizing prairie monotony along Highway 85 south is abruptly broken by a blue sign about the size of a cafeteria tray. In roadside shorthand it offers an expeditionary challenge worthy of Jules Verne: this way, 7.8 miles, to the CENTER OF THE NATION.
The unpaved road at the turnoff greets cars of the curious with growls of annoyance, and for several miles offers only sheared sheep, skittish antelope and grass. But just when suspicions of a prank begin to invade the mind, something 100 yards off the road catches the eye, something red, and white—and, yes, blue.
It is a wind-tattered American flag, flapping at the top of a silvery pole that rises from the Dakota moonscape like the claim stake of some disoriented astronaut. A hand-scrawled sign propped against a barbed-wire fence provides confirmation: Though the absence of a souvenir stand or even a snow-cone booth would suggest otherwise, this remote spot is, in fact, the declared geographic center of the Un
ited States.
Over the years this dot on the map has been treated as a holy place and as a place to share a six-pack, an inconvenient place, a nearly forgotten place, a place to reflect on something larger than one’s self. Who knows why the centers of things matter—the centers of cities, of states, of countries—but they do.
No one knows this better than David Doyle, the chief geodetic surveyor for the National Geodetic Survey at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees a national coordinate system for mapping and other scientific and engineering uses. He recalls that when his mentor retired 20 years ago, the man plopped a file three inches thick on Mr. Doyle’s desk and said, “Now it’s yours.”
The file overflowed with letters and documents, some dating back to 1925, all concerning the “center” of places American. Though the subject is hardly a government priority, Mr. Doyle says he continues to maintain the file because he now knows what his predecessor knew: “People find this to be really, really important.”
For a while, this country’s geographic center bounced around the heartland like the ball on an old movie-screen singalong. When Alaska joined the union nearly 50 years ago, the government determined that the center—the theoretical balance point—had moved from outside Lebanon, Kan., to some inaccessible prairie here in Butte County, 439 miles to the northwest. (Fret not, Lebanon has adapted; it now calls itself the “Historical Geographical Center of the 48 States or the Contiguous United States.”)
Then, when Hawaii became a state soon after, the center moved again—just six miles to this spot, about 21 miles north of Belle Fourche, a small city of ranching and agriculture. The center of the nation was now a few dozen yards from what was then Highway 85; local officials gazed into the open pasture and saw visions of camera-wielding tourists, jammed parking lots, a Belle Fourche boom.
“Now We’re Rolling,” proclaimed the local newspaper, The Belle Fourche Bee.