by Jim Defede
Patricia missed having her parents at home, especially her mother, Hannah was the one everyone turned to in a crisis, the person who held things together. She made sure things were done before anyone else thought about them, and would make everything seem effortless in the process. Patricia wanted to try to fill that void. And even though she was married, with children of her own, she still worried about whether she was up to it. Could she offer the type of support to the rest of her family they would need in the days ahead?
After catching a couple of hours’ sleep, Hannah O’Rourke asked for directions to the Catholic church. The morning sky was clear and a breeze moved through the trees lining the four blocks she walked from the Royal Canadian Legion hall. The church, St. Joseph’s, is located in a part of Gander dominated by religious institutions. The Anglican church is close by, as is the United. And farther down the road are the Baptist and the Evangelical.
St. Joseph’s is a beautiful new church with a great steeple. When Hannah arrived at the church she was met by Father David Heale, a priest for the last thirty years whose family has lived in Newfoundland for three generations. Father Heale was standing on the front steps, greeting parishioners before morning Mass. Not recognizing Hannah, he quickly guessed she was one of the stranded passengers.
“Good morning,” he offered.
Hannah held his hand and tried to remain composed.
“Father, would you pray for our son?” she asked. “He’s a firefighter and he’s missing in New York.”
After morning Mass, Hannah walked back to the legion hall and called her daughter. She felt helpless being so far away.
“We haven’t heard anything yet,” Patricia told her.
Hannah was quiet.
“Don’t give up hope, Ma,” Patricia said. “You know Kevin; he’ll find a way out. He’s a survivor. There are air pockets all over the place.”
“I know,” Hannah said, not wanting to seem pessimistic.
Finally Patricia asked, “Where are you?”
Between calls to Aer Lingus, the Red Cross, and the Salvation Army, Patricia and her husband, Kevin O’Keefe, had finally pieced together that Hannah and Dennis were in Newfoundland and not Nova Scotia. By now, Hannah had realized it as well. Before she hung up, Hannah gave Patricia the phone number for the legion hall.
Throughout the day, Hannah and Dennis talked to Patricia and Kevin’s wife, Maryann, hoping for news. The message, though, was always the same: nothing to report, but don’t lose faith.
Now that her family in New York finally knew where Hannah and Dennis were, they attempted to make their own arrangements to bring them home. Maryann’s brother offered to drive up and bring them back by car, if necessary. Patricia’s husband, Kevin O’Keefe, even tried to reach Senator Hillary Clinton. He talked to a member of Clinton’s staff and explained the situation, and the staffer told him she would try to help.
Several of the people from town offered their homes to Hannah and Dennis. But they refused. They were terrified that if they moved out of the legion hall, someone trying to find them might not know where they were. The hard part of being inside the legion was finding ways to avoid watching the news on television. Neither Hannah nor Dennis could bear to watch scenes of the devastation in New York.
Sensing their need for distraction, folks at the legion were taking turns sitting with the anguished couple. Karen Johnson, the wife of the legion’s bar manager who was eight months pregnant, visited each day so she could spend time with Hannah. Her pregnancy gave the two women something to talk about, from one mother to another.
And then there was Beulah Cooper. Treasurer of the ladies’ auxiliary for the Royal Canadian Legion in Gander, Cooper had been at the hall almost nonstop since September 11. She had three of the passengers staying in her home and had let about a dozen others come over to use her shower.
On Wednesday she convinced Dennis, his nephew Brendan Boyle, and his girlfriend. Amanda, who had been traveling with the older couple, to come to her home, shower, and relax for a couple of hours away from the crowded and noisy hall. Hannah, however, refused to leave. Cooper, a retired government employee, assured her that the folks at the legion would pass along her—Cooper’s—number, but Hannah didn’t want to take the chance. Except for the two hours each day she spent going to morning and evening Mass, Hannah did not set foot outside the legion hall.
If Hannah wouldn’t leave, Cooper decided to try to find other ways to help. She felt a special affinity for Hannah because her son is a volunteer firefighter in Gander. Whenever she hears the sirens of a fire truck, she worries about him. She tried to imagine multiplying that feeling a thousandfold and then having to live with it for days on end.
She knew she couldn’t take away the other woman’s pain, but she might be able to distract Hannah from it for a few minutes at a time. An unreserved woman, Cooper was boisterous and outgoing. And when it came to telling jokes, Cooper was a Newfie Shecky Greene. She loved giving a joke life, and sitting alongside Hannah, she’d fire away:
A fella comes out of a bar after having one too many drinks and he runs into a priest. “Hey,” the fella says, “look at your collar, your shirt’s on backward.”
“I’m a father,” the priest explains to the man.
“So am I,” the fella replies.
“Yes, but I’m the father to many,” the priest offers.
“Well, in that case,” the fella says, “you should have your pants on backward instead of your shirt.”
When Cooper would finish a joke, Hannah would smile, sometimes even laugh, which only encouraged Cooper to tell more.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A treat for Ralph.
Courtesy of Linda Humby
Excluding the crews, there were officially 6,132 passengers on board the thirty-eight flights, but Bonnie Harris feared there were actually more. Had anybody in authority bothered to check the cargo holes in the belly of the planes? Or were they too overwhelmed to search these jumbo jets thoroughly? All night Tuesday she imagined the worst. She kept picturing hidden travelers lying in the darkness of the planes, desperate to get out, ready to do God knows what.
Bright and early Wednesday morning, she decided to find out for herself. She didn’t trust the people running the operation to know what was really going on, so she called the work area for the ground crews directly.
“Do you have any animals on these planes?”
Just as she suspected, they did. The manifests for twelve of the flights showed the planes were carrying an assortment of animals, including at least nine dogs, ten cats, and a pair of extremely rare Bonobo monkeys. Harris asked if anyone had made arrangements to feed or provide water for any of the animals, who, by this point, had been cooped up in tiny cages aboard the planes for almost twenty-four hours. The answer was no. That was all Harris needed to hear. For five years she’d worked for the local chapter of the Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) and was currently the manager of the town’s only animal shelter.
“You just can’t leave them like that,” she complained.
Harris called one of her assistants, Vi Tucker, and the two women loaded up a truck with pet food, water, cleaning supplies, and anything else they thought they might need, and lit out for the airport. Once they arrived, they began sizing up the situation. The animals were stowed away in cages in the same compartments as the luggage. As Harris went around taking a quick look inside each of the planes, she knew these animals were going through their own emotional ordeals. In some cases, Harris couldn’t even see the animals, as they were buried behind mounds of suitcases. But she could hear them crying and barking.
At first she tried to convince airport officials to let her and Vi take the animals off of the planes so they could be fed and cared for properly. A representative for Canada’s agriculture department, however, refused even to consider it. The official was worried the animals might get loose and introduce some strange disease into the country. Rather than go to war with the
bureaucrat, Harris and Tucker and another SPCA worker, Linda Humby, decided to make the best of the situation.
One at a time they crawled into the belly of the airplanes, tunneling their way through the mountains of bags, to reach each animal. As best they could, they would clean the cage and then lay out some food and water.
In addition to being cramped, it was also hot. And it smelled. The worst part, though, was seeing the animals, who were obviously scared and disoriented. The women looked for tags on each of the cages that might give the animal’s name, so that the animal might hear something reassuring. Since they were all coming over from Europe, the woman thought, these pets might not understand a lot of English, but every dog and cat can recognize its name.
On a British Airways plane, they found a cat that had a pill taped to the front of its cage. The cat was apparently epileptic and needed regular medication to ward off seizures. Aboard a Lufthansa flight were two Siamese cats and a ten-week-old purebred American cocker spaniel with the name tag RALPH pinned to the door. The women fell in love with Ralph immediately.
As the woman went from one plane to the next, they became increasingly frustrated. It would take them more than ten hours to visit the twelve planes the animals were on. By the time they finished, they were covered in sweat, dirt, and an assortment of other stains they didn’t even want to think about.
“This isn’t going to work,” Harris told Humby. “It took us all day to feed them just one meal.”
Some of the animals—such as the epileptic cat—would need medication on a regular basis. The only good news was that they didn’t have to worry about the monkeys. The Bonobos were on their way from Belgium to a zoo in Ohio and were being tended to by their handler. Nevertheless, the women were going to need more help with the dogs and cats. Most of all, they needed to get those animals off the plane. Desperate, they called the government’s regional veterinarian, Doug Tweedie.
Doc Tweedie was stunned when Harris told him what was happening. On Tuesday, he had been forty miles away in Bishop Falls tending to a sick cow when he heard about the terrorist attack in the United States and learned of the diverted flights to Gander. Suspecting there might be animals on some of the planes, he asked his wife to check into it. When she called Gander’s town hall on Tuesday, she was told there were no animals on any of the flights—a message she passed on to her husband.
Now he suddenly learned there were animals on those planes. And after hearing the horror stories from Harris, Tweedie leaped into action. After several phone calls to his superiors in St. John’s, a deal was reached whereby the animals could be taken off the plane and kept in a vacant hangar where the women could care for them.
“Thank God,” Humby said when she heard the news from Doc Tweedie. She knew if they hadn’t received permission to remove the animals, some of them would have certainly died.
As the heroines of the SPCA continued their mission of mercy, Constable Oz Fudge was busy honoring a long-distance request from a fellow police officer. Earlier in the day he received a phone call from Sheryl McCollum, an investigator with the Cobb County Police Department in Marietta, Georgia.
“I have a favor to ask,” McCollum began.
“I’m cheap and I’m easy and I’ll do whatever you want,” Fudge replied.
“My sister Sharlene Bowen is on one of the flights.” McCollum explained. “She’s a flight attendant with Delta. She’s staying at the Irving West, room 214. I want you to go down there and give her a hug and tell her that we miss her and we can’t wait for her to come home.”
“All right,” Fudge said.
“Now, you remember that a promise is a promise,” McCollum said.
“Yes, my dear.” Fudge said. “Don’t worry about a thing. I promise.”
Fudge drove to the hotel, but the forty-five-year-old Bowen wasn’t there. He left her a note, cryptically saying he had a message for her. He also left her a present, a Gander Police Department patch.
While Fudge was visiting the hotel, Bowen was walking around town. A flight attendant on Delta Flight 15. Bowen was the middle child in a family of five sisters. All of the sisters were extremely close; none of them had heard from Bowen since her plane was diverted to Gander.
Bowen had managed only a brief phone call to her husband, using the cell phone of one of the passengers. When she first arrived at the hotel from the plane, she tried again, but all of the circuits were busy. Rather than sit in the room and wait for the phones to work, Bowen decided to take a look around. And after thirty hours on the plane she needed to stretch her legs and get a little fresh air.
Back in Georgia, McCollum wasn’t willing to wait. Using her detective skills, she had tracked down her sister’s whereabouts and then called Fudge.
An hour or so after Fudge departed. Bowen returned to the hotel and discovered the note and the patch waiting for her at the front desk, and assumed they must have been some sort of a message for the crew from Delta. The town’s municipal building was only a couple of blocks away, and thinking the police department might be housed inside. Bowen, along with the plane’s pilot and several of her fellow crew members, walked over.
Fudge wasn’t there, but the group did run into Mayor Claude Elliott. The mayor explained that Fudge was working a security detail at the airport and would contact Bowen later. In the meantime, Elliott asked if the Delta crew would like a tour of his town. They all accepted and then piled into the mayor’s car. He drove them to Lake Gander and then out to the airport to see the planes. It was the first time Bowen had a good look at all of the aircraft that had been diverted to Gander.
The mayor then took them over to the community center. Bowen couldn’t believe the amount of supplies people were donating. The mayor was extremely proud of his town’s efforts. He even took them to the local brewery, where they were given free samples of beer. As the mayor continued his guided tour, his cell phone rang.
“Okay,” he said, “I’ll swing by my house and pick up my clubs. See you soon.”
It was the manager of the local golf course, Elliott explained. They were allowing passengers to play for free, but the course didn’t have enough spare sets of clubs to outfit everyone. The course manager was calling his regular customers, hoping they would bring their clubs to the course for the passengers to borrow. So far everybody the manager contacted had said yes.
By the time Bowen returned to the hotel several hours later, she found another note from Fudge and a police department baseball cap. This time, though, Fudge had left his phone number.
“Don’t move,” he implored when she called. “I’ll be there in five minutes.”
Three minutes later Fudge arrived. Bowen was standing in the lobby, still not sure why he needed to talk to her. The constable walked up to her and, without saying anything, wrapped his arms around her and squeezed tight.
“That’s from your sister,” he finally said.
CHAPTER EIGHT
George, Deb, Lana, Bill, Edna, and Winnie reunite in Houston, April 16, 2002.
Photo courtesy of Lana Etherington
Twenty-four hours after the attack on the World Trade Center, there were still passengers on board a handful of planes in Gander waiting to be processed. Despite the delay, the 116 people aboard Continental Flight 5 from London to Houston were in amazingly good spirits. This was largely attributable to three factors. First, everyone recognized that in light of the tragic events in the United States, they had no right to complain. Second, they understood that griping wouldn’t do any good anyway, so they might as well make the best of it. And third, the flight attendants had unlocked the liquor carts and were letting everyone pour their own drinks for free.
Once the sun went down on Tuesday, the plane developed the vibe of a freewheeling United Nations cocktail party, with passengers mixing, mingling, and imbibing. It was during this revelry that Deborah Farrar sipped her first gin-and-tonic. Her trip overseas had been full of firsts for the twenty-eight-year-old Texan—the most signifi
cant being that it was the first time she’d ever been outside the United States. The whole point of this vacation was to take chances, experience new things, and expand her horizons; and although the reason for her current predicament was tragic, she found herself enjoying the company of the other passengers.
Ten days earlier she’d taken off from her job as an account executive for an information technology firm in Houston and had flown off to Europe all by herself. She went to Oslo and Bergen in Norway for the first six days before ending up in London. She was due back at work later in the week but now found herself in a place she had never heard of before and in the midst of something she wasn’t quite sure how to handle.
When the plane landed Tuesday afternoon and the pilot announced what happened in New York, Farrar broke down in tears. She wanted to talk to her family, hear their voices, and let them know she was okay, but none of the phones on the plane had worked. Eventually, a cell phone belonging to one of the passengers in first class locked onto a usable signal, and the man let everyone on board make a call. A line stretched down the aisle of the aircraft as one by one his fellow passengers and the flight’s crew members talked to loved ones back home for a few minutes. Five hours after landing, Farrar reached her father.