by Jim Defede
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.
In 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.
Through 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.
Cleaning 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.
Before 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.
After 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.
One rumor that did turn out to be true: the wife and children of actor Woody Harrelson were stranded in Gander on their way home from a vacation in Europe. The star of The People vs. Larry Flynt. Natural Born Killers, and Kingpin wasn’t with his family, but was able to talk to them by phone. The Harrelson family spent their time quietly in Gander and then went home with everyone else when their flight was cleared to leave.
One Hollywood personality who was in Gander was actress Marisa Berenson, one of the world’s first supermodels, who’d made her screen debut in Death in Venice in 1970 and won critical acclaim for her role in 1972’s Cabaret, in which she played Natalie Landauer, the Jewish department-store heiress who is given English lessons by Liza Minnelli’s character and then comes to her later for sexual advice. In 1975, she starred as Ryan O’Neal’s wife in Barry Lyndon, the Stanley Kubrick visual masterpiece set in eighteenth-century Ireland.
Less than a month before her plane was diverted to Gander, a story about Berenson and her sister, Berry, was featured in The New York Times Sunday Magazine. The magazine noted that Yves Saint Laurent had dubbed Marisa “the girl of the seventies,” and Elle magazine crowned her “the most beautiful girl in the world.” In recent years she had continued to act, appearing recently in a play on Broadway.
By a cruel coincidence, while Marisa was flying from Paris to New York on September 11, her sister was on one of the planes taken over by the hijackers. Berry Berenson, a well-known photographer and the widow of actor Anthony Perkins, was aboard American Airlines Flight 11, en route from Boston to Los Angeles, when it crashed into the North Tower of the Trade Center.
The two sisters had been extremely close since their childhood. Their grandmother was Elsa Schiaparelli, the famed couturiere whose use of shocking pink electrified the fashion world. Their great-uncle was the art historian Bernard Berenson. As children, they were taught to dance by Gene Kelly and developed a sense of style under the tutelage of Diana Vreeland, the legendary editor in chief of Vogue magazine. As adults, they were part of the international jet set, had been regulars at Studio 54, and counted Andy Warhol and Diane von Furstenberg as their friends.
“I’m not complaining,” Marisa had told the Times, “but everyone has their pain and tragedies in life—it doesn’t matter how famous or blessed you are.”
Six weeks after leaving Lewisporte, Rockefeller Foundation vice-president Denise Gray-Felder still hadn’t heard from either Lewisporte Middle School principal Pam Coish about their offer to furnish the school with new computers or from Pastor Russell Bartlett about a grant to the church. Neither of them, it turned out, wanted to seem pushy. By not calling, they were giving the foundation a chance to reconsider their pledge.
Gray-Felder asked if Coish had made a decision about the computers. Did the school need something else? Coish said the computers would be a wonderful gift. Initially the school had asked for less than $35,000 to replace the thirty-five computers. Gray-Felder realized school officials didn’t want to appear greedy or to be taking advantage of the foundation. She summarily rejected the number as being too low. She wanted to make sure the kids had top-of-the-line computers. The school finally agreed to accept a total grant of $52,500, which came to $1,500 a computer.
Pastor Bartlett was equally circumspect. After hemming and hawing, he finally agreed to accept a grant of $15,000, which went into a fund to help people in need.
The people from the Rockefeller Foundation weren’t the only ones who offered donations to their hosts. In nearly all of the shelters, passengers passed the hat, often generating several thousand dollars in cash, which they gave to the group or school that had taken them in. One passenger pledged to replace the roof on one of the local churches, while others wrote checks directly to the Canadian Red Cross, the Salvation Army, or one of the town governments, as a sign of appreciation.
The most ambitious fund-raising effort was taken up by the passengers of Delta Flight 15, who stayed in the town of Lewisporte. While they were flying to Atlanta from Newfoundland, a small group of passengers talked about how they wished there was something they could do to thank everyone. They realized Newfoundland was going through tough economic times, and towns such as Lewisporte had been particularly hard hit.
One of the passengers, a Dr. Robert Ferguson from North Carolina, had the idea of creating a college scholarship fund, which could select a deserving student every year. Others thought it was a great idea, and before long another passenger, Shirley Brooks, convinced the flight crew to let her get on the plane’s public-address system to announce the idea to the 217 other people on board. Pledge sheets were quickly passed around. And by the time the plane reached Atlanta, more than $15,000 was pledged for the fund. Today, the group has its own Web site—www.deltaflight15.org—and the money collected is being overseen by a well-respected charitable foundation in the United States. The fund, known officially as the Gander Flight 15 Scholarship Fund, was preparing to announce its first scholarship recipient in Lewisporte as this book was going to press during the summer of 2002.
For Clark and Roxanne Loper and their adopted daughter Alexandria, the final leg of the long journey home was not without problems. After they had stopped in Tennessee on Monday night, Roxanne’s flu had progressed to the point where she was having trouble breathing. A pediatric nurse by profession, she knew she needed to see a doctor. Early Tuesday morning she went to the emergency room of the local hospital, where doctors told her what she already feared—her flu had turned into pneumonia.
Roxanne didn’t want to stop. They were so close to their home in Alto, Texas. She just wanted to get there and have this entire trip be over. She missed her house with the brown tin roof. She missed her ranch with the horses and the chickens and the dogs. She missed seeing her parents. She missed being alone with her husband and sleeping in her own bed. And most of all she missed holding her other daughter, Samantha, whom they had adopted a year earlier.
Rather than admit Roxanne into the hospital, the doctors filled her full of antibiotics and let her go. On Wednesday, the Lopers crossed into Texas. Their first stop was Clark’s parents’ house in Tyler. A banner welcoming them back greeted them when they arrived. Roxanne’s mother pulled up thirty minutes later with Samantha. The two-year-old had grown so much since they had left that Roxanne started to cry. Although both sets of parents were anxious to hear about their adventure, Roxanne wanted to leave. There would be plenty of time to catch up later. Since picking up Alexandria in Kazakhstan, they had traveled nearly 8,000 miles by plane, ferry, and automobile, and now the only thing that separated them from their home was a fifty-two-mile drive down U.S. Highway 69 from Tyler to Alto. They raced down that last patch of roadway, and with each passing mile marker, Roxanne’s spirits lifted. They pulled into the driveway and, like kids running down the stairs on Christmas morning, couldn’t wait to get through the door. It was quiet and peaceful, and they were all together, safe and sound, a new family, a complete family. Walking through the entrance, Roxanne said the only thing that made sense in that moment, two words she’d waited more than a week to say: “We’re home.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book was the idea of Judith Regan, who saw the wonder of this story long before anyone else. I am grateful that she offered me, a relatively unknown writer embarking upon his first book, the opportunity to tackle this project. I’m also indebted to everyone else at ReganBooks and HarperCollins for their assistance, especially Conor Risch, whom I made sweat through several deadlines and whose suggestions made this a better read.
Ultimatel
y, though, the people most responsible for this book are the passengers and townspeople who so generously allowed me into their lives and trusted me to tell their story faithfully. In the course of researching this book, I contacted approximately 180 people, and only one declined to be interviewed. It would be impossible for me to list everyone, so I won’t even try. Many brought me into their homes, fed me, and in one case, even tried to take me ice fishing. There are a few, however, whose aid I would like to recognize: Betsy Saunders, from the town government in Gander, who helped me get my bearings when I first arrived in town. Karen Mills and her staff at the Comfort Inn, who not only put up with me for more than a month, but became my de facto secreterial pool. And Professor Pat Byrne, of Memorial University in St. John’s, for the afternoon we spent talking about Newfoundland’s past, including the history of the so-called Screeching-In ceremony. The description of this in chapter 17 was drawn from these conversations as well as from an article the professor wrote called “Booze, Ritual, and the Invention of Tradition: The Phenomenon of the Newfoundland Screech-In.”
Finally, I need to acknowledge the help of my friends and family, particularly Anne Windishar and Jess Walter, whose friendship and support I will always treasure; my sister, Daria, and her husband, Tommy, who are my biggest boosters; my nephews, Connor and Chris, who give me joy; and my mother, Joanne, who makes me want to do my best.
About the Author
JIM DEFEDE has been an award-winning journalist for sixteen years, first with the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington, and then with the Miami New Times. His work has appeared in Talk, The New Republic, and Newsday. He is currently a metro columnist for the Miami Herald.