More than 20 people with ties to Western Massachusetts were killed in the 9/11 attacks on America.
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The Republican | Don TreegerIn a 2001 file photo, Robert J. Harrington of West Springfield displays a picture of his daughter, Melissa Harrington Hughes, who was killed Sept. 11 in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City.Robert Harrington’s daughter was on the telephone, calling from the 101st floor of the World Trade Center.
An explosion had just ripped through the steel-and-glass skyscraper, and Melissa Harrington-Hughes – a 31-year old international trade consultant from West Springfield – was trapped 1,000 feet above the street.
Her words were coming so fast, Robert Harrington could barely understand them.
“She said a plane or a bomb hit the building, and there was lot of smoke” Harrington, now 70, recalls. “I told her to get to a stairwell, to make sure she got out of there.”
For Harrington-Hughes and nearly 3,000 others, including 21 with ties to Western Massachusetts, there was no way out that day.
It was Sept. 11, 2001. The horrors of 9/11 – a day that changed how many Americans regarded their country, the world and life itself – were just beginning.
In the next two hours, both World Trade Center towers would collapse after being pierced by hijacked airlines, unleashing an avalanche of smoke and flaming debris across lower Manhattan.
In Washington, D.C., a third airliner would be flown into the Pentagon by its terrorist hijackers, while a fourth – after a passenger mutiny – crashed in rural Pennsylvania, 15 minutes from the U.S. Capitol and the White House.
The hijackers – 19 men from Middle Eastern nations, armed with boxcutters – were quickly linked to Al Queda, the Islamic terror group behind the car bomb attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.
From the White House, President George W. Bush called the synchronized attacks “an act of war” – setting the stage for combat in Iraq and Afghanistan and heightened security at home.
This 10-part series in The Republican and on MassLive.com shares perspectives from Western Massachusetts residents on the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on America:
Sept. 4: A Father’s Journey: James F. Shea, of Westfield, father of Tara Shea Creamer, who was aboard American Airlines Flight 11
Sept. 5: A Pilot’s View: Lt. Col. Dan Nash, of the Air National Guard’s 104th Fighter Wing, flew on alert from Otis Air Base to New York City
Sept. 6: Survivors’ Stories: Susan A. Frederick, a native of Holyoke who descended from the 80th floor or the World Trade Center’s North Tower to safety, and John V. Murphy, formerly of Longmeadow, who was about a block away from his office at the trade center, share their recollections of when disaster struck
Sept. 7: Two Women’s Experiences: Longmeadow native Jennifer Gardner Trulson remembers her husband, Douglas Gardner; Lourdes LeBron, of Northampton, pays tribute to her sister, Waleska Martinez
Sept. 8: The Volunteers: Robert J. Hopkins, of Chicopee, Michael Goldberg, of Hampden, and Dan Hamre, of Springfield, were among the thousands who volunteered at Ground Zero.
Sept. 9: Crisis in Aviation: Jane Garvey, of Amherst, was head of the Federal Aviation Administration on the day of the attacks
Sept. 10: The Muslim Experience: Dr. M. Saleen Bajwa, of Holyoke, offers his impressions of our post-Sept. 11 world
Sept. 11: Remembering the Day: A look at how Sept. 11, 2001 will be remembered; Ann Murphy, sister of World Trade Center victim Brian J. Murphy, of Westfield, shares her personal perspective on what the day means for her family
Sept. 12: Tyler’s Courts: Basketball courts are created to honor the memory of Tyler Ugolyn, whose family’s roots are in Springfield; also, a regional look at 10th anniversary commemoration events
Sept. 13: Rick’s Place: The family and friends of Eric “Rick” Thorpe, of Wilbraham, established Rick’s Place to help children cope with grief when they lose a family member; also, how everyday life has changed because of Sept. 11, 2001
By dusk, lower Manhattan was a moonscape of grief, the sidewalks lined with people clutching photos of missing loved-ones.
As the nation reeled, Walter Harrington waited – for another telephone call, a glimpse on television, any sign that his daughter escaped the trade center’s North Tower.
“At first, you have hope,” says Harrington, a retired estimator for T.J. Conway in West Springfield. “She was strong; she could have walked down those stairs.”
Her first call, to her father, came at 8:55 a.m., a few minutes after the American Airlines Flight 11, a 767 jumbo jet, rammed into the building. The next call was to her husband Sean, home in San Francisco, sleeping.
The message she left would be heard around the world when her husband played it two days later on ABC’s “Good Morning America: “ “Sean, it’s me,” Harrington-Hughes said. “I just wanted to let you know I love you, and I’m stuck in this building in New York. A plane hit the building or a bomb went off, they don’t know. But there’s lots of smoke, and I just wanted you to know that I love you always.”
Four days later, her body was found the wreckage of Ground Zero, dashing her family’s last hope.
“She was such a wonderful girl,” said Harrington, who along with his wife Beverly, started a foundation in their daughter’s name to help children in Western Massachusetts. “I would never forget her, and I’d never want anyone else to forget her either.”
Painful as their memories are, families of the victims of the terrorist attacks on America a decade ago are embracing this anniversary as a way of honoring lost loved ones.
As a national tragedy with global repercussions, the 9/11 attacks hit home in this region as they did across the country and around the world, transforming people here into witnesses, rescuers, victims and next-of-kin.
All told, more than 20 people with ties to the Pioneer Valley were lost – a pilot, a flight attendant, a chef, a celebrated high school quarterback, an All-American basketball talent drafted by the Boston Celtics, a 24-year old Bentley College graduate who had just picked out her wedding dress.
To mark the 10th anniversary, services are being held across the nation, from Washington, D.C. and New York City to Westfield, where the Sons of Erin will honor three of its city’s young people, all of Irish heritage, who were killed that day, and at fire departments in Ludlow and Enfield, where pieces of the trade center wreckage have been woven into memorials.
The news that day spread quickly, by phone, email, television, car radios and the Internet.
With TV networks offering live coverage, people gasped at the images of panicked office workers at the trade center, hanging out windows or gathered on roof, hoping for rescue.
Nobody above 100th floor of the trade center’s North Tower survived, and only 18 from the South Tower escaped above the point of impact. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, jumped or fell to their deaths.
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Don TreegerRobert Greenleaf
Nobody had seen anything like it, but Westfield resident Robert Greenleaf had come close 60 years earlier.
The Navy veteran and survivor the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that plunged America into World War II was at a shooting range at 8:30 that morning of Sept. 11, 2001, taking target practice with several Westfield police officers.
It was a bright, cloudless day, and two Boston-to-Los Angeles jetliners had just left Logan International Airport and crossed over Pioneer Valley – one cruising north over the Quabbin Reservoir toward the New York state line, the other swinging south over Springfield and western Connecticut.
About 8:50 a.m., the officers’ cellphones began ringing; a minute later, they were gone, according to Greenleaf.
“They said they had to go back to the station – a plane hit the World Trade Center and it didn’t look like an accident,” recalled Greenleaf, a former Savage Arms employee.
He drove home, and watched what President Bush would term the second Pearl Harbor unfolding on live television.
Sitting on the living-room couch with his wife, Dorothy, the Navy veteran figured he was witnessing a ghastly, but not catastrophic, event.
At first, Greenleaf – recalling the limited damage that a B-25 Mitchell bomber inflicted in 1945 on the fog-shrouded Empire State Building – was sure the towers would not fall.
Until, they did.
“I realized I was watching history, but I was surprised how it was happening,” Greenleaf said. “I thought (the towers) were stronger than that,” he said.
In Springfield, Judge Constance M. Sweeney was presiding over a breach-of-contract trial in Hampden Superior Court when she heard that two airliners had hit the trade center.
She stopped the trial, broke the news to jurors, and called a 24-hour recess.
Explaining her decision later, the judge said the hijackers had seized the public’s attention.
“The country seemed to be in a state of suspended animation,” Sweeney said. “Most of us remained tuned to the news throughout the night to learn the details of the tragedy and to wonder what lay ahead.”
In Amherst, businessman and political activist Larry Kelley was sitting at his computer, typing up his dissent to the town selectboard’s vote the night before barring American flags from flying on utility polls except on special occasions.
Alerted by an email, Kelley turned on his television.
“I saw smoke and fire belching out of both towers,” the former health club owner recalled. “It was the most astonishing thing I have ever seen in my life.”
Riding his bike into town, Kelley recalled being surprised to see the American flag flying – at half mast over Town Hall. “For everything that’s happened, my feelings about that day haven’t changed one bit, “ Kelley said recently.
In Southwick, English teacher Ann M. Murphy walked into another classroom to get a chair, and saw the World Trade Center on a television. The night before, her brother Brian, a bond trader for Cantor Fitzgerald on the 104th floor, called to report on his daughter Jessica’s first day in kindergarten.
“What happened?,” Murphy asked, before seeing her brother’s building engulfed in thick, oily smoke.
“It was the worst moment of my life,” she recalled later.
From that day on, the national tragedy of 9/11 would be a Murphy family tragedy, too; her father died a few months later as the family grieved their lost husband, father and brother.
To Murphy, the passage of time has added to family’s loss, with each new year bringing parties, graduations and family get-togethers that Brian will never share with his wife, Judith, and daughters Jessica and Leila.
A decade later, the Murphys are still very much a 9/11 family. At night, Ann Murphy is careful not to leave the television on a news channel when she leaves her mother in a room for a few minutes.
“I’ll put on the cooking or shopping channel, just to be safe,” Murphy said. “The event is woven into the fabric of our lives; every time you hear it, you feel a pang.”
To honor her little brother, Murphy has been working with other 9/11 families to get the day recognized a national day of remembrance.
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File photoDan Trant
The Trant family has taken a similar approach, pouring itself into advocacy to honor Daniel P. Trant, another Cantor Fitzgerald trader who worked on the 105th floor.
A Westfield High basketball star and All-American guard at Clark University, Trant was drafted by the Boston Celtics and played professionally in Ireland – all before the turning 25.
His second life – as a father, husband and bond trader for Cantor Fitzgerald – was equally charmed, right up to the night of Sept. 10, which he spent at a soggy Yankee Stadium with his sons – Daniel, 12, and Alex, 10, and a co-worker.
The next morning, Trant called his wife, Kathy, after the jetliner hit.
He said he couldn’t see or breathe, then told Kathy he loved her and their three children. His funeral was six days later, on Long Island.
Like Murphy’s father, former Westfield postmaster William Trant – a World War II veteran and Purple Heart recipient who landed at Utah Beach on D-Day in World War II – died within a year of his son; his mother, Mary, 82, lives in Winterhaven, Fla.
A golf tournament honoring Dan Trant is held each September, with proceeds going to scholarships for Westfield High School seniors; this year’s event, held on Saturday. On Friday, a 9/11 tribute tournament in Southwick honored both Dan Trant and Jean D. Roger, a Longmeadow flight attendant on American Airlines Flight 11, the first to hit the trade center that morning.
Trant’s big sister, Sally, said the family's golf tournament doubles as a reunion for her brother’s friends from in Western Massachusetts and across the country. “It’s allowed us to turn a very sad thing into a happy event,” she said.
As his younger brother, Matthew J. Trant, a partner in a Washington D.C.-area lobbying firm, explains it: “He was a fun-loving guy, who loved to dance, to sing, and tell jokes. He wouldn’t want you sitting around and being morbid on his behalf.”
The memorial created by the Sons of Erin for Trant, Brian Murphy and Tara Shea Creamer also serves as their symbolic resting place.
“It’s funny – as kids, we were always going to cemeteries to visit families members who passed away, just going there to be with them,” Sally Trant said. “The (Sons of Erin) memorial is our place to go to be with Danny,” said Trant, a just-retired postal employee who moved to Tampa to be closer to her mother.
Not long after arriving in Florida, Trant began working on a 9/11 memorial there, too.
For his part over the past decade, James F. Shea, retired Westfield schools superintendent, traveled to a courtroom in Alexandria, Va., in 2006 to watch as his son-in-law John Creamer testified to the jury at the trial of the so-called 19th hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui about the effects the terror attacks on their family.
“It was a moving experience, both to see Moussaoui in person, to look at him in the chair and (see) his attitude and to meet other families of victims and some of those who were injured in the attacks,” he said.
The killing of Osama bin Laden in May by Navy SEALS buoyed the Shea family spirits, But one man’s death will not end the threat of future terror attacks, Shea said. “There are fanatics within our own country,” he said.
Jean Roger’s father, Thomas Roger, of Longmeadow, began working immediately after the attacks to press for airline safety reforms and helped organize Families of September 11, a Virginia-based group that helps victims of 9/11 and other terror attacks and works to prevent future attacks.
A lawyer and engineer, Roger was determined to make airlines safer to prevent, in his own words, “another father (from going) through what I’ve gone through.”
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Jean D. Roger
At 24, Jean Roger – star swimmer, senior class president at Longmeadow High School and graduate of Pennsylvania State University – had been a flight attendant for 18 months before boarding Flight 11 that morning. She took the shift of another flight attendant who called out sick.
Her brother, James, was living just three blocks from the World Trade Center when the attacks occurred.
Under pressure from the Rogers and other victims’ families, Congress mandated reinforced cockpit doors, stricter hiring and training for baggage screeners and deployment of air marshals – all within three months of the 9/11 attacks.
In Longmeadow, the Roger family organized a day of community service to mark 9/11 and remember their daughter; started in 2004, the day has featured blood drives, field clean-ups and building projects, all activities that Jean Roger would have been happy to join, according to her father.
For the airline industry, the 9/11 hijackings were the beginning of a bad decade – for the carriers, for employees, and for their passengers.
Former U.S. Airways flight attendant Jennifer R. DeForge, a Clinton resident now studying veterinary medicine at Holyoke Community College, traces her decision to leave the industry last year to the 9/11 attacks.
Recalling the days after the attacks, DeForge said: “It affected everybody. A lot of people couldn’t handle the fear – of staring at everybody (passengers) and wondering what’s going on in their minds.”
Fewer airlines and fewer passengers resulted in mergers, downsizing, lower pay and fewer opportunities for flight attendants, DeForge said.
“There was just so much financial drama, and airlines stopped hiring,” she said.
As the events of 9/11 unfolded that day, its impact reverberated across the Pioneer Valley – state courts and federal buildings were closed, Westover Air Reserve Base in Chicopee was put on alert, and the federal building in Springfield was evacuated.
Vigils and memorial services were held, and scores of volunteers traveled to New York City to help. Each year, ceremonies have been held to mark the anniversary; this year will be no different.
But the national unity created by the attacks was splintered by opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as stricter security measures imposed by the Homeland Security Act, says University of Massachusetts professor David Mednicoff.
While the events of 9/11 will always be emotionally-charged for victims’ families, Mednicoff is one who believes the idea that the attacks permanently changed life in America has been overstated.
“The question (of what changed after 9/11) has many answers to different people in the world, in the U.S. and in Western New England,” said Mednicoff, a specialist in foreign policy and Middle East affairs.
“My sense around the Pioneer Valley is that the drama and poignancy of the 9/11 and the aftermath are less evident than the pain and fear around more recent American economic problems,” he said.
In Amherst, Larry Kelley plans a ceremony tonight in honor of the terror attack victims and celebrating a decade that’s passed without a second 9/11 or a third Pearl Harbor. From 9 until midnight, huge spotlights will illuminate an American flag on the Town Common, recalling the scene at Ground Zero after the attacks.
Initially, Kelley planned a fireworks display as a flaming rebuke to terrorists and their failures since 9/11. He says he’s settled for a more somber tribute, reflecting the gains and losses since Sept. 11, 2001.
“We lost something precious on 9/11: the lives of 3,000 innocent Americans and our sense of safety,” Kelley said. “To a great extent, that sense of safety – or at the very least, routine – has returned.”
That, he said, is worth celebrating.
View full size This December 2009 file photo released by the U.S. Marshal's Service shows Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in Milan, Mich. (AP Photo/U.S. Marshals Service, File)
