Saturday was a beautiful fall day, much like that other one, a little more than 21 years ago. We had an open schedule and had wrapped up our programming at WVU, so we drove from our campground in West Virginia, through a corner of Maryland and into the hills near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, to the site of the Flight 93 Memorial. 7 crew members, 33 passengers … Continue reading Flight 93
Yesterday was a driving day. From Parkersburg, West Virginia to Richmond, Virginia to pack up an exhibit at University of Richmond. We stopped at a rest area just across the border into Virginia and I looked at the map. “We’ll go right past Charlottesville,” I said. “We should stop and see if we can find the place.” It was just about dusk when we rolled … Continue reading Charlottesville
I know two names on the memorial wall. Thomas E. Burnett Jr. and Mohammad Salman Hamdani. Their names are two panels apart, on the South Memorial Pool. Thomas is from the town where I live. Bloomington, Minnesota. My children attended the same high school Thomas did. Our post office is named after him. Thomas E. Burnett Jr. helped force down Flight 93 into an empty … Continue reading 9/11
Bud Welch lost his only child, Julie Marie, in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. She had worked as a translator in the Alfred P. Murrah building for just five months when Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols blew it up in what remains our nation’s largest domestic terror attack. When Bud saw a news clip of McVeigh’s father, he saw a man who was as … Continue reading Bud Welch
