May the lives remembered, the
deeds recognized, and the spirit reawakened be eternal
beacons, which reaffirm the respect for life, strengthen
our resolve to preserve freedom, and inspire an end to
hatred, ignorance and intolerance.
- From the World Trade Center Memorial mission
statement
The boy Chic
Burlingame once was has been cast in bronze, a child and
his dream preserved for eternity.
He's holding a wooden airplane as big as the 6-year-
old he was when he built it, all by himself, out of wood
scraps and a child's certainty that he could learn to
fly.
And so he did.
Forty-five years later, Charles Frank "Chic"
Burlingame III was at the controls of American Flight 77
when it was hijacked after takeoff from Dulles
International Airport in suburban Washington.
At 9:40 a.m., Flight 77 slammed into the Pentagon,
killing 184 people, including all 64 people aboard.
It was Sept. 11, 2001 - a day that never ends.
Two years later, the question remains: how do we
honor the memory of the 3,016 people who died that day -
and the people who have died because of that day?
How best to remember?
"It's become part of the culture," said Chic's
sister, Debra Burlingame, of New York. "We don't want to
ever forget it. But if we did want to - we wouldn't be
able to.
"The September 11 drumbeat never ceases."
It began at 8:46 a.m., with the thunder of American
Flight 11 crashing into the north tower of the World
Trade Center. At 10:28 a.m., the north tower collapsed.
At 9:03 a.m., United Flight 175 crashed into the
south tower. At 9:59 a.m., the south tower collapsed.
At 9:40 a.m., American Flight 77 crashed into the
Pentagon.
At 10:07 a.m., United Flight 93 crashed in a field
near Shanksville, Pa.
How best to remember?
In the past two years, Americans have memorialized in
hundreds of ways, in every corner of the country, in
wood and cloth and stone and metal.
Twisted pieces of steel - debris from the World Trade
Center - have become sculpture at a Florida high school,
flagpoles in Virginia, part of a church bell tower in
Albuquerque.
This year, Sandy Dahl of Lone Tree will ring a bell
in a Shanksville chapel in honor of her husband, Flight
93 Capt. Jason Dahl. She's part of the group that has
purchased land near the crash site for a permanent
memorial.
"I'm just trying to make sure that these people are
honored properly," Dahl said of the memorial plan, which
calls for the site to be as peaceful and unobtrusive as
possible.
"We don't want a McDonald's a mile away," she said.
Hans and Torrey Butzer, husband and wife architects
who designed the memorial to the 168 victims of the
Oklahoma City bombing, believe that such places need to
be created to withstand the test of time and memory.
"People are looking for something of which they can
become a part," Hans Butzer said. "These memorials are
ways of helping the community engage more thoroughly in
events that took place."
Remembering Sept. 11 has become an inspiration for an
army of artists.
W. Douglas Stickler, from Lyons, made his tribute to
Flight 93 from stone. "To the First Citizen Heroes of
the 21st Century," it reads. "The Passengers and Crew of
Flight 93.
"Let's Roll."
Loveland sculptor Ron Petitt cast pilot Chic
Burlingame in bronze. Debra Burlingame stumbled across
Petitt's work on the Internet while she was searching
for the addresses of U.S. soldiers killed in the war on
terrorism. She believed Petitt's background as a Vietnam
veteran made him the perfect artist to capture the
essence of her big brother, a Hollywood-handsome
military pilot from Herndon, Va., whose straight-arrow
perfectionism was tempered by a goofy sense of humor.
"In the midst of all the Sept. 11 chaos, all the
imagery, the really horrific imagery, I became very
focused on that picture of my brother," Burlingame said.
"It's physical evidence of what we'd always known - that
Chic wanted to be a pilot from the time he could walk."
And not just any kind of pilot. At the tip of each
wing are the letters U.S.A., printed with a little boy's
care and concentration.
"Clearly, this is a military aircraft,'' Debra
Burlingame said. "Here he is, this little boy, already
thinking about serving his country."
In the old family photo, Chic Burlingame is a child
in California wearing a striped T-shirt and a wistful
expression, standing with the wooden airplane he had
just shown off to his family.
He's not smiling; he's not even looking at the
camera. He gazes at something on the ground - a
propeller that had just fallen off his precious
creation. Petitt was overwhelmed by the simple power of
the image.
"When you look at the photograph, the first thing you
think is, what a tragedy," Petitt said. "But he realized
his dream. He was a Navy fighter pilot, a commercial
aviator. The message is, you can fulfill your dreams."
The statue is called American Patriot.
Sales of the work, both tabletop and life-size, will
help fund scholarships in Burlingame's memory through
the Patriot Dreams Foundation. Petitt is creating a
special edition of the statue; there will be 911 of
them.
"The family wants to put it in places where the
public can get the same inspiration from the photograph
that we all do when we see it," Pettit said.
How best to remember?
A month ago, a coalition of groups proposed making
Sept. 11 a day of voluntary kindness. The New York-based
coalition calls itself One Day's Pay, a reference to the
idea of repaying the community by giving at least one
day of service.
"We're not looking for it to be a holiday," said the
group's vice president, Jay Winuk, whose brother, Glenn,
died trying to rescue people in the south tower. "But we
want it to be more than the anniversary of a great
tragedy."
Two years later, the world has become a sadder place,
in the name of making it a safer one.
When Army Sgt. 1st Class Daniel Aaron Romero died in
Afghanistan on April 15, 2002, he became Colorado's
first combat casualty since Vietnam and the only
Coloradan to die in the Afghan war. When Marine Lance
Cpl. Thomas Slocum was killed on March 23, 2003, he
became the state's first casualty in Iraq.
A honey locust tree with a crooked trunk grows in his
memory in the back yard of the Thornton home where
Slocum grew up.
Twenty-five soldiers from Colorado - including 17
from Fort Carson - have died in Iraq since the war began
March 19. Memorial ceremonies at Fort Carson have become
a regular event.
Debra Burlingame has made it a goal to write to every
family that has lost someone in Afghanistan or Iraq. So
far, she's contacted 50 of them.
"These guys will never be forgotten," she said. "We
felt they were fighting on Chic's behalf and died on his
behalf. There's a profound connection there."
Martha Teas Meiklejohn was no soldier. But when she
came home to Delta from Baghdad last month in a plane
that landed just after midnight, her husband, Jamie
Meiklejohn, was there to meet his wife's flag-covered
coffin.
The 46-year-old woman became a casualty of Sept. 11
when a bomb exploded at her U.N. office, where Iraqis
could come for information about food distribution,
health issues, land mines and educational services.
Meiklejohn's U.N. tour officially ended Aug. 1, but she
had agreed to stay on.
How best to remember?
When Oklahoma City began the process of planning a
memorial to the 168 victims of the Afred P. Murrah
Federal Building bombing, they had no guide. They could
look to the Holocaust museum and the Vietnam Memorial,
but this was fundamentally different - an act of
terrorism on U.S. soil.
"We had some of the same challenges (as New York),"
said Kari Watkins, the executive director of the
Oklahoma City National Memorial, who talks to her New
York counterparts regularly. "So far, they haven't given
me a situation we haven't dealt with."
There is at least one challenge they didn't face in
Oklahoma. Of the 2,792 people who died at the World
Trade Center on Sept. 11, investigators have identified
the remains of 1,518. There are still more than 12,000
body parts, unidentifiable. But someday, it might be
possible to identify them, so the remains are being
dried and sealed and saved. Every one of the 5,200
design entries in the memorial design competition had to
include a suitable space to store them.
A winning design is expected to be selected this
fall; construction will begin in 2006.
"Done correctly, a memorial will inspire people,"
said former New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani. "It should not
symbolize the loss of our world before Sept. 11 or of an
America that no longer exists. It should symbolize our
survival and our triumph."
Minoru Yamasaki, chosen over 12 other American
architects to design the World Trade Center in 1966,
considered 100 different designs. One tower was too
unwieldy; several looked too much like a housing
project.
So it was two - twins 110 stories high, with an acre
of office space on every floor and a view from the top
that went on for 45 miles in every direction. It was
Yamasaki's steel and glass tribute to world peace.
"The World Trade Center should, because of its
importance, become a representation of man's belief in
humanity," the architect once said. "His need for
individual dignity, his beliefs in the cooperation of
men, and through cooperation, his ability to find
greatness."
It took nearly seven years to build the World Trade
Center. After it was hit by the jetliners, the north
tower stood for 102 minutes and the south tower for 56
minutes. Once they began to fall, their collapse took
just 12 seconds.
The 4.7-acre memorial site includes the two towers'
40,000-square-foot footprints, places made sacred by
tragedy.
How best to remember?
A design already has been chosen for the two-acre
Pentagon memorial: the work of two young New York
architects was chosen from more than 1,100 entries.
In a design that echoes Oklahoma City's, aluminum
benches - one for each of the 184 victims - will sit
atop small lighted reflecting pools, positioned parallel
to the jetliner's flight path.
Each bench will be engraved with the name of one of
those murdered and arranged by their ages, from 3 to 71.
On Sept. 12, Chic Burlingame would have turned 52.
Now he's forever 6, a little boy with a homemade
airplane who lived and died his dream.
Ryckmanl@RockyMountainNews.com or
303-892-2736.
Home
)
)
)
