Flight 93 National Memorial Sixth Anniversary Commemoration Events

Received the following information on Friday from the Flight 93 Memorial folks regarding this week's activities:

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Flight 93 National Memorial Sixth Anniversary Commemoration Events

September 10, 2007

The formal commemorative service will take place on Monday evening, September 10, 2007, in Somerset, Pennsylvania at the Somerset Alliance Church, 708 Stoystown Road, beginning at 6:30 PM with prelude music. The memorial service will start at 7:00 PM.

The theme for this year is The Spirit of Community.

The Families of Flight 93 and the Flight 93 project partners wish to honor and pay tribute to the community for all that has been done for the heroes of Flight 93 and to help the families in their healing process. Speakers will include Mr. Henry Cook, Somerset Trust Bank, who was a member of the Stage 2 design competition jury and who has been very active in fundraising for the memorial. Also speaking will be Mr. Chris Sullivan, Capital Campaign Chairman, and Mr. Edwin Root, President of the Families of Flight 93.

Musical selections will be performed by the Somerset County Community Band and Laurel Highlands Chorale. Readings will be by Flight 93 family members. The commemoration service is open to the public; there is no reserved seating. Light refreshments will follow the service.

September 11, 2007

On September 11, the Temporary Memorial on Skyline Road near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, will be open from dawn to dusk. The morning service will begin at approximately 9:55 am with the traditional reading of the names of the passengers and crew of Flight 93 and the tolling of the “Bells of Remembrance.” The brief service will conclude with laying of wreaths. There will be no seating during this ceremony. Parking will be immediately adjacent to the Temporary Memorial; handicapped parking is available.

Any person or group planning their personal ceremonial tribute, and/or require 1st Amendment accommodation, must call the National Park Service office at (814) 443-4557 prior to September 7th.

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Starting in late September, the project website http://www.flight93memorialproject.com/ will be merged into the permanent websites for the national memorial, the National Park Service website, http://www.nps.gov/flni or the website for the Flight 93 National Memorial Fund http://www.honorflight93.org/
The national memorial is slated to open in 2011, the tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001. Please go to the websites and see for yourself the beautiful design plans.

For more information please contact the NPS at:
109 West Main Street, Suite 104, Somerset, PA 15501

Park Planning Office (814) 443-4557, Fax (814) 443-2180

Since my last posting on their memorial activities, I've gotten DirectTV and now been able to see Paul Greengrass's wonderful film United 93 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0475276/

three more times, making a total of either six or seven.

And every time I see it, I think back to my friends and I at work on Pennsylvania Avenue the morning of September 11th, ten blocks away from the U.S. Capitol, across from DOJ and the FBI. If not for the bravery and heroism of the Passengers & Crew, would I even be alive?
Or would I have been a witness to the plane's descent into the Capitol?

In case you've somehow missed it so far, the entry below is from one of my permanent anchors on the SouthBeachHoosier blog:

Thoughts on The Pentagon and 9/11

Let me relate a 9/11 anecdote that gives you some sort of insight into me, and informs my posts here. I lived for about 15 years in Washington, D.C., and while there, worked on behalf of some of the top law firms and business groups in town, doing all sorts of things on both Capitol Hill and along the K Street corridor. While doing so, I was fortunate to meet and befriend lots of very talented, committed and impressive people, including lots from the media, think tank and public policy sectors, as well as the diplomatic community.

On 9/11, I was working on a project for Crowell & Moring, in an office in their DC office right across the street from the FBI & DOJ, and next to the Naval Memorial. After the initial reports of the attack in New York and on The Pentagon, from our vantage point on the large patio overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue, we could see past the Old Post Office across the street, and could clearly see the smoke rising up from The Pentagon to our southwest.

Being equidistant to both The White House and the U.S. Capitol -and thus, in a position to have seen any attack on either- once we received word to evacuate the building because a plane within range of DC still hadn't been accounted for -what we would all later all know as United Flight 93-I decided to forego playing the role of a sardine in a can on the Metro, and decided to walk the 7-plus miles to my place in north Arlington, mostly via K Street, M Street in Georgetown, and finally Lee Highway in Arlington.

When I got a few blocks away from the office and was near Metro Center, whom do you suppose I walked right into, but the one man, whom, IF things had fallen differently, might've played a much larger role that tragic day?

(As I walked and walked, it was while listening on my Sony AM/FM/TV portable radio, via ABC News' Good Morning America -the same program that had informed my entire floor for 90 minutes before when we gathered en masse around my radio in our floor lobby area- that I first learned that some of the planes involved in the attacks had departed out of Boston's Logan Airport.

That news made my heart sink, and made the walk home seem far longer than it normally would, since one of my former housemates in Arlington, Jennifer Dugan, a wonderfully sweet, thoughtful and immensely adorable University of Rhode Island grad, was, in fact, a flight attendant for US Airways, working out of Logan.)

That man I'm referring to was George Terwilliger, then of the DC office of McGuire, Woods, Battle & Boothe LLP, whom I knew from 1627 Eye Street, the location of the New York Times' DC bureau, who's now at WhiteCase, http://www.whitecase.com/gterwilliger/ Mr. Terwilliger was the man that much of the Washington press corps and Beltway Crowd thought was the likely first choice for President Bush to be FBI Director, and a person that many of my friends at 1627 had an enormous amount of respect and admiration for, even if they disagreed with him politically. When I saw him in passing on the sidewalk, with a concerned and pensive look on his face, like nearly everyone passing us on both sides and spilling out onto the road, all I could think to myself was, "Be careful what you wish for."