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Wednesday, September 8, 2021 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
Oregon Flight for Freedom linked country from sea to shining sea
By Jim Cornelius
Editor in Chief
Jack McGowan was up
early on Tuesday, September
11, 2001, listening to NPR
as he does most mornings.
The broadcast faded out and
a bulletin announced that a
plane had hit one of the tow-
ers of the World Trade Center
(WTC) in New York.
McGowan’s first thought
was that there had been a ter-
rible accident. Then a second
plane hit a second tower —
and the world changed.
“You’re rocked back on
your heels,” he recalled. “I
yelled to [wife] Jan, ‘Oh, my
God, Jan — we’ve got a ter-
rorist attack!’”
McGowan had been liv-
ing in Oregon since 1970, and
was serving as co-executive
director of the environmental
nonprofit SOLV (Stop Oregon
Litter and Vandalism). But he
was a native New Yorker, and
the attack hit home with great
force.
“I watched the towers
being built,” he recalled.
“Two years before, I took Jan
and [son] Travis to see my
New York, and we went out
to lunch at Windows of the
World (the restaurant at the
top of the North Tower of the
WTC).”
The dark events of
September 11, and the wound
it inflicted on his country
and the city of his birth came
down hard on McGowan.
“All of a sudden, I just
broke loose,” he said. “I cried
and cried and couldn’t stop
crying. The initial shock set-
tled into profound grief.”
Flickering in his heart,
beneath the grief, was a desire
to do… something… a need
to take some positive action
in the face of tragedy. An
opportunity soon presented
itself.
Tapping his background in
media, the TV station KGW
asked McGowan to host local
cutaways that were part of a
national telethon to support
9/11 relief. At that telethon
broadcast, McGowan con-
nected with Sho Dozono,
owner of Portland-based
Azumano Travel and his wife,
Loen.
Loen Dozono had an idea,
what McGowan character-
izes as “a bold act of perse-
verance, of looking terrorism
in the eye and not blinking.”
Dozono proposed enacting
a “reverse Oregon Trail,”
bringing Oregonians east to
New York to show solidar-
ity and provide an economic
shot in the arm for a city that
was pummeled, shut down,
and reeling. They mulled the
possibility of a bus caravan,
but that seemed too slow and
cumbersome.
“This had to be immedi-
ate,” McGowan said.
They had to fly. Planes
had been grounded across
the nation in the wake of
the attack, and no one really
knew what was going to hap-
pen with air travel in the com-
ing weeks, or what threats
civilian airliners might yet
face. But they had to fly. And
the idea for the Oregon Flight
for Freedom was born.
McGowan put every bit
of passion and emotion that
had washed over him into
helping make it happen. He
wasn’t sure he could leave his
responsibilities with SOLV to
make the trip, but Jan insisted
that he had to go. He needed
to be “part of something that
was larger than just grief.”
He was assigned to an
advance team to prepare the
ground in New York for what
was swiftly becoming an
enormous event.
In a 10-year retrospective
published in The Oregonian
in 2010, Sho Dozono recalled:
“A thousand Oregonians
responded to our call, from all
over Oregon and southwest
Washington. There were folks
who had never been to New
York; some had never flown
before. World War II battle
veterans joined. Grandparents
brought their grandkids.
Whole families flew together.
Roger Hinshaw, president of
Bank of America, took his
two children out of school to
join us. Mayor Vera Katz had
to overcome her fear of fly-
ing to lead us. Nick Fish, a
New York transplant, used all
of his contacts in New York
and arranged for a memo-
rial at Union Square to honor
the victims. Firefighters;
police officers; mayors from
Eugene, Hermiston, and
other small towns joined the
growing number of political
leaders.”
The organizers had to
weigh the impact of what they
were doing.
“The responsibility sud-
denly weighed so heavily on
us,” McGowan recalled.
Was bringing 1,000
Oregonians to New York
really the right thing to do?
Was it too much of a burden
on a city that was still reeling?
PHOTO PROVIDED
Oregon Flight for Freedom representatives rang the bell at the reopening
of the New York Stock Exchange after the September 11 attacks.
Would they be making the
Oregonians a target for a fol-
low-on terrorist attack?
But it quickly became
apparent that New York didn’t
just welcome the Flight,
“they were desperate for it,”
McGowan said.
McGowan arrived in New
York on October 1, where
the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel
waived room fees to put the
Oregonians up. McGowan
helped set up an international
press office for the Flight, and
liaised with a range of New
York officials and media.
Then, he took a bit of time
for himself.
“I went down [to lower
Manhattan] the next day by
myself because I needed to
decompress — but I also
needed time to mourn,” he
said.
The area around what was
being called Ground Zero
was covered in thick layers
of dust, and there was paper
everywhere, scattered from
thousands of offices in the
collapsed Towers. There was
a terrible smell of pulver-
ized concrete, burning, and
decomposition.
“Below Canal Street, the
city had stopped,” McGowan
said. “You could feel the
oppressive sense on every
single thing. People didn’t
even look at each other… it
was this unbelievable sense
of shock and mourning.”
The pall of grief and
mourning contrasted with an
exuberant welcome for the
Oregon delegation. Broadway
entertainers performed for
them at the Waldorf. The wel-
come created a very human
Sisters Country artist memorialized fallen of September 11
One of the great chal-
lenges in coping with ter-
rible events like the terrorist
attacks of September 11, 2001
is finding a way to appropri-
ately memorialize the fallen.
It fell to Sisters Country art-
ist Lawrence Stoller to help
create a memorial to 11
American Express employ-
ees who were killed when the
Twin Towers of the World
Trade Center collapsed after
being struck by planes flown
by al Qaida terrorists on that
Tuesday morning 20 years
ago.
In an article in Lapidary
Magazine, Stoller recalled:
“Shortly after the trag-
edy of September 11, 2001,
my wife, Sunni, and I pic-
tured a giant crystal installed
at Ground Zero. We shared
a vision of a monument that
would bring badly needed
light and healing to our coun-
try’s collective wound. Nearly
a year later a friend in the
mineral business called from
New York. Harvey Siegel,
owner of Aurora Minerals,
asked if I would be inter-
ested in being part of a proj-
ect to memorialize the 11
employees from American
Express who had died in the
World Trade Center attacks.
Before my mind could for-
mulate an answer, my heart
said, ‘Yes, of course.’ I was
humbled by the extraordinary
opportunity and the profound
honor of being part of such an
undertaking…
“The memorial was to
consist of an 11-sided pool
of water, around which the
names of those who had
died would be inscribed, one
to each side. Behind each
name, a five-line descrip-
tion of each person, supplied
by family members, would
appear etched beneath the
surface of the water, with the
words ‘September 11, 2001,’
inscribed in the center. The
pool would be mirrored by a
matching, 11-sided canopy
in the 35-foot ceiling. Both
uniting and creating tension
between this heaven and
earth, an 11-sided crystal sus-
pended by 11 cables would
hover two inches above the
water, the crystal’s image mir-
rored in the reflecting pool.
Drops of water would inter-
mittently fall from 11 small
holes in the ceiling symbol-
izing tears for each of those
lost; thus the name, Eleven
Tears.”
The work was intense and
demanding. Looking back on
it, Stoller sees how the terri-
ble events of the time, and the
effort to appropriately memo-
rialize the fallen, created a
sense of unity and solidarity
that is often missing from our
discourse today. In a note to
The Nugget, Stoller reflected
on his relationship with his
colleague Peter W. Small, a
Sisters resident who died in
2010:
“Peter W. Small and I had
a relationship which stands as
a touchstone for me as I watch
our country and our world
become ever more polarized,”
Stoller said. “Peter was an
exceptional craftsman, engi-
neer, and metal worker. We
joined forces in the late 1990s
when I commandeered him to
do bronze and metal work to
compliment my lapidary and
large gem and crystal carv-
ings. When I was commis-
sioned by American Express
to do the centerpiece for their
Eleven Tears Memorial, they
asked how long the project
would take. I told them the
last large project I did took
three years. They said, “you
have seven months to get this
done,” in honor of those who
were lost.
Peter was there to help
me with the intricate metal
work and engineering of the
sculpture. We would work
for hours at a time problem-
solving and doing the tedious
work of bringing the sculp-
ture to form.
“Our time working was
spontaneously laced with
humor and observations
about what was important in
life. But when it came to poli-
tics and religion, Peter and I
were diametrically opposed.
If we started riffing on either
a political or religious topic,
we would quickly become
embedded in our ingrained,
righteous beliefs. While these
discussions could get heated,
one or the other of us would
artfully break the spell of our
entrenched positions with
a joke, usually at our own
expense.
“As staunch as our individ-
ual beliefs were, we always
surrendered them to the over-
riding truth that our friendship
and creative process were far
more real, and important than
our well-worn, unbending