Flight 93 families hope heroism award helps keep story alive

The hope is to use the award to connect teachers to the Friends’ organization’s considerable teaching materials and historical records from the day, and bring it to classrooms, said Donna Gibson, a banking executive who, as president of the Friends organization, has given countless tours of the site tucked amid the wildflowers in Pennsylvania’s Laurel Highlands.

By the time the 20th anniversary rolls around in four months, 75 million Americans will have been born in those two decades, the organization estimates.

That’s nearly a quarter of the country, and it shows.

“One of the questions I get when people visit is, ‘Was this a national park when the plane crashed here?’” Gibson said.

A Boy Scout troop touring the site were puzzled when they heard about the messages that passengers left on answering machines from the plane’s air phones. “What’s an answering machine?” they asked.

Another time, a group visiting the area for an ATV park were at a nearby restaurant asking the staff how they could fill their next day there, unaware the memorial was so close by, Gibson recalled.

Flight 93 inspired a major motion picture, a Neil Young song and stack of books. But the worrisome thought for family members is the story of Flight 93 — and, along with it, the wider story of 9/11 — is being forgotten, including the decades of geopolitics that came before the attack and the dramatic change it created in American life.