The City of Tucker: Remembering 9/11

By Victoria R. Crosby

The annual remembrance ceremony for 9/11 took place in Tucker on Sunday, September 11, twenty-two years after the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and the plane that went down in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania in what was an aborted attempt to fly the highjacked plane into the Capitol Building or the White House. The heroic passengers of that plane saved the lives of everyone who would have died if the plane had reached its intended target.

The ceremony began at 8:46 a.m., the time when the first plane hit the North Tower. A giant American Flag hung between two extra-long ladders from the fire engines as the crowd gathered on a beautiful sunny morning, much as it was in New York the day the towers were attacked.

A steel sculpture of a phoenix wing, symbolizing the rising from the ashes, stood behind a piece of the beams from one of the towers in New York.

At the granite base of the sculpture, which is in the shape of a pentagon, are several plaques: one with the Police Officer’s Prayer, another with the Firefighter’s Prayer, a plaque with a brief history of the World Trade Center, and one with information about the memorial. It was designed by Doug Harms, a firefighter and a bagpiper, and sculptor Curtis James Miller, a former Marine Corps sergeant.

The ceremony began with a lone bagpiper, Doug Harms, followed by the presentation of the colors. A female officer sang our national anthem, the Star-Spangled Banner. The Garden Clubs of Georgia provided the floral wreath of beautiful red, white, and blue flowers, which was carried by Alex Lane, accompanied by Garden Club members Susan Turner, scholarship chairman and representative of the Georgia Garden Clubs, and me, as president of the Smoke Rise Garden Club.

A recording of Taps was played, and I was honored to read my poem “A Tribute to Heroes,” written in 2002. I read this poem every year in The City of Glen Cove, New York before I moved to Georgia.

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