STONYCREEK, Pa. — In the voicemail message she left for her sister just minutes before United Airlines Flight 93 crashed into a field on an old strip mine here on Sept. 11, 2001, Linda Gronlund’s voice is surprisingly calm.
“Elsa, it’s Lin. I’m on United 93. It’s been hijacked by terrorists who say they have a bomb,” Gonlund said in a message that can now be heard by the public for the first time at the new Flight 93 National Memorial Visitors Center. “Mostly I just want to say I love you and I’ll miss you.”
The visitor center officially opens with a ceremony Thursday here. Viewers will see 10 exhibit panels in the elegant space, set among sculpture-like walls, that take viewers on a chronological, historical and emotional tour across the events in New York City, Washington, D.C., and here on the day of the terrorist attack..
It is midway through the exhibit, at the fifth panel, that visitors get to listen to Gronlund, as well as two other voice mail messages left by flight attendant CeeCee Lyles, and passenger Lauren Catuzzi Grandcolas. Lyles’ and Grandcolas’ messages have been heard publicly before, but not Gronlund’s.
All are emotionally packed, but calm, voices from 14 years ago Friday that put you on Flight 93 with the 40 passengers and crew and demonstrate the gravity of what they were dealing with that day.
The decision to include the audio of those messages was not an easy one, but was reached by a panel that included the National Park Service, aided by a committee of historic and museum experts as well as family members of the passengers and crew.
“The discussion (on the committee) of this panel was a very emotional discussion,” Ed Root, whose cousin, flight attendant Lorraine Bay, was on the plane, said during a media tour of the exhibit Wednesday. “Some people thought it would almost be too much. But we decided it was needed and it was meaningful.”
In the end, their decision added to an exhibit that Root, and more than 100 other Flight 93 family members, who also toured the visitor center Wednesday, came away from impressed.
“The visitor is just going to be amazed,” said Debby Borza, whose daughter, Deora Bodley, was on the plane.
David Beamer, whose son, Todd, is perhaps the best known of the Flight 93 passengers after he was heard uttering the now famous phrase “Let’s roll!” before passengers attacked the terrorists, was there to tour the site with his wife, Peggy.
“Frankly my expectations have been exceeded,” Beamer said. “It tells the story.”
The exhibit does that by starting with the most basic point about Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001: What a typical, but beautiful day it was, making the terror that followed all the more horrific.
It then jumps to an explanation of events in New York City and Washington, with one exhibit running a montage of the television news shows — CNN, Fox, ABC and others — as they showed the impacts of the first, then second, and then third planes plunging into buildings before it was known what happened to Flight 93.
The Flight 93 story begins in the third panel, showing a seat-by-seat depiction of where the passengers, crew and terrorists sat on the largely empty plane.
Gordon Felt, president of the Families of Flight 93 organization that helped put the exhibit together, led the media tour of the exhibit and he pointed out that his brother, Edward, sat in a row directly in front of two of the terrorists, in seat 2D.
He had known that for years, but he said seeing the graphic representation in the exhibit for the first time “was a very powerful moment” for him.
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The exhibit goes on to explain the flight path of Flight 93, and explains what was learned from other, non-recorded phone calls from passengers and crew to family and officials, as well as showing a visualization of the last 40 seconds of the plane’s flight path, complete with quotes from the transcript of the cockpit voice recorder.
Barbara Black, curator for the memorial, said the audio of the cockpit record has not yet been released by a federal judge who long ago sealed it. But the memorial hopes to one day have that, as well, though whether or not it would be made available to the public “would require a good discussion.”
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The exhibit goes on to explain how the investigation into what happened on Flight 93 aided the look at the terrorist network that plotted the events of 9/11, and how the war that was ongoing then still is not over.
But the exhibit concludes with a focus on the 40 passengers and crew, with a wall of photographs and a touchscreen biography available for each of them, as well as some examples of the tens of thousands of mementos that have been left over the last 14 years as tributes to them.
Lastly, the exhibit concludes with a panel of the names of all of the more than 3,000 people who died on 9/11 in all three locations, a powerful reminder of the scope of what occurred.
Family members lingered over the exhibits Wednesday, with many of them listening to the voicemail messages.
Shirley Adderly, Lyles’ mother, toured the exhibit with her family Wednesday and said she and her daughter’s husband, Lorne Lyles, who Lyles called that day, decided together to let Flight 93 present her daughter’s message in the exhibit.
“It wasn’t hard for me (to decide to let them use it) because to me it was a very important part of the story,” she said.
Moreover, said Frances Watson, Lyles’ aunt, who also visited Wednesday, having the voicemail at the exhibit “is for eternity.”
“How powerful it will be for (Lyles’) grandchildren to come here and hear their grandmother on the phone trying to make a difference and telling her family that she loved them.”
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