About 5 p.m. on September 11, 2001, New York firefighter, Daniel McWilliams, was ordered to evacuate the area around the World Financial Center because it had become unstable. He saw a dirty and tattered U.S. flag hanging from a yacht moored in a small marina in the Hudson River just west of Lower Manhattan.
In a spontaneous moment of patriotism and hope he took a K-saw and cut the flag and its pole from the stern of the yacht and rolled it up so it would not touch the ground, then moved to the evacuation area. On the way, he passed George Johnson, another firefighter he knew, and asked him to give him a hand. Then Billy Eisengrein, a third firefighter joined them.
The three firefighters found a flagpole within the mound of rubble behind them and used an improvised ramp to climb to the pole which was about 20 feet off the ground on West Street where they raised the flag.
At that precise moment, Thomas E. Franklin, a photographer from The Record, a newspaper in Bergen County N.J., saw the firefighters. He was standing under a pedestrian walkway across West Side Highway. The firefighters were about 150 yards away from him and the field of debris was 100 yards beyond that. He raised his camera and, using a telephoto lens, snapped a series of frames. At the time, he had no idea about the significance of the photo he had just taken. He later said it was certainly not his best picture but as it began to show up in newspapers and other media outlets, he realized it was the most important one of his career.
Franklin had been notified by his newspaper about the collapse of the towers and had hitched a ride on a tugboat across the Hudson River, arriving about noon after the towers had collapsed.
The firefighters were not aware at the time that the photo had been taken, and in the ensuing cleanup effort and chaotic search for survivors, it was forgotten about until sometime later when someone realized the flag was missing from the pole. In fact, some video footage was found which had been taken just five hours later, and the flag was already gone.
For some 13 years, the whereabouts of the missing flag remained a mystery.
Then in 2014 a man walked into a police station 3000 miles away in Everett, Washington, carrying a small plastic bag which he said contained the original Ground Zero flag from September 11. The only information officers could get from him was that his name was Brian, he was a U.S. Marine, had been deployed in the Middle East, and that a worker at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had given it to him and told him he had received it from the widow of a 9/11 victim.
I wish I had space in this column to tell you how “Brian” found his way to the police station to deliver the flag. Perhaps I have piqued your curiosity to the point where you will do your own research, beginning with a documentary on The History Channel. Suffice it to say that the authenticity of the flag was determined in August 2015 and the flag was returned to Shirley Dreifus, the owner of the yacht, who donated it to the museum. It was unveiled and put on display at the National September 11 Memorial Museum on September 11, 2016.
As of that date, firefighters McWilliams and Johnson were still active in their respective fire stations, and Eisengrein was retired.
© Joan Rowden Hart 2016
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