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.,