WTC Photo Seen Around the World
WTC photo seen around the world
By Rick Hampson / USA TODAY
Associated PressBrooklyn firefighters George Johnson, left, Dan McWilliams and Billy Eisengrein raise the flag only hours after the twin towers fell.
Associated PressAn 18-foot sculpture cast in bronze will stand outside the NYFD headquarters NEW YORK --
The photograph has gone around the world, from Ground Zero to Afghanistan. It has been tattooed on a man's arm, carved on a pumpkin and painted on a barn near Middletown, N.Y. It has appeared on magazine covers and slipcovers, quilts and campaign buttons. A woman in Stilwell, Kan., hand-glued 10,000 colored beads to create a mosaic of it. People in Arlington, Texas, are making a stained-glass window of it. You've seen the picture: three weary, dusty firefighters raising the American flag in the ruins of the World Trade Center. It is a vision of defiance and courage at a moment of fear and retreat. "People were grasping for hope," says Monica Moses, who teaches visual design at the Poynter Institute for journalism in St. Petersburg, Fla., "and suddenly there it was." The photo echoes the classic scene of six American servicemen raising the flag atop Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima during a bloody battle with the Japanese in World War II. This time, however, a mountain is the background -- the wreckage of the twin towers. Great events, including terrible ones, produce great images. This is the story of such an image, captured at 5:09 p.m., Sept. 11, 2001. It may have been the blackest day's blackest hour. The twin towers were in pieces. After six hours of searching, it was apparent there were few survivors. Now, another tower -- 7 World Trade Center, which had been burning for hours -- was about to fall. An evacuation order went out to the firefighters sifting through the rubble for more than 300 missing comrades. Dan McWilliams, a 35-year-old firefighter, fell back west toward the Hudson River. There, he saw something on a yacht docked in a marina that made him stop: a 5-by-3-foot American flag attached to a broken wooden pole and covered in debris. McWilliams dusted off the flag, wrapped it around the pole and started walking back toward Ground Zero. He ran into George Johnson, a member of his Brooklyn ladder company, and tapped him on the shoulder. "Gimme a hand, will ya, George?" McWilliams asked. Johnson knew immediately what his buddy had in mind. On the way to the site, they met another fireman, Billy Eisengrein, who had known McWilliams since they were kids on Staten Island. "Need a hand?" he asked. It took about two minutes to reach Ground Zero, where the firefighters were surprised to find exactly what they needed: a large metal flagpole, possibly from the Marriott Hotel in the Trade Center. The pole was jutting at a 45-degree angle from a ledge about 20 feet above the ground. They climbed up and, squinting in the sun, began to rig the flag to the pole. They did not know a photographer was watching. Thomas Franklin, 35, was taking a last look around before heading back to New Jersey to transmit his pictures to his newspaper in Bergen County, The Record. He was under a pedestrian bridge between the towers of the World Financial Center, looking directly east, when he saw the three firefighters about 100 feet away. They were raising a flag -- a splash of red, white and blue in an ash-gray wasteland. He immediately thought of Iwo Jima. That photo, shot by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal, was the most famous image to emerge from World War II. When Franklin talked to high school classes, he always showed the Iwo Jima picture. Now he was staring at its reprise. But the men and the flag were merely the foreground. About 100 yards behind them loomed the twisted skeleton of a skyscraper. He began shooting with his Canon D2000 and long lens. The firefighters finished their task and walked away. They didn't notice Franklin. He didn't think to talk to them or even get their names. The firefighters heard someone yell, "Way to go!" They assumed that was the end of it. 'Oh, my!' Franklin still had to get his photo to his paper. He talked his way onto a police boat back to New Jersey and hitchhiked three miles to his car, where he had left his laptop computer. But the laptop's battery was dead, so he could not transmit his photos. Driving back to his newspaper, he got stuck in a 5-mile traffic jam. He pulled off the highway, set up in the lobby of a motel and sent his photos to the newspaper. A staffer scanning the incoming photos said, "Oh, my!" A few hours later, the photo was sent to the Associated Press and transmitted around the world. The phones at The Record began ringing the next morning. Everyone wanted the photo. Sandy Montesano of Ringwood, N.J., sought a copy of the picture for a 6-month-old girl whose father died at the World Trade Center. "I would like her to know that while there is evil in the world, there is also so much good," she wrote. "Your portrait shows all that America truly is today." Willy Thompson, a firefighter in Teaneck, N.J., said he had never been so moved by a photograph. He proposed a monument like the Marine Corps War Memorial outside Washington based on the Iwo Jima photo. The photo began to turn up everywhere: on the locker of the Arizona Diamondbacks' Curt Schilling, on a button on the chest of the Yankees' Roger Clemens. The scene was restaged on the field before the first game of the World Series as a surprised Franklin watched from the photographers' box behind first base. In Afghanistan, U.S. commandos who raided positions behind Taliban lines left behind copies of the photo with the words "Freedom Endures" superimposed on them. Meanwhile, The Record decided to give a free print to anyone who asked but suggested a donation to a foundation it set up to aid victims' families. Hundreds of requests a day Before it stopped taking requests last month, the newspaper mailed out 30,000 photos. It has received about $400,000 in photo-related donations and still gets hundreds of requests a day for the picture. Franklin's photo is not the defining image of Sept. 11 -- far grimmer ones vie for that distinction -- but it is probably the most uplifting. The background, says cultural historian Mary Panzer, "is what gives the photo its drama. You get a sense of the firemen's accomplishment." The flag flew at Ground Zero for several days. In October, it was delivered to the USS Theodore Roosevelt in the Middle East. The carrier's firefighters passed the flag in the Navy's "hand-over-hand" ceremony, a tradition honoring the dead, before it was raised up the highest mast. Almost the entire crew of 5,500 jammed the flight deck to watch. "We all consider this our battle flag," Petty Officer 1st Class Rodney Hightower says. When the crisis is over, the flag will go back to the New York Fire Department, which also plans to install an 18-foot-high bronze statue modeled on Franklin's photo outside its headquarters as a memorial. Franklin and the firefighters, meanwhile, still have not met. But they share a skepticism of their sudden celebrity. "I was in the right spot at the right time," Franklin says. "But every time something nice happens to me as a result of this, I have to stand back and remember what happened that day. I'm still chilled to the bone." Franklin's loath to discuss predictions that he's a shoo-in for the Pulitzer Prize in spot news photography. But Joe Urschel, executive director of the Newseum, a media museum in Arlington, Va., says, "If he doesn't win, I don't know who will." The firefighters' lawyer, Bill Kelly, says when merchandise related to the photo is licensed and sold, their share will go to victims' families. "My clients won't take a dime themselves," he says.
By Rick Hampson / USA TODAY
Associated PressBrooklyn firefighters George Johnson, left, Dan McWilliams and Billy Eisengrein raise the flag only hours after the twin towers fell.
Associated PressAn 18-foot sculpture cast in bronze will stand outside the NYFD headquarters NEW YORK --
The photograph has gone around the world, from Ground Zero to Afghanistan. It has been tattooed on a man's arm, carved on a pumpkin and painted on a barn near Middletown, N.Y. It has appeared on magazine covers and slipcovers, quilts and campaign buttons. A woman in Stilwell, Kan., hand-glued 10,000 colored beads to create a mosaic of it. People in Arlington, Texas, are making a stained-glass window of it. You've seen the picture: three weary, dusty firefighters raising the American flag in the ruins of the World Trade Center. It is a vision of defiance and courage at a moment of fear and retreat. "People were grasping for hope," says Monica Moses, who teaches visual design at the Poynter Institute for journalism in St. Petersburg, Fla., "and suddenly there it was." The photo echoes the classic scene of six American servicemen raising the flag atop Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima during a bloody battle with the Japanese in World War II. This time, however, a mountain is the background -- the wreckage of the twin towers. Great events, including terrible ones, produce great images. This is the story of such an image, captured at 5:09 p.m., Sept. 11, 2001. It may have been the blackest day's blackest hour. The twin towers were in pieces. After six hours of searching, it was apparent there were few survivors. Now, another tower -- 7 World Trade Center, which had been burning for hours -- was about to fall. An evacuation order went out to the firefighters sifting through the rubble for more than 300 missing comrades. Dan McWilliams, a 35-year-old firefighter, fell back west toward the Hudson River. There, he saw something on a yacht docked in a marina that made him stop: a 5-by-3-foot American flag attached to a broken wooden pole and covered in debris. McWilliams dusted off the flag, wrapped it around the pole and started walking back toward Ground Zero. He ran into George Johnson, a member of his Brooklyn ladder company, and tapped him on the shoulder. "Gimme a hand, will ya, George?" McWilliams asked. Johnson knew immediately what his buddy had in mind. On the way to the site, they met another fireman, Billy Eisengrein, who had known McWilliams since they were kids on Staten Island. "Need a hand?" he asked. It took about two minutes to reach Ground Zero, where the firefighters were surprised to find exactly what they needed: a large metal flagpole, possibly from the Marriott Hotel in the Trade Center. The pole was jutting at a 45-degree angle from a ledge about 20 feet above the ground. They climbed up and, squinting in the sun, began to rig the flag to the pole. They did not know a photographer was watching. Thomas Franklin, 35, was taking a last look around before heading back to New Jersey to transmit his pictures to his newspaper in Bergen County, The Record. He was under a pedestrian bridge between the towers of the World Financial Center, looking directly east, when he saw the three firefighters about 100 feet away. They were raising a flag -- a splash of red, white and blue in an ash-gray wasteland. He immediately thought of Iwo Jima. That photo, shot by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal, was the most famous image to emerge from World War II. When Franklin talked to high school classes, he always showed the Iwo Jima picture. Now he was staring at its reprise. But the men and the flag were merely the foreground. About 100 yards behind them loomed the twisted skeleton of a skyscraper. He began shooting with his Canon D2000 and long lens. The firefighters finished their task and walked away. They didn't notice Franklin. He didn't think to talk to them or even get their names. The firefighters heard someone yell, "Way to go!" They assumed that was the end of it. 'Oh, my!' Franklin still had to get his photo to his paper. He talked his way onto a police boat back to New Jersey and hitchhiked three miles to his car, where he had left his laptop computer. But the laptop's battery was dead, so he could not transmit his photos. Driving back to his newspaper, he got stuck in a 5-mile traffic jam. He pulled off the highway, set up in the lobby of a motel and sent his photos to the newspaper. A staffer scanning the incoming photos said, "Oh, my!" A few hours later, the photo was sent to the Associated Press and transmitted around the world. The phones at The Record began ringing the next morning. Everyone wanted the photo. Sandy Montesano of Ringwood, N.J., sought a copy of the picture for a 6-month-old girl whose father died at the World Trade Center. "I would like her to know that while there is evil in the world, there is also so much good," she wrote. "Your portrait shows all that America truly is today." Willy Thompson, a firefighter in Teaneck, N.J., said he had never been so moved by a photograph. He proposed a monument like the Marine Corps War Memorial outside Washington based on the Iwo Jima photo. The photo began to turn up everywhere: on the locker of the Arizona Diamondbacks' Curt Schilling, on a button on the chest of the Yankees' Roger Clemens. The scene was restaged on the field before the first game of the World Series as a surprised Franklin watched from the photographers' box behind first base. In Afghanistan, U.S. commandos who raided positions behind Taliban lines left behind copies of the photo with the words "Freedom Endures" superimposed on them. Meanwhile, The Record decided to give a free print to anyone who asked but suggested a donation to a foundation it set up to aid victims' families. Hundreds of requests a day Before it stopped taking requests last month, the newspaper mailed out 30,000 photos. It has received about $400,000 in photo-related donations and still gets hundreds of requests a day for the picture. Franklin's photo is not the defining image of Sept. 11 -- far grimmer ones vie for that distinction -- but it is probably the most uplifting. The background, says cultural historian Mary Panzer, "is what gives the photo its drama. You get a sense of the firemen's accomplishment." The flag flew at Ground Zero for several days. In October, it was delivered to the USS Theodore Roosevelt in the Middle East. The carrier's firefighters passed the flag in the Navy's "hand-over-hand" ceremony, a tradition honoring the dead, before it was raised up the highest mast. Almost the entire crew of 5,500 jammed the flight deck to watch. "We all consider this our battle flag," Petty Officer 1st Class Rodney Hightower says. When the crisis is over, the flag will go back to the New York Fire Department, which also plans to install an 18-foot-high bronze statue modeled on Franklin's photo outside its headquarters as a memorial. Franklin and the firefighters, meanwhile, still have not met. But they share a skepticism of their sudden celebrity. "I was in the right spot at the right time," Franklin says. "But every time something nice happens to me as a result of this, I have to stand back and remember what happened that day. I'm still chilled to the bone." Franklin's loath to discuss predictions that he's a shoo-in for the Pulitzer Prize in spot news photography. But Joe Urschel, executive director of the Newseum, a media museum in Arlington, Va., says, "If he doesn't win, I don't know who will." The firefighters' lawyer, Bill Kelly, says when merchandise related to the photo is licensed and sold, their share will go to victims' families. "My clients won't take a dime themselves," he says.
posted by "Faces of the Brave" at 10:36 PM
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