By Patrick J. Fee
Beacon Columnist
I knew Jerry Moran before Sept. 11 made his name one that had to be remembered.
Gerard “Jerry” Moran Jr. was 39 years old. He had served in the Navy as a combat photographer and was working for the Navy as a BAE Systems engineering contractor at the Pentagon, handling video teleconferencing.
He was also simply a guy I knew. That distinction matters to me.
Twenty-five years later, it is easy to talk about September 11 in numbers — the number of airplanes, the number of buildings, the number of people killed.
Jerry wasn't a number. Neither were Chuck Jones or Bob Penninger.
BAE Systems lost all three that morning. Jones was aboard American Airlines Flight 11 when it struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Penninger was aboard American Airlines Flight 77 when it struck the Pentagon.
Jerry was inside the Pentagon when that plane arrived. I was working for BAE at the time, too. In fact, I was supposed to go to work that morning.
I didn't. I was running late.
There was nothing dramatic about that. I wasn't escaping some narrow brush with fate. I was simply taking my time getting ready at our condo when I saw something on television and sat down.
Then the world changed.
My web team was supporting the Federal Aviation Administration. I had about 10 people working in Washington within sight of the Capitol.
Once I realized what was happening, I wasn't going anywhere. Washington quickly became a parking lot, and the telephone system was overwhelmed as seemingly everyone tried to call everyone else at the same time.
I spent much of the day doing exactly that — trying to reach people.
Andree and I were married on Aug. 26, 2000. We had just celebrated our first anniversary. She worked for Goodwill Corporate and was in Wisconsin for a conference. Suddenly, there were no commercial airplanes flying. Eventually, the rental-car companies allowed her group to keep their cars, and they drove them all the way back to the Washington area.
I was also trying to reach my cousin. For a while, I believed he worked in one of the World Trade Center towers.
I later learned his office had moved to Jersey City a month or two earlier. But he had still traveled through the World Trade Center complex that morning, about an hour before the attacks.
For those hours, though, I didn't know that.
That is one of the things that is difficult to explain about September 11 to someone who did not live through it. There was no location sharing on a phone. No social media safety check. Texting was nothing like it is today.
You called.
It didn't go through.
So you called again.
And waited.
Eventually came the news about Jerry and the other BAE employees.
Afterward, I had one of the people on my web team create a screensaver for BAE Systems computers honoring what we called our three heroes — Chuck Jones, Bob Penninger and Jerry Moran.
It seemed like such a small thing. Maybe it was.
But we wanted people to see their names. We wanted people to remember who had been lost.
A few weeks later, I went to Yankee Stadium to see Cal Ripken Jr., baseball's “Iron Man,” during one of the final series of his remarkable career.
Baseball had started again. People were cheering again. Life was attempting to become normal again.
But from Yankee Stadium, looking toward the other end of Manhattan, I could still see smoke rising from the place where the towers had stood. I have never forgotten that image.
Years passed.
In January 2019, I came to Burlington to work at The Hawk Eye. That fall, I began working for Pritchard Broadcasting.
Then, on Sept. 11, 2020, Steve Hexom introduced me to something Burlington did to remember.
Bells.
KBUR had a tradition of carrying the ringing of Burlington's church bells on September 11. We began simulcasting the remembrance audio and bells across the stations. And I began making my way to Central Fire Station for the Burlington Fire Department's remembrance ceremony.
There is something about a bell.
It doesn't explain anything.
It doesn't argue.
It doesn't tell you how you are supposed to feel.
It simply interrupts whatever you are doing and demands your attention.
It turns out Burlington understood that long before September 11.
While researching this column, I stopped by the Des Moines County Historical Society and asked archivist Cora Hermann-Wickham if she could find anything about Burlington's history of ringing bells for remembrance.
She did.
Hermann-Wickham found a Burlington Gazette article from November 1920 showing that, two years after the armistice ended World War I, Burlington Mayor Thomas J. Smith asked the city's church bells to ring for two minutes on Armistice Day. Then, at 11 a.m., businesses were asked to stop for one minute so people could remember.
I wouldn't suggest there is an unbroken line from that 1920 ceremony to what Burlington does today. History rarely works that neatly. But there is something familiar about it.
More than a century ago, Burlington rang its bells and stopped for a moment to remember a national trauma. This Sept. 11, Burlington will do it again.
The Burlington Fire Department's 25th anniversary ceremony begins at 7:46 a.m. Central Time at Central Fire Station, the time the first hijacked aircraft struck the World Trade Center's North Tower.
The station bell will ring.
Downtown churches have been invited to join it for two minutes.
Fire Chief Nathan Toops remembers the original September 11 from a very different vantage point than mine. He was 16 years old, a Burlington High School student working at a lathe in shop class. His teacher, Mr. Beckman, stopped the class. Everybody was told to put down what they were doing, sit down, and watch the televisions.
Toops told me that, as a 16-year-old kid, he wasn't even completely sure what the Twin Towers were. He didn't immediately understand the gravity of what was happening.
His teacher did. And as the day continued, so did Toops.
Now he is Burlington's fire chief.
And after nearly two decades in the fire service, Toops understands that morning differently than the teenager sitting in shop class ever could.
Firefighters routinely enter buildings everyone else is trying to escape. But Toops told me that going into a single-story, single-family house fire is “nothing compared to what they did” on September 11.
Those firefighters were climbing into enormous burning towers, knowing the buildings themselves could come down.
“It's unfathomable,” Toops said.
During our conversation, he pulled up his department roster and started counting.
Seven. Seven current Burlington firefighters weren't even born on September 11, 2001.
That number stopped me.
These are firefighters who will stand in front of Central Station to commemorate something they cannot remember. They know September 11 through photographs, video, history lessons, and stories told by people who were there. And that is increasingly true everywhere.
No student currently attending Burlington High School was alive that morning. The 16-year-old sitting in shop class watching history happen is now the fire chief.
Twenty-five years does that. Memory slowly becomes history.
That doesn't mean we have to remain trapped in the grief of that day. We shouldn't. But there is a difference between moving forward and forgetting.
Maybe that is why the bells matter so much to me.
In 2001, I helped put the names of Jerry, Chuck, and Bob on computer screens because we didn't want our coworkers to forget them.
In 2020, Steve Hexom introduced me to a Burlington tradition that used radio to carry the sound of remembrance across our community.
And now each September 11, I stand with firefighters and others outside Central Fire Station and listen.
This year, when that bell rings, I will think about Jerry.
I'll think about Andree stranded hundreds of miles away.
I'll think about my web team near the Capitol and the hours spent trying to get through on a telephone.
I'll think about my cousin.
I'll think about the smoke I could still see from Yankee Stadium weeks later.
And I'll think about those seven Burlington firefighters who weren't alive for any of it.
Some of us remember where we were. Others weren't here yet. That's why we keep telling the story. That's why Burlington keeps ringing the bells.