“We remember the fallen.” Glen Arbor commemorates 25th anniversary of 9/11 attacks

From staff reports

Each year on September 11, Glen Arbor holds a memorial ceremony at the Fire Department at 8:30 am to commemorate the anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks. This year marks 25 years since the hijacking of four commercial airplanes and attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., which killed nearly 3,000 people and sent the United States into two wars.

Ceremonies in past years have featured the Glen Lake School Choir singing the “Star Spangled Banner” and “God Bless America”; bagpipers playing “Amazing Grace” as is traditionally done at New York City funerals for fallen police and firemen, and the “Taps” farewell salute, by Norm Wheeler and William Brodin. At 8:46 a.m., the moment when the first hijacked airplane hit the Twin Towers 25 years ago, the Glen Arbor fire station bells sound their mournful chimes, followed by one minute of silence.

Glen Arbor resident Ted Peterson designed the memorial which sits in front of the Fire Department and features a beam that was salvaged from the wreckage at Ground Zero in New York City standing over a reflecting pool. That beam came from the Twin Towers and arrived in Glen Arbor in 2012.

Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, and Leelanau County resident Taro Yamasaki (read our 2012 feature about Yamasaki’s work), whose father helped design the Twin Towers in Manhattan, created an emotionally moving video, together with the late Julie Weeks, about the families of firemen lost in the terrorist attacks. That slideshow was presented at the memorial dedication in Glen Arbor on Sept. 11, 2013. Watch the slideshow below: