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Anna Allison, who made frequent business trips to California, often planned to leave Boston’s Logan International Airport on Monday.
But after a month-long work hiatus in the summer of 2001, the software developer, who had started her own consultancy a year earlier, delayed her departure for Los Angeles for a day to prepare for the next meetings. clients.
On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, Anna and her husband, Blake, left their home in Stoneham, Mass., With free time to catch their 7.45am flight. After parking, Blake joined his wife at the inside the airport.
The couple had met more than a decade earlier when they enrolled in a wine appreciation class that Blake, a wine company executive, was teaching at the Cambridge, Mass. Center for Adult Education. .
But it wasn’t until after taking a few of her classes that Blake invited her out. “I was slow to understand,” he said.
The couple, married for 10 years, shared a love of travel, music and gardening. Still, some friends joked that they weren’t totally alike. Anna had an optimistic “the glass is half full” personality while Blake was a “where’s the glass?” »Type.
That morning in Logan, Anna learned on check-in that only about half of the seats on the plane were reserved, which resulted in her having an economy class fight near the back of the Boeing 767.
After leaving Logan, Blake called his wife’s cell phone. “I wanted to let her know that I was thinking of her and I was hoping her meetings went well,” he said.
“Just keep me in your pocket,” she replied, which was her way of saying they would be together even though they were 3,000 miles apart.
At 7:59 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 departed Logan with 81 passengers and 11 crew on board. Fifteen minutes later, five men seated near the front of the plane unleashed the deadliest terrorist strikes in US history.
As they “pushed their way” into the cockpit, the terrorists stabbed two unarmed flight attendants, the Federal 9/11 Commission later reported.
At 8:46 a.m., the hijackers crashed the plane into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, instantly killing everyone on board and hundreds of people in the skyscraper.
With his wife sitting in row 34, Blake wonders if she knew what was going on in the front of the plane. “I hold on to the feeling that she didn’t do it,” he said.
Blake had just moved into his office when a colleague said moments earlier a plane had landed on the World Trade Center. The coworker appeared to think the accident had occurred at the Seaport Boston Hotel and the World Trade Center on the city’s waterfront.
It couldn’t be Anna’s plane, Blake calculated. Her flight left Boston an hour ago.
He turned on the radio. News stations reported that the plane struck the World Trade Center in New York – not Boston. Walking down the stairs to a conference room with a television, a colleague said the airliner that crashed into the World Trade Center was hijacked from Boston earlier in the morning.
“I knew then that Anna was gone,” he said.
She was 48 years old.
Five days after the terrorist attacks, the first of Anna’s two memorial services drew large crowds. Nancy Itkin, who lived in Lyme, had never met Anna or Blake, but attended the service with her husband. Lewis Itkin, who worked for a wine importer, had dealt with Blake over the years.
“Blake looked so isolated and alone, standing at a table, shaking hands with people,” Nancy said in a subsequent interview with The Wall Street Journal.
Fourteen months after Anna’s death, Nancy lost her husband to a sudden heart attack. In the Journal of 2006, Blake remembers going to Nancy after her husband’s funeral at Lyme Congregational Church.
“I know what you’re going through and I think I can help you,” he told her. “Please call me anytime. “
Over the next Christmas vacation, Nancy invited Blake to join her and a group of friends at Lyme. When they had the opportunity to speak, they learned that they both enjoyed classical music and gardening. Neither had children with their deceased spouse.
Blake and Nancy married in August 2005. A few years after moving to Lyme, Blake began playing the trumpet in the town orchestra. Passionate about ornithology, he later became active in the Mascoma chapter of New Hampshire Audubon.
It’s probably fair to say that more people in the Upper Valley know Blake as a bird watcher than someone whose life was turned on September 11th.
“I don’t talk much about it,” he said. “It’s a conversation stop when you say, ‘My wife was killed in 9/11. “
In May 2012, Blake traveled to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to witness the indictment of the five 9/11 planners accused in a military tribunal at a US naval base.
Blake was among 10 chosen by lot out of 250 who applied to attend the military tribunal hearing on Los Angeles Times reported.
In interviews with the Times, the relatives of other victims who made the trip to Guantanamo have clearly expressed their wishes: the leaders accused of the terrorist attacks which left nearly 3,000 dead deserved the ultimate punishment.
“Death, nothing less,” said a woman whose brother, a bond trader, was killed when the first plane struck the Twin Towers.
The newspaper also interviewed Blake, whose opposition to the death penalty dates back decades before 9/11.
“It is not a productive or appropriate way to solve anything,” he said. “It just perpetuates the idea of needing revenge.”
At Guantanamo, Blake and four other relatives of the victims met privately with the defendants’ lawyers. It was an opportunity for the families of the victims to ask questions about the progress of the trial.
Days after the meeting, hosted by federal prosecutors, Blake became fodder for the tabloids. “The husband of the victim of September 11 goes to Gitmo to spare the plotters the death penalty,” shouted a New York Post big title.
The story was “completely twisted,” Blake said, adding that he was not the only family member of a 9/11 victim to oppose the death penalty for accused terrorist leaders.
“It’s not that we don’t want these people to be brought to justice,” he told me. Forcing them to spend the rest of their lives in segregation in Colorado maximum security federal prison is enough, he said.
Nine years after their arraignment, it is still unclear when the trial of the five men will begin. The trial, which is expected to last nine months or more, was scheduled to begin this past January, but plans changed when the COVID-19 pandemic struck.
The trial could have taken place several years ago “if the government had not insisted on calling for the death penalty,” Blake said. “It would have saved the families the constant heartache and the awakening of painful memories. “
Although the families of the 9/11 victims received a “huge wave of support,” he said, it was a “double-edged sword”.
“The average person who loses a loved one to murder doesn’t see the same level of support,” he said. “On the other hand, we are part of an ongoing drama and spectacle.
“I’m now part of an event that will put me on a stage that I didn’t want to be on for the rest of my life. “
When I called Blake, now 71, a few weeks ago to ask if we could meet, I wasn’t sure what he would say. I wondered if talking about Anna’s death and the aftermath of 9/11 would be too painful.
A few days later we met in Norwich, where we chatted for over an hour.
“I want to honor Anna’s memory by telling her story,” he told me. “I want to make sure people know how wonderful she was.”
Jim Kenyon can be contacted at [email protected].
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