GANDER, N.L.- For 25 years Karen Mills has held the memories of 9/11 in her heart and in a binder full of photos she flips through while speaking with CTV News. When the tragedy occurred 25 years ago, she was the manager at a Comfort Inn hotel in Gander, N.L. that housed thousands of “plane people” who were stranded when the FAA closed American airspace forcing all planes to land. That sent 38 planes to Gander with more nearly 7,000 passengers. In a town of roughly 10,000, that meant Gander’s population nearly doubled in size overnight. With no committee or association available to help, the people of Gander and surrounding communities stepped up, for those in need. Mills says she recalls the time like it was yesterday. “Our switchboard had 12 lines and it (lit up) just like a Christmas tree, it was just buzzing,” Mills said about the time when passengers landed in Gander and need a place to stay. Although some hotel rooms were already filled with scheduled tourists, when the town declared a “State of Emergency” hotels in Gander were required to give flight crews first access to rooms. With 7,000 passengers in need of shelter, the few hundred hotel rooms in the entire town were filled in minutes. “Do you know how many times we had to say, ‘gosh so sorry,’ we felt so bad, you knew people probably slept on the floor somewhere,” said Mills. The ‘basement boys’ As the so-called “plane people” kept coming, two young men caught a break. The former Comfort Inn manager of 33 years recalled two young men who were desperate for a safe place to rest their heads. “They walked in and once again they were like ‘we know you don’t have anything sorry,’” Mills recounted. “And it was like a boom moment… and I was like ‘wait I got a box spring mattress and a cot you guys can come sleep down in the basement, downstairs in the gym in the fitness centre.’” The two men accepted with delight, telling Mills the box spring was better than the pool table they had slept on the night before. Mills dubbed the two men the “Basement Boys,” and even drove them across town to fulfill one simple request: they needed fresh underwear. The group developed a fond relationship that has run the course of 25 years. “Every year on 9/11 flowers show up at the hotel. They call themselves the ‘Liverpool Lads,’ they don’t know they’re the ‘Basement Boys,’” she said. “I did get an email (from them) once and I told them, ‘Do you know how many times I’ve told your story?’” 25 years later, Mills and the community of Gander remains steadfast in their message. “My god, if we can just be kind, what a world eh… I mean seriously think about it… I think anyone would do what we did.” Mills said. It’s a message she hopes continues to bloom in uncertain times. Open heart, open home Decades-old stories of kindness and empathy are commonly shared around the anniversary of 9/11 in the community of Gander. “I got a call from the (The Royal Canadian) Legion asking to bring a tray of sandwiches to the Legion. I didn’t ask what (it was) for, they wanted a tray, I brought a tray,” said Beulah Cooper, a Gander resident and executive at the local Legion. Her efforts extended well beyond a tray of sandwiches. With dozens of people sleeping on the floor of the Legion, in community centres and schools, she offered comfort. “I took them to make phone calls and I asked them if they wanted to come up to my home and get a good night’s sleep,” Cooper said. One of the people who accepted Cooper’s invitation was American passenger Monica Burke. She is among the many “plane people” who have returned to Gander for the 25th anniversary of 9/11, marking her fifth visit to the community. “I was kind of shocked that she invited me into her house but I was also very relieved, because I needed some rest and was emotional and exhausted,” Burke said while sitting in Cooper’s living room 25 years after they first met. Burke had spent 16 hours on the plane, parked on the tarmac and had no real sense of what happened until she arrived at the Legion. She called her boss in the U.S. to say she wouldn’t be coming back anytime soon. All she knew was that she was somewhere in Canada. As the world witnessed extraordinary horror, people in Gander gave those in need remarkable hope. “It kept happening at the Legion. People would just show up and say, ‘I have two beds. Who wants to come home?’ After a while, it was like, ‘Oh, okay, that’s what they do here.’” said Burke. The bonds capture a strength that is hard for many to describe, people who would otherwise have never met, with seemingly nothing in common, now like family. Former Gander mayor Claude Elliott “put it right,” Cooper said. “He said when they arrived, they were strangers, by the middle of the week they were friends and when they left they were family.” Well into her 80s now, Cooper is still active with the Legion and welcoming “Plane People” into her home. She says she’s humbled by helping so many in such an uncertain time and shares this advice with others: “If you see someone who needs help, or you can help them do it. Open your home or your heart to them. It makes you feel good it really does, I’d do it in a heartbeat again.”
