Morning brings good tidings, a rare experience for a night owl like myself. When I awaken in my 18th hotel room of this trip, I discover that a) floor tickets for tonight’s Bruce Springsteen show at TD Banknorth Garden are selling for below face value, and b) the Red Sox just released a batch of tickets for Friday night’s game against the Yankees, the first tilt between the archrivals this season.
I jump on both immediately, spending more than I’m comfortable with, but still less than I expected. Tonight, I will see the Boss, but before that, I have an appointment with Victims of Pan Am 103’s former president, Elizabeth Philipps.
Mrs. Philipps agreed to meet with me in the afternoon, so I swing by 826 Boston first to pick up supplies from the Greater Boston Bigfoot Research Institute and deliver hugs, as I did in Ann Arbor. From there, having killed enough time, I continue further into the city to the waterfront condo owned by Irv and Elizabeth Philipps.
When I enter, I’m immediately impressed by the view—the Philipps and I spend a moment watching a massive tanker make its way to the harbor before we settle into the living room to speak. Both Philipps retired long ago, but in their younger days, Irv made his living as a professor at Tufts University, while Elizabeth worked in the publishing industry. The couple had three children: Andrew, Sarah, and James, whom they call “Fritz,” his in utero nickname which stuck. Sarah passed away over Lockerbie.
In 1988, Sarah Susannah Buchanan Philipps studied at the University of Colorado, and wanted to spend a semester studying in London. Unfortunately, Colorado’s study abroad program was located at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, so she transferred to the Syracuse program. Part of her desire study in London proper came from a familiarity with the area.
“We had been in London together in 1985, the three of us,” Elizabeth tells me. We were doing a roots tour for Irv, and she liked it then. Then, in early 1988, I was in London on a sabbatical of a sort. She used to telephone me from Boulder. If it was midnight in Boulder, she could call me up at 7:00 in London and give me my wake-up call. She knew London was the city and Norwich wasn’t.”
Elizabeth explains she spent time in London after losing her job in a merger. When she received her severance package, Irv suggested she use it to spend a couple of weeks visiting London.
“I went for three months, took a flat in Russell Square and went to the Bridge Museum every day it was open to read Jane Austen materials. I was sort of following the trail of Jane Austen around London and Bath and Chawton, of course. Places like that. All the Jane Austen places.”
The Philipps had friends in London, a family that had spent time with Irv at Tufts several years earlier. That family would be among the last people to see Sarah alive.
“Sarah called these people and went to the theatre with the wife a time or two, and was in their house the third week in December, helping put up Christmas trees. They had two little boys, Tom and Jack. Jack was three, maybe four. Tom would have been seven or eight. They were the last people in our family to see Sarah—they’re not in our family, they’re just very close friends. They came here to Massachusetts on the day after Christmas to be with us for Sarah’s memorial service, which I thought was very sweet of them. I wanted Sarah to know Allison, because I admired Allison so much as a doctor and as a mother and as a wife. She was a wonderful woman, and I thought if Sarah got to know her, she’d have an idea how women live their lives, and combine career and children.”
Elizabeth and Irv both remember first hearing the news that a plane had crashed on their way back home from a social gathering, but they disagree on where they were.
“We were coming away from work,” she says. “Irv worked downtown at Tufts, and I worked at Little, Brown, and Company, and we had gone to a friend’s publishing house who was having an open house to celebrate his newly established publishing house. We’d gone to a party.”
“We were a little late coming out of the city, but there was terrible traffic. We usually, we’d get on the turnpike, and we decided we’d go instead on Storrow Drive by the river—”
“Uh-uh,” Irv interrupts.
“No?” she asks.
“No,” he insists.
“Tell your story,” she says, with a slight roll of her eyes and a wave of her hand.
“It was on the turnpike,” he says. “Heading home, the turnpike was terrible. It was traffic, horrible traffic, and that’s when we heard it on the radio.”
“So that’s what we heard on the radio,” Elizabeth picks up where Irv stopped, conceding the point of what street they were on for the moment, but not indefinitely.
More than half an hour from now, Irv will leave the room for a moment, and Elizabeth will come back to the subject, telling me this: “We saw that the turnpike was totally jammed. We were not on the entrance ramp. We turned off, went down, I think, Berkeley Street to get onto Storrow Drive. He doesn’t remember that, but I remember it. I didn’t want to argue about it. People don’t remember everything, do they? It’s probably a good thing.”
This amuses and intrigues me. They agree where they were on their way from and to, they agree they were together and listening to the radio, but they can’t agree what road they were on. It’s such a trivial point, and yet, it may be the most impactful thing to happen on this entire journey. But I’ll get to that.
“There had been a plane lost, and some Syracuse students,” Elizabeth continued after initially conceding the point to Irv. “We came home, tried to get home. Terrible traffic heading out of town. There was no way, you know, those were the days before everyone had cell phones. We called Pan Am. Of course, they didn’t have any information, and there were no phone calls from Sarah saying she had missed her flight. So we sat in the kitchen. We called Andrew and we called Fritzy, and we sat in the kitchen from 7:00 at night until 10:30. Finally, Pan Am called and said that Mr. and Mrs. Philipps had both been on the plane. They were mixing her up with Sandy Phillips1. And they did that in the seating chart of the airplane, so that in the early editions of On Eagle’s Wings2, the seat number’s wrong for Sarah. They didn’t notice, of course, the different ways the names were spelled.”
Not only was Sarah Philipps confused with Sandy Phillips, despite the different spellings of their last names, but, much like William Alan Daniels, her middle name was misspelled on a monument in Lockerbie.
“Sarah’s name is Sarah Susannah Buchanan Philipps. They put a z in instead of that second s.”
When I ask Elizabeth to walk me through her first few days after the attack, she replies that she’s not certain she can.
“I’m not sure I’m a very good person to tell you those things, because you’re numb at that time. You don’t remember things very well. We had a hard time finding Fritz. We couldn’t find Fritzy. In high school and at UMass, he was very close friends with the son of a local policeman. So finally, we asked that policeman if he had any resources for tracking him down, and we were able to find Fritz. He turned up at 11:00 or 12:00 at night. Of course, we didn’t know what to do. Sarah hadn’t been identified. We were just sort of trying to think of what sort of thing needed to be done. We just got through the time.”
“People came and brought a lot of flowers and food and things, and we started, for the first time, taking sleeping pills so we could sleep at night. I do remember that Fritzy’s girlfriend at the time, the woman that he was with when we were trying to call him, came. One of the things Sarah was going to do was help me wrap Christmas presents, and Janelle did that. Very sweet of her. And then, Christmas came. The boys were, both were home, and again, we were sort of at a loss for what to do. Sort of carried on.”
The Philipps were not a religious family, but one of Elizabeth’s friends was married to a Episcopalian priest, who suggested they hold a memorial service, which a neighborhood church offered to host. The Philipps held the service on the 28th, a week before Sarah’s body was finally identified.
“It was January 6th. I got a phone call. I was back at work, at a very small publishing house here in Boston. There had been lots of official phone calls, of course. Once, the FBI called us, and somebody came to the house and asked for things of Sarah’s, I suppose for fingerprints3.”
“There was somebody who was set up as sort of a liaison person from Pan Am. We’d been calling back and forth, but there was no information at that time. So we had both gone back to work, and they called me at my company and said that she’d been identified, and asked what did we want them to do? We had decided that she would be buried in Lockerbie, so we had her cremated and buried there. We went over in May of ’89 for the service. Andrew and Fritzy came along.”
Since then, the Philipps have returned to Lockerbie at least once a year, sometimes more. The first time they visited, the family wanted to see the spot where Sarah’s body had been found.
“We asked somebody to take us there, and what happened was, we were taken there by the local Anglican priest. It’s up beyond Tundergarth, in a sheep field. Wide open space. We went there on a very rainy, foggy day. We walked across, we climbed over stone walls and walked across fields, and finally came to a place that he said where she was found. We had a little prayer service there, and then wanted to go back. We were surrounded by fog in an open moor, and had no idea about where we were or how to get back. So we sort of walked, stayed together, and eventually came to the power line, which we had gone under to get to Sarah’s place. Recognizing the power line, that helped us get oriented, and we were able to find our way back to the car.”
The summer of 1989 hit the Philipps especially hard. Still suffering from the loss of their daughter, they were assailed by more and more tragedies.
“In August of ’89, Andrew and Patty got married. They had sent a letter to Sarah asking her to be a bridesmaid, and she was very excited about that. Of course, she hadn’t been to any weddings ever, and to be a bridesmaid is very, very special. So that was hard, in 1989, to have a family event and to be missing Sarah. In July of ’89, Fritzy’s girlfriend, with whom he was very close and who was also looking forward to going to the wedding, died of lung cancer. So, Sarah was killed in December ’88. In July of ’89, Janelle died—this is the girl who helped me wrap Christmas presents. And in August of ’89, the daughter of close friends of ours died of cancer. I began to feel like Typhoid Mary, with all these young women dying around me.”
How did she deal with so many emotional blows, one after the other?
“Painfully. One day at a time. The wedding was interesting, because I think we made some mistakes at the wedding, and I’ve talked with the other mothers at the 103 meetings about this. They were all having weddings, too, of course. College kids grow up and get married. People did things like, on the way between the church and the reception, they’d go to the cemetery and the bride would leave her bouquet with her sister. When Fritz and Laura got married, they put Sarah’s name on the program of the wedding. We didn’t think to do any of those things. Obviously, we were just too stunned still, too wounded to be thoughtful about that sort of thing. Other people learned from our experience.”
In those first few months, Elizabeth also signed up with the nascent Victims of Pan Am Flight 103.
“We first got involved with that at the first Syracuse memorial service. The beginning of the semester, January ’89. At that time, we talked with Sarah’s roommate, Alexia Tsairis‘s parents4, and they were getting organized. I think we got our names on a list. We weren’t active at that time, we just stayed in touch with the group and read the newsletters. After some years had passed, after the first people who were very active were sort of burnt out, I volunteered to do work on the board of the group.”
By then, the Philipps had moved to Albany, where they lived for eight years. Many of the families lived in the New York/New Jersey area, and a fair number of meetings were being held in Albany. Elizabeth thought it made sense to get involved.
“I was president and chairman of the board at the time they decided to put the cairn up, and then I stopped being president and became treasurer, so my job was to raise money for building the cairn. We’d been given it, but it had to be built. We had to raise money for building it, and we had to raise money for an endowment to maintain it, because the Arlington management didn’t want to put the cairn there. When they were forced to put it there, they didn’t want to use their budget to maintain it, so we had to have a budget for maintaining it.”
Elizabeth’s casual reference was the first I’d heard about Arlington not wanting the cairn.
“We put together a committee, and there were a lot of meetings about this thing. Jane Schultz5 was the one. I remember Anthony Lake was National Security Advisor, and he set up somebody to help her go around and find places to put this thing that we’d been given by the Scottish people. She found a little plot of land in Arlington that was unsuitable for graves. They’re very jealous of their land, because they’re beginning to run out of space for graves. The man who managed Arlington, and I’ve forgotten his name, was sort of bulldozed into agreeing that the cairn would go on this little piece of land.
“That was a big job, getting the cairn built, and at the same time, we were trying to get a meeting with the President. We tried to get a meeting with Bush, and we couldn’t. Then we tried to get a meeting with Clinton, and finally, we were able to do that. He met with us the day that we broke ground on the cairn. A bunch of us met with Clinton in the Oval Office, having had breakfast in the White House. The person in the administration, the Clinton Administration, who was so helpful to us at that time was still Anthony Lake. Of course, Senator Edward Kennedy was a great, great friend to the 103 families. And his staff, Trina Vargo in particular. Very helpful.”
When discussing politicians who were helpful to the families’ cause, the two names that always come up are then-Senator from Delaware, now-Vice President Biden, and Kennedy, which always seemed strange to me, considering most of the American victims came from the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut area. Elizabeth helps make sense of the latter, at least, by telling me that Kennedy knew somebody on the plane, but she can’t remember who6.
While the Clinton Administration proved far more receptive to Victims of Pan Am Flight 103, Elizabeth had grown tired of the cause by the time the cairn was built.
“The Bush Administration had a commission, but they were very resistant to helping us with a cairn. That’s why it took such a long time, because the Scots had sent us the sandstone. It had been sitting in a warehouse. But Clinton and Kennedy, Clinton’s access helped us a lot, so that’s what happened there. I guess I was burnt out by that time, working with Pan Am 103. Since we moved here, I think I haven’t been to any meetings. Moving to Chapel Hill7 also made me remote from the action there. But I did have the pleasure of spending some time with some other mothers. Jane Schultz gathered us together for a couple of days in her house in Pennsylvania. So that’s the sort of thing you don’t do unless you’ve been in an international disaster.”
She shows me pictures of the gathering, of five mothers who would never have met if their children hadn’t died simultaneously, all smiling and enjoying a weekend together. For her, Pan Am 103 is about the people she’s met, the experiences she’s shared in the years since the loss of her daughter. During Elizabeth’s first trip to Lockerbie, an emotional experience with a stranger formed the basis for a lasting friendship.
“We feel as though we’re doing our thing, going back to Lockerbie every year. In fact, I had a phone call from Lockerbie today, from Jess MacTaggart, with whom we’ve become friends. She and her husband. She owned a flower store. She had just started out, been in business a few months, and this disaster happened. Of course, everybody in the world wanted to send flowers, and it was her shop that sent most of them.
“Here’s the story: We were getting flowers for Sarah’s interment, after we got back off the foggy moors. I wanted a bunch of flowers for Sarah, and I wanted some for Julianne Kelly, who was her roommate, and Alexia Tsairis, so I was asking for three bunches of flowers. I wrote out cards for each of these flowers, and I’m standing there, and Niagara Falls has nothing on my weeping. I’m writing out the cards, trying to see the writing on them, and finally, I finished and I looked up and there was Jess standing behind the counter, weeping just as hard as I was. I thought, There’s a person with a heart.
“Every year we went, we would get together with them, and have them and others and have a meal. Finally, they said, ‘Why are you staying at the bed and breakfast? Come and stay with us.’ So we went and stayed with them, and they have come to visit us, both here in Boston and in North Carolina, and they invited us to the wedding of their son. We think of them as very close friends.”
While the Philipps remain close to the MacTaggerts, they drifted out of contact with many of the people from the early years of Victims of Pan Am Flight 103. Elizabeth wonders how those who remain involved stay passionate.
“We still have email addresses and things like that, but we don’t spend time together. You adapt, and you accommodate, and your life goes on, and your family grows. You have grandchildren, so you don’t feel the need as much for the support. I’m interested in Glen Johnson8 and Bob Monetti9, because they continue to be active with the group. And Jane Davis10. Glen got involved with airplane security. He got onto some FAA committees. I think that interested him very much. He’s an engineer, so he wanted to stay connected with that, but that keeps him connected with the group. Bob Monetti, I don’t know why he stayed. Maybe because Glen Johnson did, and they were pals.”
Elizabeth’s life shifted when she became a grandmother for the first time, and Pan Am 103 became less of a priority.
“Our first grandchild, Tom, was born in 1993. I’ve said lots and lots of times that, for me, that was the time when I stopped looking behind me at that terrible disaster and started looking forward into the future again, the way you look forward when you have children and grandchildren. Tom is Andrew’s son. He’s 16 this year, in about a month or so, and he has a sister, Emily, who’s 14.”
Her boys, her remaining children and grandchildren, are her cause now—in fact, when the Libya settlement was reached, Irv and Elizabeth gave the majority of the money to their sons.
“I was astonished that we actually got money out of it. I never expected that to happen. What we did with it was divide it up, giving the boys each their share. We took a share of the first portion, and then we made a rule that anything else that came up—and I never thought anything else was going to be available—would go to them too.”
“The boys got most of the money,” Irv adds. “Not all of it, almost all. We didn’t need it.”
Elizabeth explains that their decision came down to a combination of tax laws and where the money would do the most good.
“The settlement money, that’s not taxable, but if it had flown through us in an estate of some sort, it would have been taxable, first of all. Secondly, we didn’t need it, and they could use it. Andrew set up a business, his own construction company, and I said, ‘You can think of your sister as your silent partner.’ Fritzy bought into his radiology practice, and I said the same thing to him. ‘Think of this as Sarah being your silent partner. She’s still part of your lives.'”
Perhaps it’s because of their grandchildren, or perhaps they’ve mellowed in their old age, but the Philipps appear to have accepted their daughter’s death in a way that many of the other families never did. Even attending the criminal trial of Fhimah and Megrahi didn’t stir up as many emotions as Elizabeth expected.
“I was there for two weeks in the beginning, and I went for another week or so in the end. There were some fascinating things about the trial. It was interesting to me that we would sit there in that gallery, and many, many people, instead of looking forward through that plate glass and into the courtroom, were watching on the TV monitors. I mean, they were right there. They needed to filter it through the TV monitor11.”
“I was agog at seeing Fhimah and Megrahi in the courtroom, but I didn’t have feelings of revenge about them. I didn’t want to burst through that plate-glass window and strangle them. It was different from the Pan Am liability trial, where we were so angry at their defense lawyer.”
Still, one moment that Elizabeth saw brought all her emotions to the forefront: At the trial, they played the tape of the air traffic controller’s screen, and the associated audio, as the plane broke up.
“You could see the videotape of the screen that he was looking at, and it was like reading a book over and over again. You know how it’s going to come out, but your belief is suspended while it’s happening, while the preliminary action is happening. Each time they played that over it was a shock, to see the radar screen with the pieces separating and flying apart. It kept happening12.“
Overall, though, Elizabeth enjoyed her time at the trial far more than she expected.
“I liked being in Holland. We had grand times in Holland. We were very well cared-for. Nobody was chirpy with us or unpleasant to us. People in Holland were kind and low-key and pleasant. The only people that got to us were the local press. The Boston press wanted to talk to me, and the New Jersey press wanted to talk to somebody else and the New York press wanted to talk to other people.”
That trip to the Netherlands, that moment of being involved again, has proven the exception for Elizabeth. These days, she’s content being retired. Sometimes she volunteers, but she mostly just reads and finds contentment in the knowledge that Sarah, her youngest child, is remembered. Sarah’s now been dead for as long as she lived, but the memorials in her honor will last more than a lifetime. Her high school friends raised money for a park bench in Newton Center Park—Elizabeth says they told her they picked the location because “That’s where the girls always went to meet the boys”—but it’s a scholarship in Colorado that Elizabeth takes the most pride in.
“In 1989, we established a travel grant at the University of Colorado for English majors to go to England for a semester. Since that time, 36 or 37 students have been Sarah Philipps Travel Grant scholars from Colorado, and they’ve gone to all places. They go to East Anglia, they go to Glasgow or Edinburgh. They go to Ireland, they go to London, they go to Lancaster.”
Elizabeth tells me Colorado’s study-abroad program has expanded greatly since they established the grant—including an official partnership with Syracuse—and that anybody who wants to participate in the program is eligible for the scholarship. There are no requirements for academics or destinations—all that matters is that someone wants to experience some variation on what Sarah did in her final months.
“We don’t provide all of the funds for a whole semester abroad. What we wanted to do was make the difference for someone who could muster some of the funds, and our grant would take them over the top to get their trip.
“Sometimes, they send us a postcard or go to a pub and have a drink with Sarah or something of that sort. Quite often, we get postcards, and sometimes, we get letters. Now, we get emails from them and that sort of thing. I bet there must be 50 to 75 scholarships set up in honor of people on the plane, maybe more.
“These kids talk about being inspired to be adventurous, and to be open to new experiences and that sort of thing. You want to encourage them and help them along their own path.”
Sarah’s life ended early, but her path continues. Now, students follow in her footsteps, experiencing the world on her behalf. She’s a silent partner in her brothers’ businesses, and a silent inspiration to a new generation of students seeing the world.
In that way, she’s not silent at all.
Leaving the Philipps’ condo, I follow my GPS’s directions towards my 19th and final hotel of this tale. The route takes me through downtown, and eventually, onto Storrow Drive.
Somewhere on this very road, the Philipps may or may not have learned that an airplane carrying their daughter had crashed into a small Scottish town. Elizabeth told me one thing, Irv told me essentially the opposite. The only conclusion I can draw is that Irv and Elizabeth are both right, and they are both wrong.
Every word they told me, every word everyone has told me on this journey, is a lie.
Every word of this book is a lie.
Now, none of these lies are malicious or intentional. These lies are incidental, caused by the inexorable passage of time and the flaws of human memory—as Elizabeth said, “People don’t remember everything, do they? It’s probably a good thing.”
Both Elizabeth and Irv believe strongly that they are correct, and yet they cannot both be—they were either in one place when they got the news, or they were in another. Because of the ephemeral nature of how we humans experience time, it’s impossible to verify that either one of them is right or that either one of them is wrong. I can prove right now that the keys are in the ignition of the Pacifica I’m driving, but I can’t prove that I’m the one who put them there and started the engine.
“Time heals all wounds,” the old expression goes, but this too is a lie. Some wounds heal, some wounds fester and grow worse, and some wounds stay exactly the same. Regardless of the wound itself, our perceptions change—it’s possible that, even as an injury grows better, it feels worse. Our minds trick us every day.
As best I can recall, the tale I tell of waking up one morning in my blue room, walking down the hall, and finding out that my father had died is true. I could have tried further verified its accuracy—I could have asked my mom if events truly played out that way—but trying to confirm its veracity would ultimately have undermined its truth. Perhaps I remember learning of my father’s death in exactly the way it played out, or perhaps my recollection is entirely wrong, but regardless of the way events transpired 20 years ago, the way I remember it is the new truth, precisely because I remember it that way.
Even then, I sometimes wonder about my memory of it. Some days, I’m not sure if I remember it at all, or if I’ve merely thought about that morning so many times over the years that I remember remembering it. All my memories surrounding that day are long since gone13, yet that moment stands out, which forces me to consider the distinct possibility that I don’t recall it at all, that my memory is a photocopy of a photocopy of that seminal morning.
That copy of a copy is my personal truth, the moment that defines me regardless of whether it happened or not. I’m not speaking to my mom during this trip, about this topic, for exactly this reason: She, more than anyone, could tell me that everything I know is wrong—that morning was actually an evening, that she told me in the car instead of at home, or that I ran back into my room instead of climbing into the big blue chair. Maybe things actually happened that way, but those details are no longer true.
What matters is my memory.
What matters are the memories of everyone who lost somebody aboard that fateful flight, because our memories are the ripples in the pond, expanding outwards. Those people died and their stories ended there, but the impact of that moment can expand as far as we are willing to take it. We can make others’ lives better in memory of those that were cut short. We can use the money we received to change the world in a way worthy of those who were lost.
History is not written by the victors, as another old saying claims—history is written by the survivors. Sometimes it’s the same, and sometimes it’s not. It’s entirely possible to live and still lose, and in this case, it’s those perspectives that matter most.
So it is for the Philipps. Elizabeth and Irv recall being together in the car when they heard the news on the radio, and so that is where they will always have been, no matter which path their memories take from there.
My path takes me to Newbury Street, where I park the SUV and walk a block to check into my hotel. I ask about a more long-term parking solution, somewhere I can leave the car for more than two hours at a time, and the girl at the front desk directs me to three garages, all more than a quarter-mile away, the cheapest of which costs $35 per day.
I probably should have booked a hotel in the suburbs.
This extra fee feels like a small price to pay, though, to stay in the heart of the Hub. A five minute walk would get me to the Prudential Center, the Copley T station sits at the end of the block, and the finish line of the Boston Marathon—which happened yesterday—sits directly beneath my hotel room’s window. Once I settle into my room and move my car, I take the T to go see the Boss.
At the Garden, getting to floor level involves far more stairs than seems logical: I have to go in a corner entrance, get a wristband, climb several stories, traverse the concourse, and then descend to the floor. When I finally come to a stop, I notice where I am.
Were the Celtics’ legendary parquet floor in place right now, I would be standing at center court.
I point my iPhone upwards, taking photos of the Celtics’ championship banners hanging in the rafters overhead, and then I face forward, awaiting the sonic euphoria that will arrive at any moment. I’ve never before seen Springsteen—I didn’t care enough to go to his last show in Seattle—but this is different. Seattle is not a Springsteen town. Boston is.
Despite all the things I’ve been told about my father, there are very few things I feel I really know. Stories only capture a moment, a sliver of personality. Events define people to an extent, but long-term things define people most. My dad took photos. My dad played Chess. My dad listened to the Beach Boys, and he listened to Springsteen.
That’s why I’m here, standing in the middle of the Garden as the lights go down and the crowd roars to life. That’s the reason why, a song into the set, I get as choked up as I ever have at a concert.
I’m here because I’ve never seen Springsteen before, but I’m mainly here because I couldn’t forgive myself if it didn’t happen now. Here, in Boston, my father climbed his way up from blue collar to white. Here, in Boston, my father started living out the kinds of dreams that seemingly all of Bruce’s songs are about.
The show plays out exactly how I expect: The crowd feeds off the E Street Band, who feeds back off the crowd, and the energy loop feels like it might collapse the Garden, or perhaps just all of us inside. Four songs in, when the music stops long enough for the Boss to announce that “It’s good to be in Boston!” to the vocal approval of the city, a single thought overtakes my mind.
Bruce, you have no idea.
- Frederick Sandford “Sandy” Phillips was another Syracuse student.
- On Eagle’s Wings was a book put together by Georgia Nucci with brief biographies of each person lost, seating charts, and other items.
- As explained in Chapter Six, this happened in regards to my father, too.
- Alexia Kathryn Tsairis was a junior in Syracuse’s study abroad program.
- Jane Schultz’s son Thomas Schultz was a Syracuse study abroad student.
- Spoiler Alert: I’ll learn about this connection tomorrow.
- The Philipps split time between Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Boston.
- Glen Johnson lost his daughter, Beth Ann, and went on to be chairman of Victims of Pan Am Flight 103.
- Previously referenced in Chapter Thirteen.
- Also previously mentioned in Chapter Thirteen.
- I did the same, as explained in Chapter Six.
- I felt like this—albeit on a much smaller scale—while watching that Red Sox game at my hotel in Sacramento. The results were determined long ago, but I watched as though it was in progress.
- The next thing I remember is passing a Kleenex box around the front row at my dad’s memorial service, days later. I was the only person who didn’t need them—I was the only person not crying.