and Peg continued to work for American Airlines throughout their marriage, with John flying a dozen days a month and Peg working about the same. They alternated flight schedules so one or the other could be with the girls. When that failed, their families pitched in. John had spent a chunk of his career flying international routes, but the overnight flights wore him down, and he’d recently been recertified on the Boeing 767, the wide-bodied pride of American’s domestic fleet. Lately he’d been flying regularly on the Boston–Los Angeles route, often on Flight 11, which Peg had flown hundreds of times as well.
John was scheduled to fly again the next morning, another six-hour trip to California, but he decided he didn’t want to leave home so soon after returning from the West Coast. Also, federal agriculture officials and a team from Tufts University were coming to the farm in the morning to discuss a program John felt passionate about. He and Peg had set aside a dozen acres to allow Cambodian immigrant farmers to grow bok choy, water spinach, pigweed, and other traditional Asian vegetables, to sell at markets and to feed their families. John plowed for the immigrants and rarely collected the two-hundred-dollar monthly rent. He built greenhouses for early spring planting, provided water from the farm’s pond, and taught the new Americans about New England’s unforgiving soil, crop-killing pests, and short planting season. Soon the Ogonowskis’ White Gate Farm was designated the first “mentor farm” for immigrants. When a reporter stopped by, John heaped credit on the Cambodians: “These guys are putting more care and attention into their one acre than most Yankee farmers put into their entire hundred acres.”
After dinner, John went to the desktop computer in the TV room. He logged in to the American Airlines scheduling system, hoping that another pilot wanted to pick up an extra trip. A match would turn John’s onscreen schedule green, allowing him to stay on the farm on September 11. He tried several times, with the same result each time.
“I’m just getting red lights,” he told Peg.
The farm tour would go on without him, while once again John would serve as captain of American Airlines Flight 11, nonstop from Boston to Los Angeles.
PETER, SUE KIM, AND CHRISTINE HANSON
United Airlines Flight 175
In 1989, a vibrant young woman slalomed through a house party, weaving through the crowd to avoid a determined young man with red dreadlocks, freckles, and a closet stuffed with tie-dyed T-shirts. Peter Hanson was cute, but Sue Kim wasn’t interested in a latter-day hippie desperate to convince her that the music of the Grateful Dead was comparable to the work of Mozart.
This sort of thing happened often to Sue, a first-generation Korean American. It made sense that a curious, intense man like Peter would meet her at a party and be smitten by her intelligence and effervescence. Sue’s easy laugh made people imagine that she’d lived a charmed life. But she hadn’t.
When Sue was two, her overworked parents sent her from their Los Angeles home to live with her grandmother in Korea. She returned to the United States four years later and learned that she had two younger brothers, who hadn’t been sent away from their parents. Her mother died when Sue was fifteen, and she helped to raise her brothers. Later her father committed suicide after being diagnosed with cancer. Beneath her placid surface, Sue craved the bonds of a secure family.
After the house party, Peter engineered ways to see Sue again while he pursued a master’s degree in business administration. When Peter thought that he’d gained romantic traction, he cut off his dreadlocks, stuffed them in a bag, and gave them to his mother, Eunice. She understood: Peter wanted to show Sue he’d be good marriage material. It marked a sharp turn toward responsibility for the free-spirited twenty-three-year-old. His parents worried that perhaps he wasn’t quite ready for marriage, but he couldn’t wait.
“If I don’t nab her now, she won’t be there,” Peter told his mother. Eunice accompanied him on a shopping trip for an engagement ring. Sue said yes, accepting not only Peter but also his devotion to the Grateful Dead. Their wedding bands were antiques, handed down from the parents of Peter’s father, Lee.
Peter earned an MBA from Boston University and became vice president of sales for a Massachusetts computer software company. He stayed close with his parents, with whom he’d traveled the world as a boy and occasionally enjoyed his favorite band’s contact-high concerts. Even as he accepted adult responsibilities, Peter remained a prankster. One day while answering phones at the local Conservation Commission office where she worked, Eunice heard a stern male voice demanding permission to build a structure next to a pond on his property. Eunice calmly explained the review process and the permits needed, but the caller raged about his rights as a landowner. As the rant wore on, Eunice realized it was Peter.
Meanwhile, Sue developed into an impressive academic scientist. She’d worked her way through a biology degree at the University of California, Berkeley, then moved to Boston for a master’s degree in medical sciences. With Peter’s encouragement, Sue pursued a PhD in immunology, working with specially bred mice to explore the role of certain molecules in asthma and AIDS. Sue was scheduled to defend her dissertation that fall, but approval was a foregone conclusion. Her doctoral adviser envisioned Sue joining the faculty at Boston University.
Peter and Sue juggled their professional lives with taking care of their daughter, Christine, who was born in February 1999. She looked like Sue in miniature, a hug magnet with Peter’s love of music. Christine’s middle name was Lee, for her paternal grandfather. Quietly, Sue stocked up on pregnancy tests, hoping to give Christine a little brother and Peter’s parents a grandson.
Lee and Eunice visited often from their Connecticut home. When Eunice arrived one day with a broken foot, Christine yelled, “I help you, Namma! Wait here!” She ran upstairs and returned with a colorful Band-Aid she applied to Eunice’s cast. Lee found joy in watching Christine work with Peter in the yard. The little girl promised the young trees that she and her daddy would help them grow big and strong. When they said grace before meals, Christine insisted on a song from a television show about Barney the purple dinosaur: “I love you, you love me, we’re a happy family. With a great big hug, and a kiss from me to you, won’t you say you love me too?” If her grandparents missed a word, Christine made them start over.
Early in September, Peter needed to fly to California on business, so they decided to turn the trip into a family vacation and a visit with Sue’s grandmother and brothers. The weekend before the September 11 flight, Christine told Eunice of her excitement about the upcoming trip, which included plans for an outing to Disneyland. During one phone call, Christine reported to her grandmother that she was going to California to see Mickey Mouse and Pluto. Then Christine expressed an even stronger desire: “I want to go to your house, Namma!”
On the night of September 10, Christine slept in her new big-girl bed with her favorite stuffed animal, Peter Rabbit holding a carrot. Before she left home the next morning, she’d tuck Peter under the covers, to keep him safe until she returned.
BARBARA OLSON
American Airlines Flight 77
Under the hot lights of the C-SPAN television show Washington Journal, host Peter Slen flipped open a copy of Washingtonian magazine for September 2001. The camera zoomed in to a headline, THE 100 MOST POWERFUL WOMEN IN WASHINGTON. Then it swung across the set to find conservative firebrand Barbara Olson, her telegenic smile dialed to full blast, her gleaming blond hair draped down the back of her red blazer. Slen asked Barbara: “Why are you listed as an influential political insider?”
Barbara knew perfectly well, but she answered modestly: “I don’t know. That’s where they put me.” She changed the subject to a recent lunch where the magazine’s honorees discussed who might be the first female president. Overwhelmingly,
