Volunteers from across the Valley set up a display of about 3,000 flags in Tempe Beach Park early Wednesday morning as part of a yearly tribute to those who lost their lives in the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
Tempe is the only city in Arizona and one of three cities nationwide participating in a 9/11 memorial ceremony called Healing Field, said Nikki Ripley, Tempe media relations director.
“As far as I know, we are the only city in the Valley doing something like this, this year,” Ripley said.
The city of Tempe partnered with The Valley of the Sun Exchange Club Foundation and the Colonial Flag Foundation for the fifth year in a row to set up the memorial, VSECF representative Jerry Michaels said. The memorial will be up until Sunday, and a candlelight vigil will be held there at 7 p.m. on Thursday.
Michaels said the club focuses on “programs of patriotism and service” and the Valley club generally focuses on child-abuse prevention events.
The city has participated in the program since 2003, but this year visitors to the memorial will see something new — photographs and laminated cards containing information on the deceased.
“[The memorial] is much more personal than it was before,” Ripley said.
The victims’’ photos and information were gathered by Valley of the Sun Exchange Club member and homemaker Lisa Vella.
Vella, who joined the club last September, said she wanted to add a more personal touch to the memorial.
“I saw what they had done last year, with the [victims’] names on the back of the yellow ribbons, and thought, ‘It would be nice to have their pictures too,’” Vella said.
Gathering information on the roughly 3,000 victims and putting it together was a labor of love that took four and a half months to complete, Vella said.
Starting in January, Vella gathered the names and photographs of the casualties from the 2001 terrorist attacks on Web sites such as cnn.com, legacy.com and the now-defunct http://september11victims.com.
When Vella had finished gathering photos and information, she passed it on to a New York-based printing and graphic-design company called Tana Seybert, which printed out laminated cards free of charge.
“Someone in our club was a retired [New York] police officer, and he knew this guy in New York who could help us out with this project,” Vella said.
After the long process of gathering information and images, volunteers from fire departments, civic organizations and youth programs gathered in Tempe Beach Park to put up the memorial.
The group of about 80 volunteers worked from 6 a.m. to 11 a.m. on Wednesday, planting flags at designated spots marked by the VSECF the previous morning.
Michaels said the long hours of work were dedicated to honoring the dead, and his group also aimed to educate young people seven years after the attacks that changed the United States forever.
“We just wanted to send a message to the public,” Michaels said. “A lot of kids today don’t remember [the attacks].”
Reach the reporter at derek.quizon@asu.edu.
