Motorcycle ride helps remember 9/11 victims
Journey from Darlington to Parkville honors those who died during attack, wars
The reason Yvonne Green traveled from Rosedale to northern Harford County for a motorcycle ride on a dreary, drippy morning was as clear as the shirt on her back.
It carried the picture of Army Spec. Toccara Green, her 23-year-old daughter, who in 2005 became the first Maryland woman to die in the Iraq war.
“They say a soldier dies twice — once when they’re actually killed and twice is when you no longer speak their name,” the 59-year-old Gold Star mother said.
Toccara Green, a 23-year-old Army specialist, did not die a second time Saturday. Her name was spoken aloud, along with those of 69 Marylanders killed on 9/11.
The occasion was Maryland’s seventh annual Patriot Day Ride, which took dozens of motorcyclists and passengers from the Darlington Volunteer Fire Department to the Putty Hill Shopping Center in Parkville.
The event is the creation of Chuck Ritz of Essex, whose Hope and Peace Foundation sponsors the ride.
Ritz, 59, said that after 9/11, he attended anniversary commemorations in New York and Pennsylvania before deciding Maryland should have its own caravan.
“Our motto is ‘keeping the promise’ — so we never forget,” he said. “9/11 changed most of our own lives and changed the world that we live in.”
The prospects for the event looked bleak at 8 a.m. as riders and others started gathering at the fire hall. Already floodplagued Harford County was hit by a drenching rain that made the roads treacherous — especially on two wheels.
Over the years, the event has taken on its own patriotic rituals. There are six moments of silence.
Ritz led the first at 8:46 a.m., with only a few on hand, to mark the time American Airlines Flight 11 smashed into the North Tower of New York’s World Trade Center. But the attendance grew for each subsequent moment of remembrance: at 9:03, when United Flight 175 hit the South Tower; at 9:37, when United 77 plowed into the Pentagon; at 9:59 when the South Tower collapsed, and at 10:03 when United Flight 93 crashed into a farm field in Somerset County, Pa.
By 10:28, well over 100 were in the fire hall to fall silent to mark the fall of the North Tower.
Shortly after 10, Ritz led off a ceremony of calling out the name of the 69 Marylanders killed on 9/11, starting with Sheila Hein of University Park, killed while working at the Pentagon.
Others took turns reading out other names. After each name was called, either Jim Scarborough of Conowingo or Joe Glackin of Delta, Pa., pulled the cord to ring a church bell cast in Baltimore 100 years ago.
Yvonne Green, who attended with her husband, Garry, and fellow Gold Star mother Rosemarie Ceo of Baltimore, were among those reading out names. Ceo, 67, was there to honor the memory of the son whose picture she wore on her shirt, Army Cpl. Bernard Lawrence Ceo, also killed in Iraq in 2005 at 23.
Ray Pescuzzi of Forestdale, a 63-yearold Air Force veteran, said it was his first time at Ritz’s event, though he has taken part in other 9/11 rides. “It’s been 17 years,” he said. “I think people are forgetting what they said they’d never forget.”
Shortly before 11 a.m., under cloudy skies but with the rain stopped, a contingent of mounted police officers from multiple Maryland departments led the riders out of the Fire Department parking lot and onto southbound U.S.1.
About 45 minutes later they arrived in Parkville along what Ritz calls the Path of Honor — Putty Hill Road lined with 2,977 U.S. flags representing the number of victims in all four 9/11 attacks. They pulled into the Putty Hill Shopping Center, and many of the bikes parked beside a green slope called the Field of Honor marked with 151 flags representing Marylanders killed in military service.
Ritz said that despite the bleak weather, 55-60 bikes took part.
Yvonne Green thought Toccara would have approved.
“She would like to be here with me,” she said.
And so, in a way, she was.