9/11 memorial built with help of Ohio students
Eleven years CLEVELAND — ago, Drew Watkins was one of thousands of children in Northeast Ohio and across the country who collected pennies, nickels and dimes to pay for a memorial to honor the people on United Airlines Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001.
Today, he is proud as he realizes that the final part of the “93 Cents for Flight 93” campaign is completed. The $6 million “Tower of Voices,” was dedicated Sunday on that windswept hill in Shanksville, about 200 miles east of Cleveland and was lauded during Tuesday’s memorial service, which included President Donald Trump.
Watkins, formerly of the Canal Fulton suburb of Clinton, raised money to create the national memorial that includes a museum-like visitor’s center, a memorial wall and now the “Tower of Voices.”
The “93 cents” campaign, operated by the Halo Foundation of Akron, started in 2008 and has raised about $140,000. Even though the mission to help build the memorial in Shanksville is over, the collections continue, collecting money and goods for victims of natural disasters in honor of the people who died on Flight 93.
Tuesday morning, Trump and other national dignitaries attended the service for the 40 passengers and crew of Flight 93, who are credited with rising up against hijackers and thwarting the a plan to crash the plane in Washington, D.C.
It was one of several terrorist attacks that occurred 17 years ago that killed nearly 3,000 people when hijackers also crashed passenger planes into the two towers of New York World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The “Tower of Voices” marks the final element of construction at the National Flight 93 Memorial. It is a 93-foot-tall concrete tower open to the wind that contains 40 chimes, one for each of the men and women who died on the field it overlooks.
Watkins, now 25, remembers visiting the Shanksville site when there was nothing there but several eightfoot sections of a chain link fence where people left messages and precious items to honor the fallen. One woman left her engagement ring on the fence overlooking the field where her fiance died in the crash.
“I’m amazed to see what it has grown into, and to think I help build it makes me proud,” said Watkins, now living in Phoenix. “I was there a few years ago to hear Michelle Obama speak and I was overcome looking at the welcoming center and museum. I wish I could be there to see the Tower of Voices dedicated. I feel like it was worth all the money we collected.”
Watkins was a 14-yearold student in the Northwest School District when his father came home and said the group raising money for a 9/11 memorial in Shanksville needed some help.
“They needed a website to help with marketing the 93 cents initiative, I thought it was way over my head since I had never designed a website before,” he said. “But I was interested in computers, so I worked on it and figured it out.”
Watkins said working to raise the money turned out to be the best decision he ever made.
“It took my life on a different trajectory,” he said. “I worked as a student leader, organizing other student leaders to raise money in their schools, right into the time I went to college. Because of what I did, I started working in web design and today I work as an analyst for the Cast & Hue company in Phoenix.”