The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland (16 page)

Royal Canadian Sea Cadets helping out at the Lions Club.
Courtesy of the Lions Club

W
erner Baldessarini found himself in a place he’d never been before, a place he never imagined he would visit in his lifetime—the men’s underwear department of Wal-Mart.

For most folks in Gander, Wal-Mart has everything they’ll ever need. Since the first planes landed on Tuesday, however, the store had been overrun with passengers, and by Thursday the shelves were starting to look a bit bare, particularly in the underwear section. It was one thing, apparently, to wear T-shirts or pants or dresses donated to the local shelters during this crisis. It was an entirely different matter to wear secondhand underwear. Many of the stranded passengers who accepted assistance drew the line at accepting hand-me-down briefs.

And it was certainly a line Baldessarini had no intention of even approaching. In his twenty-seven years with Hugo Boss, first as a buyer, then as a designer, and now as the company’s chairman, he had helped shape the world’s image of what it meant to dress for success. Through the eighties and nineties, a Hugo Boss power suit, with its classic lines and dark tones, set the standard by which all other clothiers were measured. But it wasn’t just the suits. Hugo Boss designed shirts, slacks, leather jackets, shoes, boots, sandals, sunglasses, cologne, and yes, underwear. Cotton briefs, boxer shorts, and boxer briefs. All heralded for their quality and marquee name.

Baldessarini himself was no less stylish.

As one would expect, he was a walking advertisement for his company, dressing head to toe in Hugo Boss apparel. The cashmere suit he’d worn for the flight from Frankfurt to New York was from a special line of clothes the company produces under a signature label bearing his name. And while the suit was holding up quite well during extended wear and adverse conditions, common decency demanded a change of underwear.

Entering Wal-Mart, Baldessarini walked between the smiling greeter in the blue vest and a row of shopping carts, past a display of beer coolers and lawn furniture, and around several racks of T-shirts bearing the likenesses of professional wrestlers and NASCAR drivers. The men’s underwear wasn’t actually in a department of its own in the store, more like an aisle, containing several metal tiers of shelves. He found the appropriate size and style, and then stood in line and paid at the checkout stand.

When he returned to the school, he showered and changed. He immediately felt uncomfortable. The waistband, the material, the design—it was all wrong.

Baldessarini was living through his very own version of the Hans Christian Andersen story of “The Princess and the Pea.” This wasn’t snobbery as much as it was a realization of the superiority of his product. After all, a person who is used to filet mignon certainly notices when someone tries to pass off a Salisbury steak in its place.

Luckily, help was on the way.

H
aving also worn the same clothes for the better part of three days, Deborah Farrar, Lana Etherington, and Winnie House were anxious to go shopping. Since there really wasn’t a place for them to shop in Gambo, George Neal offered to drive them all into Gander. Bill Cash, Mark Cohen, and Greg Curtis went along as well. And like everyone else, they ended up at Wal-Mart.

Winnie was browsing through what was left of the women’s underwear in the store when she noticed a young girl who was about ten staring at her. Since arriving in Newfoundland, Winnie had been very conscious of the fact that she was often the only black person around. At one point she had asked George if there were any black people living in Gambo. “No,” he said, shaking his head, “not really.”

Even if she hadn’t been black, Winnie wasn’t the type of person who was capable of just blending into a crowd. Her shoes made her almost six feet tall. She was wearing Dolce & Gabbana designer jeans and her hair brushed the small of her back. Winnie looked over again at the young girl. The child was saying something to her mother.

“Go ahead,” the mother told the girl. “It’s okay.”

The girl walked over. Winnie could tell from the mother’s accent that they were locals.

“Excuse me,” the girl said. “Can I have your autograph?”

Winnie was flabbergasted. “I’m really a nobody,” she replied.

The child’s mother smiled and told her it didn’t matter. “You’re somebody to her,” she said.

A little embarrassed, Winnie agreed, and the mother dug through her purse for a piece of paper. The child asked if she could touch Winnie’s hair.

“Of course,” Winnie said. The child stroked it gently as Winnie signed her name, along with a few
X
s and
O
s, for hugs and kisses.

“Thank you,” the child said, leaving with her mother.

Winnie was so moved she wanted to cry. Throughout her stay in Newfoundland, she was always greeted with such warmth. In all her travels around the world, it was one of the few times she was made to feel her skin color didn’t matter.

Outside the Wal-Mart, Deb walked over to Greg, who was shaking his head and looking disappointed.

“All they have left in the men’s section is extra-small and thong underwear,” he said.

“Really,” Deb said gleefully. “Let me see.”

Before she could reach into his bag, he told her he was just kidding. Leaving the mall and heading back to Gambo, Deb realized that she really liked Greg. And she could tell he liked her as well. After being thrown together the night before, they were now getting to know a little bit more about each other. Where were they born? Where did they grow up? How large were their families? Where did they go to school?

Because they were spending so much time together, it felt as if they were compressing the normal dating cycle, so that by their second night together it seemed like they had known each other a lot longer, and they were growing close. But there also wasn’t as much pressure on them as there might have been since they were always in a fairly large group, with George, Edna, Winnie, Bill, Lana, and Mark usually around.

N
ot even an international tragedy can slow down a determined personal assistant trying to please his or her boss.

Inside the Frankfurt headquarters of Hugo Boss, the full resources of the company were being tapped to aide their stranded chairman. On Tuesday, company executives thought Baldessarini’s flight was being diverted to Toronto, so they dispatched the president of Hugo Boss’s Canadian subsidiary, Les Minion, to the airport to greet him. After two hours of waiting, Minion learned that the flight had been diverted to Gander.

On Wednesday, Hugo Boss chairman Werner Baldessarini contacted his corporate offices to let them know he was safe and where he would be staying for the foreseeable future. Baldessarini’s first concern was making sure that all his people in New York were safe. And they were. The remainder of Fashion Week had been canceled and Hugo Boss would have to delay the release of its spring collection—a decision that cost the company almost $2 million. Given everything that was happening in the United States, the collection and the money were merely trivial details to Baldessarini.

By the time Baldessarini called in, his staff was already making plans for his rescue. Hugo Boss is a major sponsor of the McLaren Formula One race team. The principal owner of the team is Mansour Ojjeh, a wealthy Saudi Arabian businessman. When Ojjeh learned his good friend Baldessarini was stranded in Gander, he offered to send his personal jet to Newfoundland to pick him up. As his staff coordinated these efforts, Baldessarini mentioned the uncomfortable bind he was in—literally—regarding his underwear. Snapping into action, his assistants in Germany once again contacted Minion to see if this situation could be rectified.

Minion knew exactly what to do. The closest Hugo Boss outlet to Gander was Byron’s, a men’s clothing store in St. John’s, about two hundred miles away. Minion contacted the owner, Byron Murphy, and asked if he could send one of his store clerks to Gander with a CARE package for someone.

“Who’s out there?” Murphy asked.

“It’s Werner,” Minion replied.

“Werner Baldessarini?”

“That’s right.”

Murphy couldn’t believe his ears. In Murphy’s world of fashion retail, Baldessarini was the equivalent of a movie star. Murphy prided himself on owning the premier men’s clothing store in St. John’s, and, for that matter, in all of Newfoundland. He had over 3,000 square feet spread over two floors in a redbrick building in the historic section of St. John’s. He carried an assortment of name brands—Polo, Manzoni, Lipson, Cambridge, Greg Norman. The Hugo Boss line, however, was one of his bestsellers.

Since opening the store ten years before, he had always dreamed of meeting someone of Baldessarini’s stature, but was never part of that in-crowd that went to the big fashion shows and rubbed elbows with such icons. Murphy knew he’d regret it his entire life if he let this moment slip away.

“I’ll go, I’ll do it,” Murphy volunteered.

Minion gave him a list of items. Murphy packed an assortment of shirts, pants, socks, and underwear—all Hugo Boss, of course. Unsure of the chairman’s preferred style, Murphy selected both boxers and briefs. In addition to a change of clothes, Minion asked Murphy to assemble a basket of food and gave him suggestions on bottles of wine and types of breads and cheeses. Murphy picked up several nice bottles of Merlot—a couple from Australia, one from Chile, and another from Italy. He also found a lovely Gouda and some Brie and a few loaves of French bread.

The drive from St. John’s is nearly three hours, and Murphy didn’t arrive until almost 6
P.M.
The thirty-nine-year-old Murphy didn’t have any problem finding the school, Gander Collegiate, where Baldessarini was staying. Murphy had been born in Gander. As soon as he arrived, he went to the school office and had Baldessarini paged. Within minutes, he spotted the chairman emerging from the school’s gym. He recognized him from his pictures in the catalogs.

“Mr. Baldessarini,” Murphy said, a bit awestruck, “my name is Byron Murphy.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Baldessarini said. “Thanks for driving out.”

Murphy led him outside to his car and the packages he’d brought with him. The chairman was a bit embarrassed. He told Murphy that while he was grateful for his efforts, he couldn’t accept the baskets of food and wine. He wanted to eat what everyone else was eating.

Baldessarini thought about offering the items to the town’s relief effort but decided against it. He was afraid his donation would suggest that the food the people in Gander were offering the passengers wasn’t good enough. Baldessarini’s voice was filled with emotion when he described to Murphy the efforts of everyone in town to aide the passengers, particularly the women, who seemed to be cooking around the clock. He didn’t want to risk doing something that might offend these fine folks, he explained.

“Take them back with you,” he told Murphy.

Not wanting to be a complete masochist, though, he did take the underwear. Both the boxers and the briefs. Leaving the other items in the car, Murphy and Baldessarini went back inside the school, where the chairman showed him around and introduced him to some of his new friends from the plane. In the cafeteria, they had a soda and talked a little men’s retail. Baldessarini briefed Murphy on the spring line and asked him questions about his store. How large was it? Which items sold best? Which didn’t? Murphy thought Baldessarini seemed genuinely interested in his opinions.

In the background, a television was tuned to CNN, and the two men talked about the terrorist attacks. After a couple of hours Murphy announced that he’d better start the drive home to St. John’s. Baldessarini walked him out, thanked him for the clothes, and invited to come to Europe, where he could tour the Hugo Boss headquarters and attend one of the company’s fashion shows.

As he drove home, it all seemed so surreal for Murphy. Was he dreaming or did he just spend two hours in a high school cafeteria in Gander, Newfoundland, talking to the chairman of Hugo Boss about fashion and world politics after delivering him an emergency supply of underwear? It was no dream, and in the morning, when he opened his store and laid out the cheese and wine for his customers, he had quite a story to tell them.

J
essica Naish had never seen so much food. Since she’d been bused to the volunteer fire department in Gambo on Wednesday afternoon, hardly an hour had passed without someone from town walking in with another tray or dish of food for the passengers. Casseroles. Stews. Salads. Homemade pies and cakes. Fresh-baked cookies. It wasn’t possible to sample it all.

Naish was a passenger on Continental Flight 5. An American, she’d been living in Cheddar, England, and was on her way to Houston to visit family and friends. On the plane, she’d met two men, Paul Moroney and Peter Ferris. Although she was sure their paths had never crossed before their ill-fated flight, Naish couldn’t help but feel she had met them before. There was something very familiar about the two, but she wasn’t sure what it was. Until they told her what they did for a living. They were professional Beatles impersonators and performed in a group called the Beatles Band.