Silver King, Megalodon and Sept. 11 memories here

Next Thursday, Sept. 11, 2025, our own Boca Grande Fire Department will celebrate its new Silver King engine and Megalodon tender by having a “push in” ceremony to commemorate this new equipment. It will hearken back to horse and buggy days, when fire pumpers were all pulled as wagons. The idea of including the community in a push in is that the community itself is protected by the engine, and it has a stake in the whole enterprise, as it bought the equipment and entrusts the department to maintain it.

There will also be a moment of silence to remember Sept. 11.

Next year it will be 25 years. A quarter century ago, the day was bright, then turned dark. A fresh autumn morning in most of the U.S. when the weather turned cool and the clouds were rare. Do we not all love that time, when the season turns and the heat of summer disappears, but there is no cold, only crisp cool warmth?

On a yearly calendar of remembrance, the U.S. has not come to terms with how to remember Sept. 11. It has been Patriots Day and a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance. The TV news networks seem to always pause. Do we need to watch the coverage again, or move forward by fixing the remaining questions and properly remembering the victims? It does not seem right to stop our livelihoods and have a true holiday, as what offends us about Sept. 11 is the way terrorists forever ruined the normalcy of our daily work.

It is particularly appropriate to think about Sept. 11 here in Southwest Florida, as so much of the story arc happened here. Much of the tragedy, and its actors, touched this area or retired here. President and Laura Bush are often on island during season, as is Tom Brokaw, who kept such cool for us as a nation on NBC. Brit Hume was also reporting that day; an excellent recap of his time is on C-SPAN, where in 2011 Marvin Kalb talked to journalists.

The morning of Sept. 11, Bush took a four-mile jog on Sarasota’s Longboat Key before heading for those moments at Emma E. Booker Elementary School when White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card whispered in his ear. We have all seen the video. He was staying at the Colony Club, a tennis resort where one of our own island chefs was then working. The Colony Club, known for tennis greats and little pasta-shaped tennis racquets at their modest restaurant The Monkey Room, is now the minimalist and exclusive glass-fronted St. Regis.

There were darker moments just up 41, a reminder that the markers from evil people never go away completely in Florida.

The Dutchman Rudi Dekkers, who owned Huffman Aviation at the Venice Municipal Airport, unwittingly trained Mohamed Atta and Ziad Jarrah. Marwan al-Shehhi also trained at another school just by the Intracoastal Waterway. The small cozy house in Nokomis where Atta lived is still there. Dekkers was ruined after Sept. 11, later crashing in a helicopter in the Caloosahatchee River while in Fort Myers in 2003, and dying broke in the Philippines last year.

There is also that house in Sarasota’s Prestancia in Palmer Ranch, where a Saudi Arabian family fled two weeks before Sept. 11, 2001, leaving all their belongings. Even as the neighborhood was gated, Sarasotans were transfixed by that juxtaposition and contradiction, and drove by it, asking questions, as did the local media, but no formal report from the government. Litigation is still ongoing between the Kingdom and Sept. 11 victims, with new filings Aug. 28. 

This Sept. 11, Tucker Carlson, on his TCN Network, will premiere a five-part series looking at the many unanswered questions. Those who would dismiss it, and him, should think again. What has made all of this fester is that we never got good answers the first time round. Last weekend, this editor perused a discarded “The 9/11 Commission Report” at the Englewood Habitat store. Looking at it on the shelf, so much of its recommendations were for what to do after, not the larger details. If questions had been properly answered, many more could have moved on to purely celebrate the lives of those lost.

The disquiet over government festers. We pay so much lip service to first responders and public safety, often in an obsequious manner. But here on island, we cannot even get a reasonably priced new fire engine in a decent amount of time. This May 13, the American Economic Liberties Project and the International Association of Fire Fighters wrote to Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson and Attorney General Pam Bondi, urging the FTC and the Justice Department’s antitrust division to investigate consolidation in the fire and emergency vehicle manufacturing industry. The allegation is that REV Group, Oshkosh and Rosenbauer now control nearly 80 percent of the fire equipment market. In California, some have questioned whether unrepairable equipment contributed to wildfires.

That has nothing to do with our relationship to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia or the CIA, but it does point back to a government, and Justice Department, that is not doing its basic duties in protecting competition in capitalism, which we all thought was a basic thing. There were terrorists, yes, on Sept. 11 but what offends and hurts is not only that they exist, but that the warning signs were all ignored. 

This is a messy world, and there are many dark places. But there is light all around. Indeed, the light is much greater if we let it work.

Garland Pollard is editor of the Boca Beacon. Email your letters to editor@bocabeacon.com.