CWA Mourns Members Lost in Terrorist Attacks

The devastating terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon, near Washington, D.C., touched the CWA family directly, with the loss of at least six active members and three retirees. Countless members lost relatives, friends or acquaintances in the events of Sept. 11, which claimed the lives of more than 6,600 people, and a dozen or more members were hospitalized, one still in critical condition as the CWA News went to press.

“Each of us has been horrified by these tragic events,” CWA President Morton Bahr said. “We remember those who have perished and are injured. We thank God for those who have been saved. And, we hope that our thoughts and prayers comfort CWA families through the weeks and months ahead as they mourn loved ones.”

About 400 CWA members were at work at the World Trade Center when the attacks came.

CWA members presumed dead in the collapse of the Trade Center’s twin towers include two employees of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey represented by Local 1032, and two NABET-CWA technicians working on transmitters near the top of the 110-story North Tower. A third NABET-CWA technician was aboard American Flight 11, the first plane that struck the building.

The union also lost a volunteer organizer, Renee Newell, who worked on the campaign to bring American Airlines passenger service agents into CWA. She was also traveling on Flight 11.

Hospitalized in serious condition were Local 1032 members Yvonne Robinson, who suffered serious burns, Arnold Lederman, who broke his back, and Shirley Bates, who broke both elbows. Deborah Merrick, also of Local 1032, was listed in critical condition with burns over 75 percent of her body.

One Verizon member of Local 2336, detailed to the Army’s accounting office, was lost in the fiery crash at the Pentagon. Three Verizon management employees also were killed at the Trade Center.

One CWA retiree was aboard each of the planes that crashed into the Trade Center, and one was on the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania.

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney issued a statement of support for “an appropriate American response” to bring justice to those responsible for the attacks and the federation established a fund to assist all impacted union families. In addition to CWA’s losses, hundreds of police, firefighters, rescue and medical personnel, clerical workers, pilots, flight attendants and others died.

CWA received letters of condolence from 150 unions worldwide; workers and others from 80 nations were lost when the twin towers fell.

Reports indicated that about 65 Local 1032 members employed by Unique Security, who worked on the first floor of the World Trade Center, and several Hudson Newsstand members of TNG-CWA Local 31003 escaped without injury, as did more than 100 Verizon service reps, support staff and technicians working in the twin towers.

Lucent and Avaya technicians at the Trade Center were also reported to be safe. Approximately 50 Verizon and five Lucent members at the Pentagon are safe.

CWA’s largest group at the Trade Center was the 228 Port Authority workers on duty that day. All but two escaped.

The union’s District 1 office at 80 Pine St., near the site of the crash, as well as local offices remained closed for several days following the crash. Verizon and AT&T employees in the restricted access area were moved to other locations.

CWA members rallied to console one another, to contribute to blood drives and disaster funds, and to volunteer in relief efforts. Many helped to restore lost phone service and rebuild damaged telecom infrastructure. (See separate stories.)

CWA mourns the following brothers and sisters:

• Donna Bowen
  
  After four years doing billing for Verizon’s work at the Pentagon, Donna Bowen of Local 2336, was as enthusiastic about her job as ever, her husband, Gene, said. “She loved the people she worked with and she loved working with bills, working with figures.”
  
  Bowen, 42, was assigned to the Army’s accounting office in the outer ring of the Pentagon at the hijacked plane’s point of impact Sept. 11.
  
  Bowen, originally from Boston, lived in Waldorf, Md., with her husband of 12 years and their three children ages 6, 8 and 10. She had her schedule worked out so that every Wednesday she could volunteer at her children’s elementary school, rotating among their classes as a teacher’s aide.
  
  “She was easy-going, free-spirited. And you always knew where she stood. She’d voice her opinion on anything,” Gene Bowen said.
  
  He had dropped his children off at school that morning and stopped to buy dog food for a white Boxer named Angel that Donna had recently rescued from the pound. While he was out, his wife phoned. “It was seven minutes before she was killed,” he said. “She and the women in the office were trying to call me because they didn’t have a TV and they wanted me to tell them what was going on at the World Trade Center.”
  
  
• Patricia Cushing
  
  Since she retired from Verizon two years ago, Patricia “Pat” Cushing loved spending time with her sister-in-law. They shopped, saw movies, took walking tours of New York City, went to the beach and spent the past six months planning a dream vacation to San Francisco. They left on Sept. 11 on United Flight 93, the hijacked plane that crashed in Pennsylvania.
  
  “My mother would have been thinking of us, probably praying, probably saying her rosary, but at the same time, she would have been one of the people calming other people down,” her son, Dave Cushing said. “That’s the kind of person she was, always taking care of everyone.”
  
  Cushing, 69, had been an active member of CWA Local 1023, including service as a steward. She worked as a residential service representative in Jersey City, N.J., retiring in February 1999.
  
  “She always came to our meetings and sat right down in front. Whatever needed to be done, you could always count on her,” 1023 President Linda Kramer said. Vice President Reynaldo Massa said, “You couldn’t ask for a nicer person. I never heard anyone say a bad word about her.”
  
  Cushing, who was widowed in 1988, was a devout Roman Catholic with five children and two grandchildren. The family was invited to the White House Sept. 24 with other relatives of Flight 93 victims. From the government to the airline to the Red Cross, “everyone has been tremendous,” Dave Cushing said. “They’ve bent over backwards to make sure we’re comfortable.”
  
  
• Donald DiFranco
  
  Don DiFranco of NABET-CWA Local 51016 knew every inch of WABC-TV’s transmitter atop the World Trade Center’s north tower. When a state-of-the-art facility was built a couple of years ago, he helped design some of its circuitry and he daily made the signal adjustments that provided millions of viewers a clear window on the world.
  
  Not only was the transmitter engineer a perfectionist at work, said local Shop Steward Vinnie Ioele, he was “the kind of friend you could call at 3 a.m., ask for help and he would be there.”
  
  DiFranco, 42 and single, lived in Brooklyn but was always available to his sister Lisa Pipitone, her husband Sal, and three children who share a two-family home on Staten Island with the DiFrancos’ mother. Don helped them look after Angelina DiFranco, 69, recently hospitalized for heart problems.
  
  “Losing Don is like they ripped a piece of my heart out,” said Lisa, who relied on him for emotional support and advice.
  
  She and her mother have a strong resolve not to be cowed by the terrorists. “They want us to become a broken people,” she said. “If we’re not strong as a family and as a country, then there are more victims.”
  
  Angelina DiFranco called the site of mass destruction “holy ground.” When it is renovated she and her daughter would like to see Don have a memorial bench by the water. “He loved boating,” Lisa said.
  
  
• Mary Jones
  
  Mary Jones, 72, worked on the 68th floor of the World Trade Center. Many of her friends, aware that she struggled with arthritis in her knees, had urged her to take a well-deserved retirement from the Port Authority. But after 33 years, Mary still liked working as a clerk in the mailroom.
  
  “She would arrive at 6:30 or 7 in the morning and stay until 6 or 6:30 at night,” said Jodi Benson, Local 1032 steward for Mary’s unit. “It didn’t matter if it was overtime or not; she was really dedicated. We were family. We all loved her.”
  
  Many of the CWA members who worked on that floor have handicaps, said Benson, who herself is legally blind. But co-workers helped them down the many flights of stairs in an orderly evacuation.
  
  Benson said that a man named Reggie stayed with Mary all the way to the sixth floor, where a firefighter took over. He told Reggie to run, that it would be all right. The building was starting to crumble. Mary had to go slowly because of her knees. All of the other mailroom workers made it out safely.
  
  Two nieces, Brenda and Candace, looked after Mary, according to Local 1032 officials.
  
  
• Alfred Marchand
  
  Al Marchand had already had a full career as a police officer in Alamogordo, N.M., when he went to work as a flight attendant for United Airlines. He could speak several languages and was eager to see the world.
  
  Marchand, 45, who helped lead Alamogordo’s police and firefighters into CWA Local 7911 in the 1980s, was working on Flight 175, the second plane to crash into the World Trade Center.
  
  Marchand, who retired from the police department as a lieutenant, was married and the father of three teen-age children. Becoming a flight attendant “was something he always wanted to do, and planned for when he retired,” said longtime friend and fellow retired police officer Richard Todd Owen, past president of Local 7911.
  
  Owen saw Marchand about two weeks before the tragedy, just a few months after he started working for United. “He was as happy as could be. He loved it,” he said.
  
  Marchand had a deep religious faith, which helped him cope better than many officers with internal problems in the police department. “He was able to shake things off, laugh them off,” Owen said. “His big thing was, ‘You’ve got to forgive people. You’ve got to let things go.’ But he also believed in right and wrong. I think he’d feel forgiveness now, but he’d also believe in consequences.”
  
  
• Jane Orth
  
  Jane Orth of Haverhill, Mass., had retired from Lucent Technologies just weeks before she boarded American Airlines Flight 11 in Boston for her first trip out of the United States. She was headed to Australia for a month.
  
  Her daughter, Elizabeth, a college student who had always lived with her, took her to the airport and waited at the gate. “We had a lengthy goodbye,” she said. “This was going to be the longest that we’d been away from each other.”
  
  Orth, 49, had worked on the production line at Lucent in North Andover for 20 years and was a member of CWA Local 1365. She has three children and two grandchildren, cats, birds and countless friends, her daughter said.
  
  “She had the most beautiful spirit,” she said. “She was fun and loving and she loved to have a good time. Her smile was so, so beautiful and her laugh — everyone recognized her smile and laugh. Her life was just so full. The phone was always ringing, she was always going out. There was never a dull moment.”
  
  She said even though money was tight her mother showed her children the finer things in life, taking them out for nice meals, concerts and trips to the theater in Boston and New York.
  
  Jane Orth hated to fly but told her daughter at the airport that she felt calm. Her Catholic faith and unshakeable spirit would have kept her strong when the hijackers took over, Elizabeth Orth said. “She was such a life force. I’m sure she gave it a pretty good fight.”
  
  
• Thomas Pecorelli
  
  Tom Pecorelli had his most prized possession in his pocket as he headed home to Los Angeles from Boston on Sept. 11: The ultra-sound photo of his unborn son.
  
  Pecorelli, 31, was a freelance camera operator and member of NABET-CWA Local 59053. He’d worked on Fox sports, E! Entertainment Television and numerous award shows, including the Emmys and Oscars. He was on American Airlines Flight 11, the first to strike the World Trade Center.
  
  Four months pregnant, his wife, Kia, spoke passionately on “Oprah” about her husband, his love for her and their child on the way, and his zest for life. “He was the funniest, most talented person,” she said. “He’d sing 70s love songs, Frank Sinatra, driving in the car. He was so happy and so involved. He had so many dreams.”
  
  His friends remember his joyful exuberance and the quick wit and sense of humor that made everyone laugh. “Those of us who knew Tom will always remember his professionalism, but most important the smile that he brought to our faces,” co-worker Robert Ohlandt said. “He was a great comedian, singer and all-around good guy.”
  
  
• William Steckman
  
  The first thing anyone will tell you if you ask about Bill Steckman is that he was “a gentleman.” The soft-spoken NABET-CWA Local 51011 member belonged to a rare breed of specialists who tweak the high-power television signals that go out to major cities.
  
  Steckman, 56, was the transmitter engineer for WNBC-TV, working in a room full of 10,000-watt equipment on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center below “the needle,” or broadcast tower shared by all of the networks. That in itself made his job dangerous, but nothing could have prepared him for the danger of Sept. 11.
  
  Like his WABC-TV counterpart, Don DiFranco, Steckman called work and reported an explosion after a jetliner hit the north tower. He was not heard from again.
  
  Steckman had been with the station for 35 years. Local 51011 Steward David Friedman said his friend was incredibly knowledgeable. “Bill was the guy the companies would call when they had trouble,” Friedman said. “He ran classes for transmitter engineers.”
  
  He was also a family man who, with wife Barbara, raised four daughters and a son. “He provided for all of us and gave us beautiful weddings,” daughter Maneri told Jo Craven McGinty for a piece in Newsday.
  
  A ham radio operator trained in the Coast Guard, Steckman also enjoyed the simplest pleasures, like holding his grandchildren in his arms.
  
  
• Lisa Treretola
  
  Lisa Treretola, 36, a Port Authority employee since March 1988, was a principal office assistant in the Tunnels, Bridges and Terminals Department on the 64th floor.
  
  “Her father got a call from Lisa the morning of the bombing,” reported CWA Local 1032 Staff Representative Bernice Krawczyk. “She told her father she was scared and asked what she should do. She put her father on hold and called her brother. She and others in her department were waiting for instructions. Her father heard someone calling ‘let’s get out of here, and Lisa left. It was already 9:15.”
  
  Treretola and a group of about 15 started down the stairway, according to reports Krawczyk obtained from co-workers. The building started to collapse before they reached the ground. Only two from the group were rescued.
  
  Three years after twins Amanda and Michael were born to Treretola and her husband Michael, Lisa returned to the Port Authority in a job sharing arrangement that allowed her to still work and care for her children.
  
  “Lisa was planning a surprise party for her husband’s 40th birthday on Oct. 6,” her mother Irene Spina told Krawczyk. “She loved to spend time with her children working on crafts projects.”
  
  Treretola survived the first bombing on the trade center in 1993 and a bout with thyroid cancer. She would have been 37 on Sept. 30.