by Dan Barry
The parking garage tickets never validated, the Yankees tickets never used, the airplane tickets for flights never taken. The shoes worn in panicked retreat and now tucked deep in closets, never to be worn again, never to be thrown away. The face masks and Mass cards, the children’s drawings and trade center trinkets. The worthless, precious bits of paper that burst out of the twin towers, fluttered across the East River, and floated down upon the streets of Brooklyn like sorrowful confetti.
Nick Arauz, for example, who had just hurried across the Manhattan Bridge with thousands of others, found a single page, a charred piece of a Peace Corps application, on the hood of his car in Carroll Gardens. Kept in the Army chest he uses as a nightstand, this bit of paper evokes so much—from the weapon of a jetliner flying directly over him to the innocence of his infant twins—yet he rarely looks at it.
“It was just something I couldn’t throw away once I picked it up,” he said.
The paper saved by Amy Shigo is even smaller. It is a red ticket, the kind used at carnivals and raffles, and yet so dear now that it is kept in a jewelry box. “Admit One,” the ticket says, inviting the existential question of admission to what? The refuge of New Jersey? The continuation of life?
It is Ms. Shigo’s ticket to then. To having recently completed her first Ironman competition. To seeing something hit the north tower from the window of her Hoboken-bound train. To being enveloped in the gauze of denial before heeding advice to leave her Chelsea office and get on a Jersey-bound ferry. To reaching the pier, where an orderly line had formed, and where a man was dispensing tickets. To making it home some seven hours later, where poor solace was found in a container of chocolate-chocolate-chip ice cream.
“It got me home; of course I would save it,” Ms. Shigo said of her ticket. “This was my Willy Wonka-esque moment. All right. I made it. Admit one.”
Even the very dust.
Jean-Marie Haessle, a French-born artist with mortality on his mind—he had just discussed his will with a lawyer in Lower Manhattan—began hustling back uptown after the collapse of the first tower. But, in an action he can describe only as reflexive, he stopped long enough to scoop up dust with an envelope on Wall Street.
“I don’t know why, I don’t know why,” Mr. Haessle, now 71, said. “As an artist, I feel this gigantic, beautiful structure, reduced to this amazingly thin powder. To me, even today, it’s just….”
The dust reminds him of his eventual death; of the certainty of change—“of a lot of things, not all for the best.” He keeps it on his desk, encased not in a vessel of gold or silver, but in the same paper envelope he used to capture it.
“The humblest kind of thing,” he said.
Mateo Taussig-Rubbo, an associate professor at the University at Buffalo School of Law, State University of New York, has studied the “sacralization” of the saved objects of Sept. 11—from the American flag raised, Iwo Jima-like, at ground zero and now missing, to the chunks of trade-center granite, marble and steel that ironworkers and law enforcement officials handed out as solemn mementos.
These objects, particularly those directly related to the catastrophe, “are no longer what they appear to be,” Mr. Taussig-Rubbo said. “They are something else.” The items become a condensation of many concepts: the loss of a loved one; the value of human life; the sovereignty of the United States; the exact moment of the world’s alteration.
This need to possess something tangible from Sept. 11 extends beyond the individual to the communal. After the calamity, for example, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey filled the 80,000 square feet of Hangar 17 at Kennedy International Airport with girders, vehicles and other remnants. Then, a couple of years ago, it began to grant the requests of communities around the country, and the world, for a piece of history to display in a memorial garden, or town hall, or local museum.
The Port Authority so far has granted more than 1,200 requests. There is no cost beyond transportation, and little bureaucratic hassle beyond a letter of request, an explanation of use—and the approval of a federal judge, since the steel is technically part of a crime scene.
Communities in every state have received a remnant: the fire department in Guymon, Okla., and the school district in Massapequa, N.Y.; the board of commissioners in Martin County, Fla., and the rescue squad in Crivitz, Wis.; a museum in Tunica, Miss., and the Police Department in Cambridge, Mass. Coon Rapids, Minn.; LaGrange, Ga.; on and on.
“Inevitably a handwritten note of thanks comes back from the town or fire company, or police department,” Christopher O. Ward, the port authority’s executive director, said. “In some ways it will allow communities and towns to touch a piece of that day. And that’s important.”
Not long ago, Gig Harbor Fire and Medic One, outside Seattle, learned that it had been granted a piece of girder. So, in late May, four Gig Harbor firefighters hitched an empty trailer to a fire chief’s official vehicle and drove the 2,800 miles east to Hangar 17.
Dressed in formal uniforms normally reserved for funerals and ceremonial events, the four men braced themselves as they walked into the hangar early one morning. The most stoic of the four wept.
They watched a forklift lay the piece down on their trailer “like you’d lay a child on a bed,” recalled Rob McCoy, a Gig Harbor paramedic. Then, just outside the hangar, they covered their 986-pound girder with an American flag, and saluted.
On the days-long ride back, the firefighters occasionally pulled over for small flag-changing ceremonies: in Shanksville, Pa., to honor the victims of Flight 93; beside a picturesque farmhouse in Iowa; in a misty shroud near Mount Rushmore. And when they returned to Gig Harbor on Memorial Day, a long motorcade provided escort, while hundreds lined the streets, waving flags and crisply saluting.
The plan in Gig Harbor is to create a memorial garden one day, but for now there is this enduring image, seen there and around the country: People lining up, as if at a church service, to place their hands upon a relic.
A Town Won’t Let Go of a Coin-Drop Line to the Past
PRAIRIE GROVE, ARK.—JULY 5, 2014
As the driver of an S.U.V. drifted off to sleep one recent afternoon, her vehicle drifted across a momentarily quiet two-lane highway. It came to rest on grass, but not before hitting a utility pole, an ornamental gas lamp and an upright rectangular structure of aluminum and glass.
Yes: a telephone booth. Among the last of those once-ubiquitous confessionals of communication, and the last one operated by the family-owned Prairie Grove Telephone Company in Arkansas.
The 67-year-old driver, exhausted from a night spent preparing for a yard sale, was uninjured. The same could not be said of the phone booth, which had stood sentry for a half-century outside the 1930s-era Colonial Motel, where soda-bottle caps popped and dropped on lost summer days are embedded in the asphalt.
The broken booth lay on the ground, spilled of its whispered secrets and mundane mutterings, but still bearing scratched assertions of affection (“I love Teresa”) and existence (“Jimmy Jones was here”). A half-dozen bystanders took pallbearer positions and carried it to a resting place behind the motel’s cottage-like office.
The motel’s owner, Guy Matthews, said that in his four decades at the Colonial, he had seen his share of teenagers and traveling salesmen set aglow by its interior lights, engaged in coin-drop conversation. But for many years now, he said, the booth has been little more than a photo-op curio.
“Cellphones,” he explained, with forensic specificity.
The Prairie Grove Telephone Company, which serves the western half of Washington County, has known for a long while now that its last phone booth has little purpose. One employee, Wade Jones, said that he emptied the phone booth of its coins only twice a year.
“Maybe $2,” he said. “Sometimes a little more. Sometimes not even $2.”
So what was the Prairie Grove Telephone Company to do with this battered relic of telephony, whose semiannual return doesn’t even cover the expense of sen
ding Mr. Jones out to collect it?
This was the question facing David Parks, whose own fate was determined in 1888, when his great-grandfather, a physician named Ephraim Graham McCormick, strung a telephone wire across the main street to his brother’s pharmacy—perhaps Prairie Grove’s most momentous event since the quick but brutal Civil War battle that bears its name.
Because many of their neighbors also craved disembodied connection, the good doctor and his partner wound up incorporating their company in 1906. They had a switchboard and a one-page directory that listed everyone from the Prairie Grove elite to “Davis, Sam—Barber Shop.”
The company grew through the years, surviving wars and the Depression in part by never disconnecting a phone for nonpayment. According to a company history, it routinely accepted payment in the form of eggs, produce and “the occasional cow.”
Dr. McCormick’s son-in-law, James C. Parks, took over for many years, with the phone company operating from a small office above a hardware store. An old photograph shows many wires shooting, Medusa-like, from the side of the building to link up Prairie Grove.
Jim Parks’s twin sons, Barry and Donald, succeeded their father, and then Donald’s son and only child, David, came on board in 1980. Although his just-earned degree from the University of Arkansas was in education, he was the logical choice to take over one day.
“To keep it in the family,” Mr. Parks explained.
Tall, angular, with an easygoing way that serves him well as a community leader in a town of 4,600, Mr. Parks runs his phone company now from a renovated building across from the old Masonic Lodge. With 33 employees, 6,900 landlines and 5,800 bills sent out every month, it is no Verizon.
Rural telephone companies like his, of which there are still hundreds around the country, are often the service providers of last resort for the most remote areas. But they are part of an endangered breed in this ever-changing digital age, grappling with challenges that include the move away from landlines to cellphones, and the decline in the fees collected for long-distance calls.
After a long pause to consider a question about his company’s future, Mr. Parks said that he expected his family’s business to still be around in a decade—though in what shape or form, he did not know. He went on to echo a favored analyst’s assessment: “We’re in an in-between time.”
With all this going on, Mr. Parks had not given much thought to the company’s only phone booth, which he drove past at least twice a day. The morning after the accident, in fact, he passed the motel going to and from Sunday service, and never noticed anything amiss.
But the phone booth’s absence became an instant Facebook cause celebre, as locals pleaded for the return of their totemic reminder of things past. Acting quickly, Susan Parks-Spencer, a telephone company board member and Mr. Parks’s cousin, used a friend’s trailer to move the booth to the phone company’s warehouse, where several people unloaded it.
“We dragged it some,” Mr. Parks acknowledged.
He previously had been inclined to disconnect the phone booth. After all, a couple of dollars every six months? But the Facebook reaction persuaded him to salvage the curio, if only to imagine a younger generation trying to decode its instructions:
1. Listen for Dial Tone
2. Deposit 25¢ in Coins
3. Dial Number Desired
The telephone booth will return to its proper place, outside the Colonial Motel, in the next few weeks. At the moment, though, it is disassembled, its four aluminum-and-glass sides propped against the warehouse walls, its black box on the concrete floor. Carved everywhere are once-urgent phone numbers, now-moot sales calculations and Alan’s romantic declaration for Anna.
The employee most responsible for the booth’s resuscitation is Patrick Smith, 50 years old and nearly as large as his inanimate patient, whose injuries include broken glass panes, bent supports and a battered foundation.
Mr. Smith grew up in nearby Morrow, and remembers passing the booth whenever his family trucked their cattle to the sales barn in Fayetteville. The sight of Superman’s see-through closet—an arrangement that made sense only if you didn’t try to make sense of it—filled the boy with wonder.
Later, as a teenager, he often stepped into the phone booth after a movie night at the 112 Drive-In theater in Fayetteville, to call as the family curfew was descending.
With the close of the phone booth’s door, the teenager would glow like a firefly. A mother’s reassuring voice would emanate from the receiver. And the caller from Prairie Grove would promise, promise, to be home soon.
EPILOGUE
The telephone booth has been restored and returned to its original location. In August 2017, a plaque was planted beside it that reads:
1959 Prairie Grove
TELEPHONE CO.
PHONE BOOTH
Has Been Listed In The
NATIONAL REGISTER
OF HISTORIC PLACES
By The United States
Department of the Interior
Restoring Lost Names, Recapturing Lost Dignity
OVID, N.Y.—NOVEMBER 28, 2014
For a half-century, a slight and precise man with an Old World mustache resided as a patient at the Willard State Psychiatric Hospital, here beside spectacular Seneca Lake. You are not supposed to know his name, but it was Lawrence Mocha. He was the gravedigger.
Using a pick, a shovel, and a rectangular wooden template, he carved from the upstate loam at least 1,500 graves, 60 to a row and six feet deep. At times he even lived in the cemetery, in a small shack with a stove, beside a towering poplar.
The meticulous Mr. Mocha dug until the very end, which came at the age of 90, in 1968. Then he, too, was buried among other patients in the serene field he had so carefully tended.
But you will not find the grave of Mr. Mocha, whose name you should not know, because he was buried under a numbered marker—as were nearly 5,800 other Willard patients—and the passing years have only secured his anonymity. The hospital closed, the cemetery became an afterthought, and those markers either disappeared or were swallowed into the earth.
Now, though, this obscure gravedigger has come to represent the 55,000 other people buried on the grounds of old psychiatric hospitals across New York State—many of them identified, if that is the word for it, by numbers corresponding with names recorded in old books. This numerical system, used by other states as well, was apparently meant to spare the living and the dead from the shame of one’s surname etched in stone in a psychiatric hospital cemetery.
A retired schoolteacher, Colleen Spellecy, is seeking to end the anonymity, which she says only reinforces the prejudices surrounding mental illness. One way to do this, she says, is to place a plaque bearing Mr. Mocha’s name on the spot where his shack once stood.
“He’s a symbol for what we want to do with all the rest,” Ms. Spellecy said. “It’s almost like if we could just do something for one, we could do it for all.”
But the State Office of Mental Health, which oversees some two dozen hospital cemeteries tucked in upstate corners and along busy Long Island highways, has consistently denied her request. Its officials say that a generations-old state law protects the privacy of people who died in these institutions.
“Stigma and discrimination is alive and well, though I wish it were not,” said John Allen, special assistant to the commissioner of mental health. “Outing every family, whether they want to be outed or not, does not conform with the reality.”
Lawrence Mocha
But advocates say that other states have long since figured out how to return names to those buried under numbers—a process that the advocacy organization Mental Health America says would help to end prejudice and discrimination. In an email, its spokeswoman, Erin Wallace, wrote: “These people had names, and should never have been buried with us forgetting them.”
Larry Fricks, the chairman of the National Memorial of Recovered Dignity project, an effort to create a Washington tribute to all mental pa
tients buried without names, agreed. He suggested that the cost of memorializing so many people could be a factor in a state’s reluctance—and some of those books with recorded names have been damaged and even lost over the many years.
The issue is not trivial, Mr. Fricks said. “There is something embedded deep in our belief system that when people die, you show respect.”
In addition to his name and burial site, here is what else you are not supposed to know about Lawrence Mocha:
Born poor in Austro-Hungarian Galicia in 1878. Hit in the head with a rock as a young man. Drank heavily, was briefly institutionalized, and served in the Army. Emigrated, and found work at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. Caused a ruckus one day and was sent to the psychiatric unit, where he talked of guilt and depression, of hearing God and seeing angels.
Sent to Willard in 1918, never to leave.
Kept to himself for years, but eventually took an interest in tending to the graveyard. Requested freedom in 1945, but was ignored. Made an extra dollar here and there by preparing bodies for burial. Stopped having episodes, if that was what they were.
Dug, and dug, and dug.
Gunter Minges, 73, the last grounds superintendent at Willard, sat on his pickup’s tailgate at the cemetery’s edge and recalled Mr. Mocha in his last decade. A reclusive man, he said. Had special kitchen privileges. Smoked a pipe. Wore hip waders, because groundwater would fill his neat rectangular holes.
“He dug until he died,” Mr. Minges said, and was rechristened with a number. Then, with a Catholic priest at graveside, the grounds crew used ropes to lower Mr. Mocha’s coffin into a hole dug by someone else.
“But where it is,” Mr. Minges said, “I don’t know.”
