Families take spotlight for Sept. 11 ceremonies

9/8/2003

Commemorations on the second anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks will focus on the families of victims and minimize the role of public officials.

Vice President Dick Cheney, not President Bush, will attend Thursday's memorial service at the World Trade Center site in New York, where for about four hours that morning victims' children will read the names of the dead. The recitation will be interrupted by the tolling of church bells and minutes of silence to observe the moments when two hijacked planes struck and the twin towers fell. Families will lay flowers at the lowest level of ground zero.

At sundown, the popular "Tribute of Light" -- a rendering of the fallen World Trade Center through beams of light -- will be displayed in lower Manhatten, as it was last year.

In Washington, families who lost members at the Pentagon and on American Airlines Flight 77 will attend a wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld will preside at that event and later dedicate a stained-glass window in the Pentagon chapel.

In Shanksville, Pa., where families of those lost on United Airlines Flight 93 wanted the anniversary to be solemn and simple, there will be an invitation-only tree-planting ceremony to honor rescue workers, and Interior Secretary Gale Norton will install a federal advisory commission to oversee the design of a permanent memorial.

Bush declared Sept. 11 as Patriot Day and instructed Americans to fly flags at half-staff and observe a moment of silence at 8:46 a.m., when the first hijacked plane struck the World Trade Center.

In Boston, Massachusetts families who lost relatives on Sept. 11 will gather at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Thursday morning and walk together to the Public Garden for a ceremony marking the site of a future memorial to the victims. Mental health workers will be available to care for the victims' children, said Linda Plazonja, executive director of the Massachusetts 9/11 Fund.

MARY LEONARD