Naples women recall Canadian love and humanity during 9/11 darkest hours

Editor's note: This story was originally written as a preview for the musical, "Come From Away," which was scheduled to open at Artis—Naples on March 24. In early April, Artis—Naples canceled its spring season due to COVID-19. We felt this story was poignant and relevant and decided to publish it with a few adjustments. 

On Sept. 11, 2001, both Lillian Rudd and Deena Hall found themselves plunged into a world unlike any they’d known — 30,000 feet in the air.

The Canadian town of Gander on the island of Newfoundland was one of 17 airports across Canada to receive more than 200 flights as part of Operation Yellow Ribbon. The town of just under 10,000 people took in nearly 6,600 people from 38 flights as part of the operation, which was a Canadian effort to remove air traffic from the U.S. airspace after the FAA grounded all flights in the country in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. 

“Come From Away,” a musical set in the town of Gander in the days following the attacks, was set to open at Artis—Naples on March 24. The musical, which won a Tony Award in 2017, saw a run on Broadway and is touring the U.S., though some performance dates have been delayed by COVID-19.  

While both Rudd and Hall planned to attend the Naples performance, they didn't need a musical to tell them the remarkable tale of hospitality and compassion in the wake of one of the nation’s darkest hours.

The two Naples residents lived it.

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The musical takes its title from a term used in Canada's Atlantic provinces to refer to somebody who has come to the area from somewhere else, according to the Macmillan Dictionary. Rudd and Hall, like the cast of the musical and the thousands stranded in Newfoundland, were come from aways. 

Rudd was aboard a Delta flight headed from Dublin to Fort Myers with a connection in Atlanta. Hall was a flight attendant on a separate Delta flight from Paris to Atlanta. Midflight, Rudd recalled the captain announcing a detour into Gander with no explanation.

“Well, we must have some problems with the plane,” Rudd said to her husband, Richard.

The thought occurred to her, too, that perhaps somebody on the flight had a medical emergency. As their flight came in, on the other side of the fence of the airport, she saw cars parked with people sitting on their roofs, looking up at the sky. She thought, for sure, something was wrong with the plane.

But as they landed, she also saw all the planes on the ground. There was little time for confusion before the captain made another announcement: A plane had hit the World Trade Center.

On Hall’s flight, the captain told the crew and passengers what had happened. Her first thought was that it was a smaller plane, like a Cessna. With no cellphones, and in an era before the news could travel the world in an instant, Hall could go on little more than what the cockpit knew.

“The cockpit was told if they ‘Come into American airspace, we will shoot you down,’” she said.

Both Rudd and Hall were stuck on their airplanes on the tarmac for hours. On Hall's flight, which she said was full of Parisians desperate for a cigarette, they finally opened the doors at the rear of the plane to give them a place to smoke. Hall was parked on the tarmac for about 12 hours, and with the time of her flight across the Atlantic Ocean accounted for, she spent between 18-19 hours on the plane.

While Hall would have plenty of time to witness the goodness of the people of Gander for the days she was stranded there, one of the moments of compassion that stuck with her happened between passengers before she deplaned. The husband of one of the passengers was driving from Arkansas to pick up his wife in Atlanta. 

“Another woman on the flight said ‘Let me call my husband, here’s my address, he can stay at my house until we get this all straightened out,’” Hall said. “Everybody was trying to help everybody else on the flight."

Hall and her crew — three pilots and nine flight attendants — stayed at a bed and breakfast while they were stranded. It was 11 p.m. on 9/11 before she and her coworkers got to a television to see what happened.

“It was almost like being numb,” Hall said. “We just kind of clung to each other.”

The first person Hall got in touch with was her mom, Dolores Edwards, who was hysterical that her daughter was stranded in another country — even if it was Canada. On her flight alone, there were 186 passengers.

“You had an influx of a lot of people,” Hall said. “They all needed some place to go.”

One of those people was Rudd. Her flight came in on Tuesday around noon. It didn’t deplane until the same time the next day. School busses ferried passengers to the terminal, carrying only what they had with them.

“I realized then what our forefathers felt like when they came through Ellis Island,” she said.

Rudd and her husband were housed in a building she described as similar to a VFW hall. She was struck.

“These people were not rich people in this area, and they gave us everything,” she said.

Rudd recalled, specifically, the medical care she received free of charge and car rides from folks passing by.

“Breakfast, lunch and dinner may not be what you’re used to having in Naples but it was sufficient and kept us happy and healthy,” she said.

When Rudd and Hall flew home several days later, both of their flights flew over Ground Zero. The rubble was still smoking.

“I thanked God I was home and that we were OK,” Rudd said. “It was nothing like what people were experiencing here when families were dying or dead.”

Hall felt excited to get back into the air, to show her defiance against the terror the attacks on 9/11 were meant to inspire. She later found out her then-fiancé and now-husband, David Bupp, was in Columbus, Ohio, preparing to board a plane to go to a meeting at the World Trade Center before the attacks transpired. He never made it to the twin towers.

“As soon as I got home, it just kind of sunk in,” she said.

She took the week off Delta offered her, but the day she could, she was back in the air.

“I was an American. I’m going out there. I’m doing this for America,” Hall said. “They’re not going to get the best of me.”

Hall found herself changed forever by the few days she spent in Newfoundland, so she was looking forward to the performance of “Come From Away."

“Here’s a musical that I lived,” she said.

Hall, like the thousands of others stranded in Gander, will be forever changed by the kindness they changed in a time of desperate need.

“I saw the goodness in people that reached out to complete strangers,” she said. “It was genuine.”

Rudd felt the same.

“How do you say ‘Thank you’ to people who did it without thinking?” she said. “A ‘Thank you’ seems so insufficient for what they did for you.”

Andrew Atkins is a Naples Daily News features reporter. Contact him via email at andrew.atkins@naplesnews.com or on Twitter at @andrewjatkins. To support work like Andrew's, please consider subscribing: https://cm.naplesnews.com/specialoffer/