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Every September, Sue Riccardelli and her wife, Maureen Murray, fly a large flag composed of Canada’s Maple Leaf and America’s Stars and Stripes outside their New Jersey home.
The flag honours the people of central Newfoundland who cared for them and more than 6,500 other passengers aboard 38 planes grounded in Gander, N.L., for days after the terrorist attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.
It is also a reminder of how important Canada and the United States are to each other, they said.
Last year, as relations between the countries grew strained, the couple started bringing the flag to local performances of “Come From Away,” a musical about the stranded passengers and the people in Gander who gave them food, clothing, shelter and friendship.
Riccardelli, 65, and Murray, 67, are among a group of Americans expected to return to Gander next week for the 25th anniversary of 9/11, an event that changed the world and their lives.
They are horrified by their president’s treatment of Canada, they said, and they plan to bring their flag and hold it high as a message of love and solidarity.
“As Americans, our country was at war, we were far away from home, and here were these people — Canadians, people from Gander — who just gave us their all,” said Riccardelli in a video interview from their home in New Jersey.
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“That’s what the message needs to be, that Americans are not Trump, Americans are not this government,” Riccardelli added. “We are Americans who love Canada. That’s my message.”
Canada’s relationship with the United States began crumbling last year when U.S. President Donald Trump started making threats of annexation and tariffs on Canadian goods.
Tensions erupted into an all-out trade war last month when Prime Minister Mark Carney walked out of negotiations with the United States. Trump introduced 50 per cent levies on billions of dollars of Canadian exports and Carney has retaliated with tariffs beginning next week.
All this just weeks before an anniversary of a horrific event that brought thousands of Americans and Canadians together.
Kerry Derringer-Cashin was flying home to New Jersey from Dublin when hijackers slammed two planes into the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, killing nearly 3,000 people. Her plane was the first to make an emergency landing in Gander when officials closed U.S. airspace that day.
She and her fellow passengers had to wait on the plane for hours, wondering what was happening. Strangers finally hustled them into the small Gander airport, where locals offered them sandwiches.
Local school bus drivers stopped a labour strike to shuttle the so-called “plane people” to churches, schools and community centres in towns throughout the area. Derringer-Cashin got off a bus at around 5 a.m. on Sept. 12, 2001, in Glenwood, about 20 kilometres west of Gander, where residents had set up cots and blankets in a church in the community.
They had even set up television sets, so the frightened passengers could watch the morning news and finally understand what was happening in the United States, she said. People offered phones and computers so passengers could contact their families. Some offered their homes for showers.
Some even offered the plane people their guest rooms, she said.
“I’m hoping that the message (of care and kindness) still somehow comes through,” said Derringer-Cashin, now 63, about the upcoming anniversary of 9/11. “People always say here, ‘I wish it was Sept. 12 again,’ because that’s when everybody in America came together, they put their differences aside.”
“We’re not happy with the relationship with the U.S. and Canada these days. We’re hoping that it will change and this will just be a blip in time,” she added. “I apologize on behalf of my country.”
Riccardelli and Murray were on their way home from France when they landed in Gander on 9/11. They stayed at the local College of the North Atlantic campus for four days, with more than 230 other people from their flight.
They made lifelong friends in Gander, and they’ve been back at least 10 times since to see them.
They first brought their flag to a local production of “Come From Away” in Morristown, N.J., a few months after Trump’s inauguration last year. He had already begun threatening to make Canada the 51st state.
They sat in the audience, nervous and clutching the fabric. When the show ended, Riccardelli said she stood up and opened the flag, turning to face the crowd.
Someone threw a spotlight onto her and the crowd erupted in applause.
“They went wild,” Murray said.
She said it’s important to remember that airports and towns all over Canada welcomed planes on 9/11.
“This was a Canada-wide effort to shelter people during this really hard time, to support them and support our country. And I’m hoping that is the takeaway,” she said. “Whatever is happening now between the U.S. and Canada is not deserved.”
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