09/08/2026
OPINION
After 9/11, this Kansas town forged an unlikely bond with the FDNY. It is honored in tumbling steel.
Max McCoy
ANTHONY — Why?
That’s the word that hovers over Memorial Park here, just before dusk on an evening in early September when the wind swells from the southwest and the swaying branches of the trees break the rays of the setting sun into dancing shafts of gold.
There is peace here, the kind of tranquility that settles over a small town at the drowsy end of the working day. This community of 2,108 in south central Kansas is like others across America, a one-stoplight town with a clock above the county courthouse that might as well have stopped decades ago.
But Anthony is different than other towns.
At Memorial Park, there are three chunks of twisted steel set above a brick and concrete base. The pieces are from the ruins of the World Trade Center and form a sculpture that seems to tumble from the blue prairie sky.
Anthony — founded in 1878 and named after the governor at the time — is the unlikely site of the state’s official 9/11 memorial. Another governor, Kathleen Sebelius, signed a bill in 2006 proclaiming the city as such, and not just because the city set a few pieces from a fallen tower of the World Trade Center on a pedestal.
In the days and weeks following the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the residents of Anthony came together to support a ladder company in the Bronx that had lost colleagues in the twin towers. The town raised money, first for the Red Cross, then directly for the widow and children of a young fireman who died, and finally to create a memorial to the victims of 9/11 and to celebrate the friendship between the Kansas city and Engine 88, Ladder 38 of the New York department.
Donna Crowe was at work as a secretary at the Anthony Police Department that Tuesday morning, 25 years ago, when her husband called to say a plane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers in New York. She turned on the TV at the police department and, with the chief of police, watched on live television as a hijacked jet slammed into the other tower.
“We couldn’t believe it,” she told me. “And then it just started like a tumbling effect (with Washington and Shanksville). I can remember going outside and looking up in the sky, and it was this eerie feeling, the quietness of it. There were no planes in the sky, because they had grounded all the planes.”
Wichita is 60 miles by road to the northeast, and normally there would be commercial jets approaching or departing the national airport there.
Crowe struggled to explain what had happened to her children, an 11-year-old boy and a 10-year-old girl. They had watched the news at school and were frightened.
“For several days, we made pallets on the floor and slept together,” she said. “How do you explain it to them? I said there are some people in the world that are bad people and want to hurt others. It was hard to explain to them why, because I didn’t know. Why did it happen?”
Twenty-five years on, a library of books have been written trying to answer why. The facts give us the what but barely touch the why: Three hijacked commercial aircraft, part of a coordinated terrorist attack by al-Qaida, a Muslim militant group founded by Osama bin Laden, were flown into the World Trade Center towers in New York and the Pentagon at Washington, D.C. A fourth hijacked aircraft, United Airlines Flight 93, believed to be headed for either the White House or the U.S. Capitol, crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers who had been alerted to the previous attacks rushed the cockpit.
All told, it was the deadliest single day of terror attacks on American soil, with 2,977 dead, including the 19 hijackers who committed murder-suicide. Most of the victims died in New York, included 343 firefighters. But the numbers don’t reflect the first responders and others who died of illness related to toxin exposure at the trade center site.
The attacks kicked off the Global War on Terrorism and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which some 7,000 American troops and 8,000 contractors were killed. Indirect deaths from post-9/11 wars were estimated by a Brown University report at 4.5 million.
The day after Crowe watched the second tower fall on television at the Anthony police station, Mayor John Schott came to her at the city offices and had a task for her — they were going to adopt one of the first responders who had died.
She began researching but was soon overwhelmed by the names and photographs of the firemen who had died. She made calls to New York, but didn’t find anybody who was receptive.
“That last thing they wanted,” she said, “was to answer a call from Anthony, Kansas.”
But Schott kept trying.
Schott owned the local True Value hardware store and was serving his first year as mayor. He had relocated from Southern California, where he was a mid-level manager for Pacific Bell. Although his parents had been from Anthony, they were Baptist missionaries, and he was born and raised in the Philippines. Every few years the family would come back to the area and Schott would be re-introduced to small-town life. He had fond memories of riding his bike in Anthony, going to the local swimming pool, and visiting his grandparents in nearby Manchester, Oklahoma.
Schott wanted the same experience for his kids.
In the days after 9/11, Schott called the mayor’s office in New York and was eventually referred to Ladder Company 38, in the Belmont neighborhood of the Bronx.
“So I called them,” Schott said. “And the guy who answered the phone said ‘Hang on, let me get my lieutenant.’ And Joe Huber gets on the phone and says, ‘Yeah, what do you want?’ He was very, very skeptical, and he wouldn’t give me any information until he checked some stuff out.”
Huber called back and said one of the young men at their house, Joe Spor, had recently transferred to Rescue 3 and had been killed in the collapse of the south tower. Spor left a widow and four children, ages 6 years to 9 months.
Spor, 35, had joined the FDNY in 1994. He was a handyman who did carpentry work on the side, according to Schott, and his dream was to serve in the same rescue company his fireman father had, according to his obituary. The special operations rescue companies, of which there are only five, are the elite of the New York fire department.
Six others from Rescue 3 also died in the collapse.
Now that 25 years separates us from that Tuesday morning in September, the events have taken on the patina of history. At my elbow I have five books about the attacks, including a paperback copy of the official report of the 9/11 Commission, and all of them seem remote now, as do the histories we have here at home on the Vietnam War.
But there is one image that still conveys the terror and disorientation of the day, and that is the photo of the “Falling Man” by Associated Press photographer Richard Drew. Captured head-down in his tumble from the north tower, the unidentified man is seconds away from death. The image, at first denounced for its insensitivity, has become recognized as one of the most human images to come from the tragedy.
It not only conveys the plight of the doomed, but the sickening feeling of witnesses unable to help.
Both Schott and Crowe said they were driven by a motivation to do something — to do anything — . The only thing they could do was to raise money, so they organized bake sales and other community events. But Schott said it really wasn’t about the money, or the Christmas gifts that went to the Spor children. The money represented support, an effort from one tiny community in Kansas to connect in a meaningful way with the greatest of American cities that had suffered an unimaginable tragedy.
Huber, and other firefighters from Ladder 38, would eventually come to Anthony, to talk with the grade school children and attend ceremonies and make new friends. The school kids would make the firefighters Valentine’s Day cards and send them cookies.
“We just really became close to this day,” Crowe said. “I talk to (Huber) and other fireman every year on Sept. 11.”
For the memorial at the city park, Schott showed the same determination he had in finding Spor. Through Huber, he located some of the World Trade Center steel, and with the help of the national True Value cooperative managed to have it shipped to Anthony. A local artist, Sam Beam, made the design for how the pieces would be displayed, and welder Howard Hatfield put it together.
From a friend who worked at the Pentagon, Schott obtained a 250-pound limestone block from the Pentagon, and from another source received dirt and ashes from the Shanksville crash site. The block and the Shanksville material are displayed in the base of the monument.
Schott, who was mayor from 2001 to 2005 and now lives in Wichita, doesn’t remember how much money was collected for the Red Cross or Spor’s family, but he said the cost for the memorial was $80,000. All of it was raised through donations, he said, including the sale of bricks at the monument. Crowe became chair of the memorial committee, and Schott was its motor. The work, Schott said, made demands on him that at times felt uncomfortable.
“Actually, I’m an introvert,” Schott said. “It goes against everything in my body to do something public like that. But I grew up in a family that believed very strongly that you were put on this earth for a purpose. You do what you can, and what you can do is help other people.”
At an event at the Anthony memorial to commemorate the anniversary, Schott is expected to give a speech. He said he didn’t yet know what he was going to say, but that he would probably include a recitation of a Jewish prayer of remembrance. But what he really wanted to talk about was how, on 9/11, America was united.
“That’s not the case anymore,” he said. “What needs to happen is that we need to get back to understanding the golden rule, to respect and honor others, to reach out and help people when we are able.”
While the community came together to make the memorial a reality, Schott said, it wasn’t without internal soul-searching.
“In a small town this remote from New York or Pennsylvania or Washington, the question that came up a lot was, ‘Why?’ Why should we do a memorial? The simple answer is so that our children are able to feel, touch, and see actual pieces of what happened that day, so they won’t forget. There is evil in the world, but good people stand up and do something.”
Schott said the families of those who died on Sept. 11 need to know that their loved ones have not been forgotten, even 25 years later.
Crowe agreed.
“The connection, it’s terrible, it’s such a horrific ordeal that brought New York and Anthony together,” she said. “I just don’t want people to forget.”
There will be speeches at Memorial Park here, not just this month but in the years to come. There will be talk of patriotism and heroes, and candidates for public office will use the memorial as a backdrop for their own ambition. But with luck, the park will remain a place where, as the September sun dips low in the sky, one can contemplate the nature of sacrifice, compassion and the challenge of living in difficult times.
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate.
