Seeing a neighbor play wiffle ball with his two small sons recently brought a smile to David Beamer’s face as he recalled times with his own son, Todd Beamer, who died on Sept. 11, 2001, when United Airlines Flight 93 crashed into a Pennsylvania field.
Ordinary fathers and sons going off to a little league baseball game or practicing pitching and hitting are sights that fill Mr. David Beamer, 81, with cherished but bittersweet memories.
“For years, that was really, really tough for me to see,” Mr. Beamer told The Epoch Times. “I lament the fact that he wasn’t around for that.”
In the summer of 2001, when the greater Beamer family gathered for a North Carolina lake retreat, he recalls seeing his son teach his 3-year-old grandson how to throw.
“I remember Todd teaching him how to step and throw,” he said. ‘This is how you throw a baseball. You step and throw.’ We have so many great memories.”
Business Travels
There were a few things Mr. Beamer didn’t know on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. On a business trip in California, he and some co-workers were isolated in a meeting without a television and didn’t immediately learn of the four commercial airplanes that were flown into the two World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field.
“The very few of us in that room might have been the only ones in America that didn’t have a TV going that morning,” Mr. Beamer said.
He also didn’t know that his son had returned to the United States on Sept. 10. Todd Beamer, 32, had earned a sales incentive trip to Rome, and he and his wife, Lisa Beamer, five months pregnant with their third child, had arrived home the night before.
“I didn’t think they were coming back until Wednesday or Thursday of that week, so I didn’t know,” Mr. Beamer said.
His son, who worked in software sales, had a California business meeting, so he got on an airplane, Flight 93, in Newark, New Jersey, the day after returning from vacation.
By Beth Brelje
