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BUSINESS | Owner of Frankie’s Pizza releases his first-ever cookbook [5]
ARTS | New Eastside organization FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2011 showcases local artists [9]
A DIVISION OF SOUND PUBLISHING
SPORTS PREVIEW | The Overlake School girls’ soccer team reloads, aims for state-title glory [13]
REMEMBERING 9/11 — TEN YEARS LATER
Beating cancer one day at a time Redmond woman uses 3-Day for the Cure walk as therapy SAMANTHA PAK spak@redmond-reporter.com
of rubble was difficult, especially when he found a member of the firefighter family beneath the broken buildings. “You feel the lowest level of sadness you can feel,” he said. Langton said the level of destruction was something he had never seen before. “It was 16 acres of utter destruction,” he said. Langton, a logistics section chief at Ground Zero, said he didn’t allow his emotions to interfere with his work, but one early morning as he was driving to work, he couldn’t help from breaking down. At 3 a.m. in the pouring rain, he drove past a group of people cheering on the recovery crew, hoping they would find more people.
When 55-year-old Amy McGraw was diagnosed with breast cancer in December 2002, she made sure the disruption to her life was minimal. The Redmond resident had a mastectomy in January 2003 and took two weeks to recover before returning to work as a first-grade teacher at St. Thomas School in Medina. She still had eight rounds of chemotherapy and six weeks of radiation treatment, but that only took her out of commission for a few days at a time, every other week. While some people in her situation would take things easy, McGraw only took as many days off as necessary. She said the eight hours she spent at school with her students helped keep her mind off the illness. “It was a time I didn’t have to think about it,” McGraw said. As a breast cancer survivor, she decided to participate in the Susan G. Komen 3-Day for the Cure walk for the first time in September 2008. “We had a team with my school and we had 13 people on the team,” she said. McGraw has done the walk every year since and will be participating for the fourth time in this year’s
[ more 9/11 page 2 ]
[ more MCGRAW page 8 ]
Firefighters scour the rubble for people following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Five firefighters from Redmond helped with the efforts and the experience continues to have a profound impact on all the firefighters involved in the recovery efforts, just as it does for millions of Americans shaken by the 9/11 disaster. Photo courtesy of Rudy Alvarado
POWERFUL REMINDER ‘Our true colors came out’ during the 9/11 recovery efforts
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orking alongside fellow firefighters, an emotional storm struck Rudy Alvarado as he dug through the smoky rubble, looking for innocent victims and fallen heroes amid the loud noises of heavy machinery. First came the surge of heated hostility and then the painful sadness. But then he quickly shook off his strong feelings and focused on the task at hand. His job: “Go through the rubble and find people, find what we could,” he said. The former Redmond fire captain, along with four other Redmond fire personnel — Tom Langton, Stacey Baker, Mike Curtis and
Lafond Davis — were part of the recovery efforts following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 that destroyed the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York. Alvarado is now retired after 33 years with the Redmond Fire Department (RFD). Langton, now a captain, along with Baker and Davis, who are paramedics, still work for RFD and Curtis now serves for the Phoenix Fire Department. The emotional memories of their efforts will never fade and always seem to flood back this time of year. “That first night of work, the feeling that went through my body went from very angry to very sad, then I went into rescue mode,” said Alvarado, 59. He said digging through the 16 acres
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BILL CHRISTIANSON bchristianson@redmond-reporter.com