If any small town ever embodied Canada’s traditionally rock-solid friendship with the United States, Gander was it.
Gander — just inland on the island of Newfoundland — was where generations of U.S. soldiers made their last stop in North America before venturing across the Atlantic to conflicts from World War II to Iran. Where many Canadians and Americans forged friendships and even marriages over the decades.
And where residents took care of thousands of stranded and frightened airline passengers after the Sept. 11 attacks, inspiring the tale of selfless humanity and deep cross-border ties in the hit musical, “Come from Away.”
“We were the best ally they ever had,” said Beulah Cooper, 85, a Gander resident whose real-life bond with Hannah O’Rourke, a New Yorker whose firefighter son was killed in the World Trade Center’s North Tower, forms the musical’s emotional core. She paused, considering current tensions with the United States and added, “It’s — it’s hurtful when you stop and think about it.”
While Gander commemorates the Sept. 11 attacks every year, the event planned for Friday is taking place amid an extraordinary deterioration in relations between Canada and the United States that began with President Trump’s second term and grows more intense by the week. Even as the people in Gander recalled the lifelong friendships with Americans that resulted from the events in 2001, a strong undercurrent of hurt, disappointment and anger has run through the preparations for the 25th commemoration.
“It would be foolish to suggest that stuff is not running in the background,” said Percy Farwell, the mayor of Gander and deputy mayor during the attacks. “But that’s not what we are remembering on Sept. 11. It’s not about the relationship between our two governments or who’s got the biggest trade surplus. We’re talking about humans that we have a lot in common with.”
Still, in an hourlong interview at town hall, Mr. Farwell spoke about his disappointment at the Trump administration’s treatment of Canada.
“We’re polite, and we’re your best friend until you betray us, or threaten us, or insult us, or disrespect us,” he said. “And then we have a pretty strong resolve.”
The deep ambivalence in Gander — ahead of a two-day ceremony involving high-ranking Canadian and U.S. officials, emergency workers, community leaders and passengers from the stranded aircraft — is a microcosm of how the United States’ place in the world and its relations with its closest allies have changed in the past quarter of a century. After the attacks, the United States received an outpouring of sympathy from much of the world.
Last month, after a breakdown in trade talks, Prime Minister Mark Carney described the United States as posing a danger to Canada’s sovereignty and economy. President Trump warned Canadian leaders to “fall in line.”
In his second term, Mr. Trump launched a trade war against Canada, and he threatened to annex Canada and turn it into the 51st state. He has kept up a stream of insults against Canadian leaders and institutions — echoed by members of his cabinet and the U.S. ambassador to Canada, Pete Hoekstra, who is slated to attend the commemoration in Gander.
The breakdown in relations and the escalating trade war have left both Canadians and Americans bewildered.
“I’m angry at our government’s rhetoric and actions — this is not the way you treat your neighbor, period,” Kevin Tuerff, an American whose experience of being stranded in Gander with his partner is told in the musical, said by phone from New York City. “Canadians didn’t just help America on 9-11. They’ve helped us in multiple wars we dragged them into.”
“Honestly, I’m embarrassed,” said Mr. Tuerff, 60, who is scheduled to participate in the upcoming commemoration in Gander.
Moved by the generosity of the people in Gander in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Tuerff founded Pay It Forward 9/11, a charity that encourages acts of kindness on the anniversary. One example has stayed with him a quarter of a century later: He and others sheltered at a college in Gander were allowed to freely make long-distance phone calls.
“So we said, ‘Can we give you some money?’” he recalled. “‘No, no, you would do the same,’ they said. And I thought: Would we?”
Even before 2001, Gander’s airport had played a prominent role in the history of aviation. Canada, the British and Newfoundland built the airport in 1938 in the middle of the wilderness but, critically, along the shortest flight path across the Atlantic on the most eastern landmass in North America, with the exception of Greenland. During World War II, the United States helped expand the facility into one of the largest military air bases in the world. The airport’s largest section was known as the “American Side” — complete with hangars, accommodations, a bowling alley and a movie theater.
A suburban-style, car-friendly town created to service the airport — with large thoroughfares like “Airport Boulevard,” residential crescents named after aviators, few sidewalks and no historic core — grew next to the airport.
The airport itself served as a refueling stop for commercial aircraft after the war. After jets started flying nonstop across the Atlantic in the 1960s, the airport continued to serve as a stop for U.S. military aircraft and an emergency stop for commercial planes.
“Gander has always been a safe haven for anything that happens on the Eastern Seaboard,” said Dion Faulkner, who oversees the operations in Canada for Allied Aviation, a New York-based company that services carriers at airports in North and Central America.
So shortly after the attacks on the morning of Sept. 11 — with U.S. airspace closed — international flights, most en route to the United States, were diverted to Canadian airports. The 38 planes and 6,700 passengers landing at Gander nearly doubled the town’s population.
The planes waited on the tarmac between eight and 24 hours before passengers were allowed to disembark, Mr. Faulkner said.
“We had to go to the local drugstore to get Nicorette, baby formula, diapers, and we started putting that on the planes,” Mr. Faulkner said.
If disembarking passengers were frightened, so, too, were the locals who feared that terrorists could be aboard.
“Who are we letting in here? Who are we going to put in amongst these innocent people?” recalled thinking Betty Moulton, who, as a volunteer with the Red Cross, greeted passengers into the airport’s international terminal.
Nevertheless, countless people in Gander rallied to help.
“We never had to ask for volunteers,” recalled Claude Elliott, the mayor at the time. “People came in, people wanted to help. It was volunteers who stayed there 24 hours around the clock to make sure that passengers were taken care of.”
Passengers were sheltered in schools, churches and many private homes.
Learning that many were staying at her daughter’s school, Dawn Baker took over sanitary pads, sleeping bags and visited repeatedly with salad bowls. A stranded teenage girl stayed in her basement, watching movies for days before she was able to fly out to New York.
Being able to help “was a gift for all of us here,” Ms. Baker said. “We were all watching it on television, and you felt this hopelessness that there’s nothing you can do. But there was something we could do, so we hopped up and did it.”
Raphael Fusco was 17 years old and flying back to New Jersey with his father. Like all other passengers, they had to leave their luggage on the plane.
“We had no idea what was going on, we were distraught,” recalled Mr. Fusco, a composer and pianist, in a phone interview. “And these people, they gave us toothbrushes, toothpaste, they took us bowling. They made us feel like family and gave everything of themselves.”
“So when the whole world was seeing unspeakable acts of violence, the only thing that we saw was how good people could be,” Mr. Fusco said.
Mr. Fusco said he was “embarrassed” by the U.S. government’s current “bullying” of Canada. “It just shows a lack of gratitude, a lack of respect,” he said. “It just bothers me so much to see the opposite of what the Canadians showed us in terms of generosity and hospitality and warmness and brotherhood.”
Tony Toluba, a Virginia resident, is planning to come to Gander for the 25th anniversary on what will be his third visit after being stranded in 2001. He was aware that relations between the two nations are now very different from what they were during his previous visits.
“I don’t know what it will actually be like when I get there, I do have a little bit of trepidation,” Mr. Toluba said in a phone interview. “But the thing that struck me most about Newfoundland is that they’re very friendly, they’re very people oriented. I think on a people level, I think I will have the same kind of experience I’ve had in the past. At least, I certainly hope that I will.”
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