Garrett Hottle
SKY VALLEY, Calif. (KESQ) Bobbee McGuire never went to Ground Zero. Ground Zero came to her, one roll of film at a time.
In September 2001, McGuire was an assistant manager at an Eckerd drugstore on Route 9 in Poughkeepsie, New York, about 80 miles north of the World Trade Center. She also ran the store’s one-hour photo lab.
On the morning of Sept. 11, she says, her store manager sent her home early because colleges across the Hudson Valley, including the Culinary Institute of America, where her husband was a student, were locking down. She called her mother and asked her to turn on the news.
“I just stood there looking at the TV like, did I just really see that?” she said.
The next morning, McGuire arrived to open the store and found military trucks in the parking lot. The men inside were New York Guard volunteers, members of the state’s unpaid defense force, on their way to the World Trade Center site.
“They literally took every little shopping cart that we had,” she said. “Cases of water, bottles of water, any type of first aid supplies, gauze, bandages, you name it. They really cleared out my store.”
When they came to the register, she refused to ring them up.
“I said, I can’t charge you. There’s so many more people down there that need it more than we do,” McGuire said. “One of my newer employees was like, ‘Oh my God, you’re going to get fired.’ And I went, well, I guess if I do, it’s for a good reason.”
She wasn’t fired. Her district manager, she says, had nine stores on the east side of the Hudson start over-ordering supplies and trucking the extra to her location. For weeks, the drugstore became a resupply point, with volunteers eventually arriving in big rigs to haul donations south.
On the return trips, they brought her their film.
“The sergeant in charge said, some of these are very graphic and we only want one person in charge of processing the film,” McGuire said. “And he said, I want you to be that person.”
About 25 volunteers dropped off two or three rolls each every other day, she says. She estimates more than 40,000 images of the site passed through her lab, most of which have never been seen publicly.
“I would sit for hours, even sometimes after my shift was over, processing rolls of film,” she said. “I saw things that nobody should ever have to see or experience.”
The volunteers offered to let her keep one print. She chose a photograph of the flag-raising at Ground Zero, an image she says was taken moments after the famous photograph by The Record’s Thomas E. Franklin that became the “Heroes of 2001” postage stamp. She was told, she says, that the frame she picked would probably never be published.
Her binder also holds photos of a relief fundraiser the store organized about two weeks after the attacks, with Poughkeepsie police fingerprinting children for identification cards, Culinary Institute students running the grills and a table collecting donations for the Red Cross. One of the children fingerprinted that day was her daughter, Amanda, then a year old.
“The only reason she remembers is because I have pictures and I have stories,” McGuire said.
A framed photograph on her wall, signed by the unit, thanks “the Eckerd’s staff” from “Task Force Poughkeepsie, Disaster Relief, 4th Bde, N.Y. Guard.” The New York Guard was mobilized after the attacks in what the state’s Division of Military and Naval Affairs called its largest activation since World War I.
Friday marks the 25th anniversary. For the first time, the ceremony at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum will include a permanent seventh moment of silence for those who have died of 9/11-related illnesses, a toll the museum says now exceeds 9,000.
McGuire thinks about the men who came through her store.
“I don’t even know if their health has been affected,” she said. “It would be nice to know.”
The Eckerd chain no longer exists. Its New York stores became Rite Aids in 2007, and the Poughkeepsie location closed last year in Rite Aid’s liquidation. McGuire moved to Arizona in 2003 and now lives in Sky Valley.
She has hung the photographs in every home since.
“I had somebody ask me, why would you put pictures up of something so horrific?” she said. “And I said, because I think it’s important that we remember.”
Asked what she would say to the volunteers today, she didn’t hesitate.
“I’ll always be eternally grateful that you chose my store to stop at,” she said. “I wish I remembered all of their names.”
Local 9/11 ceremonies Friday include the Cathedral City Fire Department remembrance at 8:15 a.m. at Fire Station 1, the Palm Springs Fire Department ceremony at 8:30 a.m. at Fire Station 2, and the dedication of Indio’s new 9/11 memorial, built around a steel beam from the World Trade Center, at 9 a.m. at Miles Avenue Park.
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