Paulie's Push: Man honors 9/11 flight attendants with 300

Paulie Veneto has a big voice with some gravel in it and a broad Massachusetts accent. His enthusiasm is contagious even through a phone line, so you feel like you’re talking with your friend at the bar — good old Paulie — and he’s telling stories that make you wonder if a divine hand is at work in his life.

Veneto is famous in a particular way, as the man devoted to preserving the memory of the flight attendants who died on the aircraft seized by terrorists Sept. 11, 2001.

He was a flight attendant himself for 30 years, mostly based in Boston, and has carried out his tribute to his departed colleagues through an annual feat now in its third year: Paulie’s Push, in which he pushes an airplane beverage cart from the airports where the hijacked planes took off to the sites where they crashed.

These pilgrimages have garnered national and international coverage, so Veneto attracts plenty of attention as he makes his way along side roads, escorted by the Paulie’s Push RV and, often, police and firefighters.

“My intention was to get these flight attendants recognized,” Veneto said Monday during a layover at a hotel in Bethlehem, where he was resting the 64-year-old legs that have carried him about 80 miles so far on this year’s 300-mile trek from Newark Liberty International Airport to Shanksville.

That’s the rural patch in Somerset County where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed after passengers and flight attendants rose up against the hijackers and foiled what was probably a plan to crash into the Capitol or White House.

“They were heroes, truly heroes,” Veneto said, speaking not only of Flight 93’s attendants but the others who were among the first victims of the terrorists, with some murdered by the hijackers to cow passengers into acquiescence.

Veneto might have been one of them, if not for the happenstance of scheduling. He routinely worked on United Airlines Flight 175, one of the two planes hijacked out of Boston’s Logan International Airport and steered into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York. He happened to be off Sept. 11.

Paul “Paulie” Veneto, a 64-year-old retired flight attendant, stands nears his beverage cart Monday, Aug. 21, 2023, at Sonesta Select in Bethlehem. Veneto is doing a 300-mile trek from Newark-Liberty International Airport to the Flight 93 National Memorial in western Pennsylvania. Paulie’s Push is Veneto's effort to recognize the heroism of the "first, first responders" of Sept. 11 — the flight crews who died that day. Veneto was a United Airlines flight attendant in 2001, routinely scheduled to work on Flight 175, which terrorists crashed into the World Trade Center. (Rick Kintzel/The Morning Call)

Paul “Paulie” Veneto, a 63-year-old retired flight attendant, holds images of the flight attendants from United Airlines Flight 175 that he keeps in his beverage cart Monday, Aug. 21, 2023, at Sonesta Select in Allentown. Veneto is doing a 300-mile trek from Newark-Liberty International Airport to the Flight 93 National Memorial in western Pennsylvania. Paulie’s Push is Veneto's effort to recognize the heroism of the "first, first responders" of Sept. 11 — the flight crews who died that day. Veneto was a United Airlines flight attendant in 2001, routinely scheduled to work on Flight 175, which terrorists crashed into the World Trade Center. (Rick Kintzel/The Morning Call)

Paul “Paulie” Veneto, a 64-year-old retired flight attendant, wears wristbands with the numbers “93” representing Flight 93 Monday, Aug. 21, 2023, at Sonesta Select in Bethlehem. Veneto is doing a 300-mile trek pushing a beverage cart from Newark-Liberty International Airport to the Flight 93 National Memorial in western Pennsylvania. Paulie’s Push is Veneto's effort to recognize the heroism of the "first, first responders" of Sept. 11 — the flight crews who died that day. Veneto was a United Airlines flight attendant in 2001, routinely scheduled to work on Flight 175, which terrorists crashed into the World Trade Center. (Rick Kintzel/The Morning Call)

Paul “Paulie” Veneto, a 63-year-old retired flight attendant, looks down at images of flight attendants from United Airlines Flights 175 and 93 that are taped to the top of his beverage cart Monday, Aug. 21, 2023, at Sonesta Select in Allentown. Veneto is doing a 300-mile trek from Newark-Liberty International Airport to the Flight 93 National Memorial in western Pennsylvania. Paulie’s Push is Veneto's effort to recognize the heroism of the "first, first responders" of Sept. 11 — the flight crews who died that day. Veneto was a United Airlines flight attendant in 2001, routinely scheduled to work on Flight 175, which terrorists crashed into the World Trade Center. (Rick Kintzel/The Morning Call)

Paul “Paulie” Veneto, a 64-year-old retired flight attendant, pushes his beverage cart through the parking lot after being interviewed by area news organizations Monday, Aug. 21, 2023, at Sonesta Select in Bethlehem. Veneto is doing a 300-mile trek from Newark-Liberty International Airport to the Flight 93 National Memorial in western Pennsylvania. Paulie’s Push is Veneto's effort to recognize the heroism of the "first, first responders" of Sept. 11 — the flight crews who died that day. Veneto was a United Airlines flight attendant in 2001, routinely scheduled to work on Flight 175, which terrorists crashed into the World Trade Center. (Rick Kintzel/The Morning Call)

Flight 175 hit the south tower at 9:03 a.m. It was traveling nearly 600 mph. Of the 65 people aboard, six were flight attendants.

Veneto knew them as friends: Amy Jarret, Alfred Marchand, Alicia Titus, Amy King, Michael Tarrou and Robert Fangman. King and Tarrou, he said, were engaged to be married.

A few days after the attacks, he attached photos of the crew to his luggage so everyone who saw him at an airport saw their faces.

Eventually he decided photos weren’t enough. He felt fight attendants had never gotten their due for their sacrifices and wanted to do something that would attract attention beyond the confines of airports.

That’s when he settled on the beverage cart idea. What better symbol of the people who move so reassuringly up and down the aisles during fights, calming white-knuckled fliers, tending the airsick, handing out drinks and pillows and blankets and whatever other comforts exist at 30,000 feet.

But it wasn’t just that. Authorities believe that when Flight 93’s crew and passengers fought back, they used a beverage cart to smash open the cockpit door.

Veneto’s 2021 trek took him 220 miles from Logan International to Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan. Last year’s journey was much shorter — Dulles International Airport outside Washington, where American Airlines Flight 77 took off, to the Pentagon, where it crashed.

That inaugural journey from Boston began in the high winds and rain of a tropical system but Veneto was joined almost immediately by a woman who walked with him for two hours, recounting among other things how she received a new kidney donated by her daughter.

Veneto didn’t quite understand the connection between the woman’s new kidney and his 9/11 pilgrimage, but the same thing kept happening — people would join him for a time and tell him personal stories of private challenges and sorrows.

“The stories were changing and getting more intense and they were divulging stuff they hadn’t even told family members,” Veneto said. “I was bawling my eyes out with strangers.”

An older man spoke to him briefly about the sight of people falling from the burning towers. Veneto watched the man walk back to his house and was struck by a hunch.

“That guy was probably a newsman in a helicopter, and that vision is playing over and over again in his head,” he said.

When Veneto began his journey from Newark on Aug. 14, a police officer approached him and told him about his brother, who survived the attacks at the World Trade Center but descended into a depression that had never lifted.

“Have him call me,” Veneto said. A short time later, the brother called and asked if he could meet Veneto and walk with him.

“He told me about his struggles,” Veneto said. “It was unbelievable to experience this.”

That wasn’t the end of it. When he reached the next town, he fell to chatting with a couple. The husband told Veneto he was a therapist who helped people struggled with trauma-induced depression.

That night, in his hotel room, Veneto put the therapist in touch with the police officer’s brother, who called Veneto on Sunday night and had an enthusiasm in his voice that brought tears to Veneto’s eyes.

Those are the moments that make him think the universe is looking favorably on his work.

“I guess something’s going on,” he said. “I don’t know what, but I’m OK with it. For some reason this year I feel like what I’m doing is coming from the crews through me.”

Veneto expects to travel 12 miles a day and arrive in Shanksville on Sept. 10. He’ll visit the Flight 93 Memorial Chapel. On Sept. 11, he’ll go to the annual ceremonies at the Flight 93 National Memorial, which he visited when planning this year’s route.

“I felt like the air was sucked out of me,” he said, recalling his reaction to the marble wall of names and the tower in the field where the plane virtually disappeared into the ground.

After more than two decades, the idea of the crew and passengers on a run-of-the-mill commercial flight rising up against hijackers, knowing they would almost certainly die, stirs his heart and makes the aching miles of his trek go a little easier.

“For me to push a cart in the middle of the street is nothing,” he said.

Morning Call reporter Daniel Patrick Sheehan can be reached at 610-820-6598 or [email protected].