The town of Gander, Newfoundland, has six traffic lights and a population of less than thirteen thousand. Snowmobiling is popular, and people leave their car doors unlocked while they’re at the grocery store. Its distinguishing feature—and the reason it exists—is its airport, which opened in 1938 and was once the largest in the world, making Gander a crucial transatlantic refuelling stop in the days before long-range jet travel. On September 11, 2001, after flights were rerouted to their nearest airports, thirty-eight jets suddenly landed in Gander, stranding some seven thousand passengers for up to five days in a town with only five hundred hotel rooms.
“The first thing I did was declare a state of emergency,” Claude Elliott, the Mayor of Gander since 1996, recalled the other day. A stout sixty-seven-year-old with salt-and-pepper eyebrows and a thick Newfoundland accent, Elliott was in New York with his wife and daughter for the opening of “Come from Away,” a new Broadway musical recounting Gander’s act of extreme hospitality. It was his third time in New York City. “Going out for breakfast, we were standing on the street corner and I told my wife, ‘There’s more people here this morning than what live in Gander,’” he said.
Elliott’s mayoral duties typically include welcoming conventiongoers and negotiating local disputes, such as the school-bus drivers’ strike that was in effect on 9/11. The arrival of the plane people, as the locals called them, nearly doubled the town’s population. “I didn’t go home for five days,” Elliott, who is retiring as mayor in September, recalled. Elementary schools were converted into makeshift dormitories. Volunteers from the Salvation Army and the Red Cross made lunches, and the hockey rink became a walk-in refrigerator. Other logistical problems were trickier. “We ran out of underwear,” Elliott said, so more was trucked in from St. John’s, two hundred and seven miles away. The plane people hailed from ninety-five countries, including Zimbabwe; kosher meals were required, as was a place for Muslim passengers to pray. A town veterinarian took care of the animals in the planes’ cargo holds, including two chimpanzees en route to the Columbus, Ohio, zoo. “A few years later, I got a letter from the Columbus Zoo and a picture of a baby chimpanzee, and they’d named it Gander,” Elliott said.
By Day Two of the crisis, Elliott was at the Royal Canadian Legion Hall, initiating marooned passengers as honorary Newfoundlanders, in a ritual named “screeching in”: visitors wear yellow sou’westers, eat hard bread and pickled bologna, kiss a cod on the lips, then drink the local rum, called screech, while onlookers bang an “ugly stick” covered in beer-bottle caps. “We started off with seven thousand strangers,” Elliott said, “but we finished with seven thousand family members.”
In New York, the Mayor, wearing a tuxedo, reappeared in his hotel lobby in Times Square, along with fifteen other Newfoundlanders who had come down for opening night, including a town constable named Oswald Fudge. They had heard that Cindy Crawford was at the Saturday matinée. “She said she cried, she laughed, but it was the human kindness that really touched her,” Elliott said.
The group walked to the Schoenfeld Theatre, while Elliott led them in a Newfoundland ditty called “Aunt Martha’s Sheep.” Outside the entrance was a press line, including reporters from Playbill and the BroadwayWorld Web site. Elliott went straight for the Canadian press, including camera crews from the local CBC branch and Newfoundland’s NTV.
“How does it feel today to be here on the red carpet?” an NTV reporter asked him.
“Like being a kid in a candy store!” Elliott said. “There are very friendly people here. People are waving to you, they say hello to you—almost the same as we do in Newfoundland.”
He accompanied his family inside and sat in front of Beverley Bass, who was the first female captain at American Airlines and one of the pilots grounded in 2001. After the show, the actors invited their real-life counterparts onstage for a bow. “Something else to take off my bucket list,” Elliott said. Walking out of the theatre, he told an N.Y.P.D. officer, “God bless you for your service,” before leading the Ganderites onto a shuttle bus. On their way to the after-party, where screech co*cktails and cod awaited, they broke into song again: “There’s no place I would rather be than here in Newfoundland!”
“If we were onstage when they were doing the screeching, it would be the real stuff!” Elliott bellowed. The Newfoundlanders cheered.
“And the bottle of screech wouldn’t be only half-empty!” someone behind him yelled.
Three days later, the Mayor went back to watch the show alongside the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, who had brought Ivanka Trump. Right before the lights went down, Elliott took a selfie with Trump. “I invited her to Gander,” he said afterward. “And if she wants to become an honorary Newfoundlander, we will screech her in.”♦
