Never forget.
At City Hall is the plaque that honors three members of one South Pasadena family: Sue Kim Hanson, her husband Peter, and their daughter Christine, two and a half years old.
This Friday morning, September 11, the city will mark 25 years since they were taken. And here, those two words, ‘never forget’, have never been an abstraction. They are a South Pasadena family; they’re one of us.
A Ceremony Before Dawn Breaks Over Mission Street
The City of South Pasadena, together with the South Pasadena Police and Fire Departments, will hold its 25th Anniversary Remembrance Ceremony on Friday, September 11, in front of the City Hall Courtyard at 1414 Mission Street. The ceremony begins at approximately 6:45 a.m., when public safety personnel and city officials gather to lower the American flag to half-staff.
At 7:00 a.m., something larger happens. Verdugo Fire, the regional emergency communications center, will broadcast a tribute over a shared radio channel, and a moment of silence will be observed simultaneously at all 49 fire stations in the Verdugo system, the South Pasadena Fire Dept. among them. For one minute, from South Pasadena to Glendale to Burbank and beyond, the radios that never stop will go quiet together. Dignitary remarks follow.
The ceremony is free, open to the public, and requires no registration. It is brief by design. The people who run toward emergencies for a living do not need long speeches to remember why.
The timing is not arbitrary. At 6:03 a.m. Pacific time on September 11, 2001 – 9:03 a.m. in New York – United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower of the World Trade Center. The Hansons were aboard.
SPHS Alumni on Flight 175
Sue Kim Hanson. Born in Los Angeles, she spent her early childhood in Korea before returning at age six, and she graduated from South Pasadena High School in the Class of 1984. From there she earned a bachelor’s degree in biology and psychology at UC Berkeley, worked at Cetus Corporation during the early development of PCR gene amplification, then moved east and earned a master’s in medical sciences at Boston University in 1992.
By September 2001 she was on the verge of everything she had worked for. A doctoral candidate in immunology and pathology at the BU School of Medicine, on full scholarship, she had completed her dissertation on the role of interleukin-16 in immunity – research with implications for asthma and AIDS – and was preparing to defend it that November.
Peter Hanson was a software executive, a vice president at a Massachusetts firm and a 1994 graduate of the BU School of Management. Away from the office he was happiest in his garden with music playing. Christine was their first and only child – a toddler who loved Mickey Mouse, loved gardening alongside her father, and had a gift for making the adults around her laugh.
On the morning of September 11, the three boarded Flight 175 in Boston, bound for Los Angeles. Peter had business in California; the family came along so Sue’s relatives here could finally meet Christine, and the calendar was circled for a day at Disneyland. It was Christine’s first airplane ride. They had originally been booked on September 10 and moved the flight by one day.
Less than an hour into the flight, Peter called his father in Connecticut. “Dad,” he said, “I think we’re being hijacked.” In a second call, as the plane descended toward Manhattan, he tried to comfort the man who had raised him: “Don’t worry, Dad. If it happens, it will be very fast.”
Christine Lee Hanson was the youngest of the 2,977 people killed that day, one of eight children lost. Her stuffed Peter Rabbit now rests in the collection of the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York.
The Hansons: What Endures and Why
It’s been said that: “The measure of a life is what it sets in motion”; and by that measure the Hansons are still very much with us.
In 2002, Boston University’s faculty voted unanimously to award Sue her doctorate posthumously. She is Dr. Sue Kim Hanson now, and forever. The university also established the annual Sue Kim Hanson Lecture in Immunology, which has brought leading scientists to Boston every year since – more than two decades of research talks, graduate students, and discovery carried out under the name of a woman from South Pasadena who never got to sit for her oral exam.
At the 9/11 Memorial in New York, a grove has been tended as the Hanson Family Garden, an echo of the hours Peter and Christine spent in the dirt together. And at our own City Hall, the plaque remains – quiet, unassuming, and impossible to walk past once you know the story.
A Milestone Year Across the Country
Friday’s observance in South Pasadena is one thread in a national fabric. In New York, families of the victims will gather on the Memorial plaza at Ground Zero for the annual reading of the names, beginning around 8:30 a.m. Eastern. For the 25th anniversary, seven moments of silence will be observed – the traditional six marking each impact, each collapse, and the Pentagon attack, plus a new, permanent seventh honoring the hundreds who have died in the years since from 9/11-related illness and injury.
Four former presidents – Biden, Obama, Bush, and Clinton – are expected at Ground Zero, while President Trump attends the observance at the Pentagon and Vice President Vance represents the administration in New York. Friday evening, the Tribute in Light will once again send twin beams into the Manhattan sky.
Closer to home, Pasadena holds its own ceremony at 7:30 a.m. Friday at City Hall Centennial Square, and remembrances are planned across the San Gabriel Valley, from San Gabriel to Sierra Madre.
Why The Ceremony Matters
Twenty-five years is a generation. The South Pasadena High School students walking past Sue Hanson’s alma mater this week were not alive on September 11, 2001. For them, that day is history – tragic and horrifying stories told by grandparents, videos and books.
That is exactly why the ceremony matters, and why it belongs to all of us and not just to those old enough to remember where they were when the second plane hit. Memory does not maintain itself. It has to be handed off, deliberately, from the people who carry it to the people who will.
So on Friday morning, before the sun clears the San Gabriels, a flag will come down to half-staff on Mission Street. Forty-nine fire stations will fall silent at once. And a community will stand in front of a plaque bearing three names – a wife who was weeks from becoming a doctor, a husband who loved his garden, and a little girl on her way to Disneyland.
A beautiful South Pasadena family with big plans for the future.
Never forget.
