WESTPORT, Conn. — For the past several summers, Paul Veneto has spent much of August and early September pushing a beverage cart along each of the four doomed flight paths of the planes hijacked on Sept. 11, 2001. This year, he’s retracing the route from Boston Logan Airport to Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan, the path his fellow crew members on United Flight 175 traveled on the last day of their lives.
For Veneto, it should have been a treasured Tuesday off. Instead, he has had to live with survivor’s guilt — the knowledge that his colleagues, several of them beloved friends, spent the last day of their lives trying to protect their passengers and alert authorities on the ground to the horror transpiring on the plane that crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.
When the towers came down, Veneto remembers thinking, “I will absolutely make sure these guys get the recognition for their heroics.”
It’s a promise he feels he has kept.
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‘Never forget’
This year, Veneto has grown his pushcart fleet to four and invited members of the public to join him in his charitable tribute.
“Everyone in the country said we’ll never forget,” Veneto told Straight Arrow on a recent Friday during a hydration break. “So this year, that’s really what this is about. Adding these four beverage carts so the public can come out and show the next generations how we can come together.”
Thanks to his website’s geotracking app, joining up with Veneto along the way was easy. Keeping up with him, however, was another story.
Despite the 10 to 18 miles he walks each day of Paulie’s Push, Veneto remains light on his feet, nearly bouncing on his blue running shoes. At 67, he’s seemingly indefatigable, chatting with everyone around him in a gravelly Boston-area accent, pushing a cart with one hand and gesturing with the other, even nimbly turning around and walking backward to wave or smile for a photo. From time to time, he abandons his cart to run to the sidelines and engage with spectators before returning and resuming the procession.
This year’s push began on Aug. 15 and concludes Friday — the 25th anniversary of 9/11 — with just a single day off.
As the cart glided smoothly across Route 1 in southern Connecticut, a member of his entourage asked if the carts were equipped with special wheels.
“Of course not,” he responded. “Why would I make it easy on myself?”
‘The first first responders’
The idea for Paulie’s Push came to Veneto in 2002. He was back on the job as a flight attendant, but thinking constantly of the nine colleagues he’d lost the year before.
“I was on a plane a year after 9/11, and I was standing in the galley, and I looked at the beverage cart, and it clicked,” he said. “I looked at it and said, ‘I know what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna push that thing from the gate they left, C 19, on the street, to Ground Zero.’ One thing I’m grateful for today is that I’ve kept my promise to myself.”
Over the past five years, Veneto’s annual tribute has been documented by local and national press, and enough people are familiar with his mission to keep up a steady stream of applause at nearly every block he passes throughout the day. Passing cars stop to roll down their windows and shout encouragement, most frequently in the form of “Thank you” and “God bless.”
Veneto’s tribute looks a bit like a mini parade, with a fire truck and sometimes police on motorcycles leading the way. Veneto pushes one cart, flanked by companions who guide the other three. His organization’s RV, donated in 2022 by a supporter, brings up the rear.
At each town along the way, he is joined by local police, firefighters and emergency service workers. They keep him company, pushing the other three carts if needed, and honoring the work he’s done to bring attention to the first responders who rushed toward danger on 9/11, including the flight crews, whom Veneto refers to as “the first first responders.”
Stories grow more personal
This year’s walk was nearly two years in the making, as Veneto decided to retrace his first walk from Logan Airport to Ground Zero, this time with four beverage carts, each representing one of the flight crews from the planes hijacked on 9/11, and an invitation for folks along the way to join him.
In 2022, he walked the flight path of American Flight 77 from Washington Dulles Airport to the Pentagon. In 2023, he walked from Newark Liberty Airport to the Flight 93 National Memorial near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. To honor American Flight 11 in 2024, Veneto walked to Ground Zero from the 9/11 Memorial in Boston Public Garden.
In Westport, Connecticut, Gina Arena told Veneto about her connection to the 9/11 attacks as she pushed a cart for several blocks. Her childhood friend was among the 343 New York City firefighters who died that day.
These stories become more intimate as the walks approach New York City.
Nearly everyone from Boston to New York knows someone directly affected by the tragedy, said Dennis Morrisey, Veneto’s childhood friend and Paulie’s Push teammate. But he told Straight Arrow that the degrees of separation narrow as the routes progress.
Outside of Boston, Veneto might run into someone whose cousin escaped the towers. By the time he pushes his cart through suburban Connecticut and New York and into Manhattan, those walking alongside him are far more likely to have lost a sister or husband, or to have fled the towers themselves.
‘Suffering in silence’
Veneto hopes his efforts have helped some survivors realize they are not alone in their grief.
“Some people are still in it,” he said. “I run into people that still feel that way, to this day.”
A couple of days earlier, he said, a Delta Airlines flight attendant walked with him.
“Paul,” he said she told him as they walked together, “It’s been 25 years, and I’m finally walking on the street with someone who gets it.”
A quarter century is a long time to wait for that feeling.
“It just proves that some people still are suffering in silence,” Veneto said. “They feel alone with their thoughts over that day. And it’s a horrible feeling. I felt alone everywhere I went. And I don’t know. There’s not even words to explain that feeling.”
Many flight attendants never returned to work after the attacks. This was partly due to widespread industry layoffs, but Veneto knew many who chose to leave due to grief and trauma. Veneto worked for United Airlines for another 10 years before retiring.
“I didn’t blame anybody for not coming back, because there were so many unanswered questions,” he said. “We were terrified.”
Veneto was determined not to let terrorists take his career from him.
“But,” he said, “it was never the same after that.”
Moving past addiction
In the days following the attacks, he taped a black-and-white poster featuring images of his nine crewmates and the words “Remember United 175” to his flight bag. Veneto carried it with him to every assignment for the next 10 years.
His inner grief and unresolved anger led to a nearly 15-year addiction to prescription opioids. Once he was sober, he knew it was time to keep his silent promise from 2002 to honor his crewmates’ courage in their final moments.
But Veneto wants the world to remember more about his friends than the day they died. He can still crack a smile when he remembers his closest friend on the crew, flight attendant Amy Jarret. Veneto and Jarret preferred to work the back of the plane. Veneto said Jarret was extremely efficient and safety-focused. “You could always count on her.”
But away from work, during out-of-town layovers, Jarret was cheerful and funny, always upbeat and smiling. “She was the giggly type,” he recalled.
Michael Tarrou and Amy King, two other flight attendants on duty on Sept. 11, were engaged to be married. Alfred “Al” Marchand was new to his role at United, but Veneto had already noted that he was a very funny man, always ready to make his coworkers and passengers laugh.
“He was a great guy,” Veneto said. “They all were.”
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