Ex-flight attendant pushes beverage cart to Shanksville to honor Flight 93 crew

Instead of soaring above the clouds at several hundred miles per hour, he plods along on the ground. The roar of jet engines is replaced by the rattle of a metal beverage cart rolling over bumpy roads – 300 miles of them.

Through cities, small towns and vast, empty rural areas, Paul Veneto travels step by step, yard by yard, mile by mile to make a point: The four flight crews who came under attack on Sept. 11, 2001, were that terrible day’s first victims of terror.

In Veneto’s estimation, they were too quickly forgotten.

This is why the retired United Airlines flight attendant is crisscrossing Pennsylvania on his third journey to pay tribute to all the flight crews lost that day. His first trek, from Logan International Airport to Ground Zero, where the Twin Towers once stood tall, took place on the 20th anniversary of 9/11.

In an interview with PennLive during a pit stop at Dunkin’ Donuts in Lemoyne, Paul said he got the idea for the beverage cart tribute way back on the terror strike’s first anniversary. That’s when he first sensed that the story of the flight attendants – the beginning point of the tragedy – were already being lost.

It took him 20 years and his retirement for the Boston-based former flight attendant to finally pull it off. His beverage cart trek has become known as “Paulie’s Push.”

Veneto worked nearly another decade after 9/11. But serving passengers was never the same. He and many of his airline colleagues traumatized by 9/11 were convinced it was only a matter of time before the terrorists tried it again.

Paul said he was ready. His eyes roamed the cabin looking for anything – anyone – unusual.

“You couldn’t drop a pin on a plane without me knowing about it,” he said. “I was like a cat on the plane.”

Paul said he almost welcomed another attack.

“I was waiting every single time I got on a plane. I wanted revenge,” he said.

But wired and hypervigilant was no way to work – or live. “I wasn’t too stable,” Paul recalled. “I don’t know how I lasted another 10 years working.”

At one point, Paul said he reached for prescription painkillers to “numb” it all away. As he plunged into addiction, all his plans for the beverage cart tribute seemed to fade away, too.

In the end, Paul said he realized painkillers weren’t the remedy for his emotional pain. Purpose was.

“When I put that stuff down, I knew I was going to do this. I just knew,” he said.

A clean-and-sober Paul phoned up a group of grade school buddies, letting them know the beverage cart tribute was back on – just in time for the two-decade anniversary in 2021.

“Is this for real?” Stephen Lynch, one of Paul’s friends from the Boston area, shot back. “I didn’t believe it.”

These days, Lynch trails behind Paul as he pushes the beverage cart, driving an RV emblazoned with words and images commemorating the four flight crews and “Paulie’s Push” to honor them. The RV was donated by one of Paul’s many supporters after his first trek to honor United Flight 175.

This maiden voyage was the one most personal to Paul. As he puts it, he got off the same plane the night before. The doomed crew, most of whom Paul knew, replaced him the next morning. For the rest of his working life, he kept a collage of their pictures taped to the carry-on bag he rolled through airports before his every trip.

After retirement, it was time to roll his beverage cart for another, much deeper reason: To remember the crews who went to work like any other day, only to have it cost them everything.

Paul says a new generation of flight attendants will never know what it was like in the weeks, months and years following the trauma of 9/11. The skies were never friendly again. Potential terrorists seemed to be everywhere – and nowhere.

These days, flight crews seem to have more to fear from unruly passengers and embarrassing social media posts. No wonder the airports where he departs for each of his beverage cart tributes make a big ceremony of it. The airline industry remembers its own, even all these years later.

“I understand these new flight attendants, there’s no way they can begin to comprehend it,” Paul said.

This year’s journey began early this month at Newark Airport, where United Flight 93 originated on that brilliantly blue Tuesday morning. Paul calls it his most challenging trip yet – some ten times longer than last year’s 30-mile sojourn from Dulles Airport to the Pentagon to mark American Flight 77. Next year, Paul plans to complete his honoring of the four flight crews with a final trip from Boston to Ground Zero to commemorate American Flight 11.

The roads and hills of Pennsylvania are giving the 64-year-old a workout. He’s sunburned and pealing. The rattle of the beverage cart vibrates up his arms – a feeling that lasts long after he’s done pushing for the day.

“I’m not an athlete, trust me,” he said. “It’s a mental thing.”

He rolled through Harrisburg Monday, including a stop at the Capitol. He planned to push on from Lemoyne bright and early Tuesday. Paul said he likes to log a dozen miles a day, except for certain designated rest days.

As he looks ahead to his expected arrival at the Flight 93 National Memorial near Shanksville in time for yet another somber commemoration of 9/11, Paul said he’s ahead of schedule. But his trip is about the journey, as much as it is the destination.

The sight of Paul pushing the cart, plus all the images and signs emblazoned on the RV that trails along behind him, brings it all back for so many who lived through 9/11.

“People have been fabulous out there,” he said. “The people that come out of their homes, or drive up beside me, or come down their driveways and wait for me – Oh, I get emotional.”

Paul’s voice breaks then. He falls silent. Clearly, his long slog behind the beverage cart isn’t the only thing that’s draining.

And when he finally reaches Shanksville for 9/11, the emotional part will be only beginning.