One Foot in the Clouds, One Foot in the Soil

Captain John Ogonowski was almost too good to be true.  In September 2001, he was fifty years old.  He had spent slightly more than twenty years as a commercial airline pilot.  It was a career that not only gave him his living, it gave him his life.  It was not too very long after that he met Peggy, who he would marry and with whom he was raising three little girls, Laura, Caroline, and Mary Kate when he was murdered on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. 

John Ogonowski flew transcontinental flights twelve days a month for American Airlines.  He set up his schedule that way so that he would have more time at home, which was a 150-acre farm in Dracut, Massachusetts.  He secured a grant through the federal government's Agriculture Preservation Restriction program to establish his farm, on which he raised hay, corn, pumpkins, blueberries, and peaches.  An Air Force veteran who flew C-141 transport planes during the Vietnam War, carrying equipment to Asia and sometimes carrying the bodies of American soldiers killed in action home to the United States, he became involved in the New Entry Farmer Project, a program designed to assist Cambodian immigrants the opportunity at a fresh start in the United States...as New England country farmers.  He leased land to a number of the Cambodian farmers and rarely, if ever, accepted rent from them.  He looked at them as doing what his forefathers had done generations earlier, which was come to a new land in search of a better life as long as they were willing to work their fingers to the bone.  They were and Captain Ogonowski was happy to help.  

He was the Captain of American Airlines Flight 11, which left Logan Airport in Boston at 7:58 am bound for Los Angeles on the morning of September 11, 2001, but was hijacked shortly after takeoff and then flown as a weapon into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 am.  

Not everyone makes the world a better place simply by being in it.  John Ognonowki did.  

Captain John Ogonowski - American Airlines Flight 11

Photo Credit:  Ogonowski Family 

-AK