The unemployed travel worker

By Mindie Paget

Few people would blame Marcia Beckman for harboring at least a tinge of resentment against the travel industry.

Though it paid her bills for 38 years and sent her to every continent except Antarctica, after last Sept. 11 it abruptly dumped her into the unemployment line.

Marcia Beckman

But Beckman, who spends most afternoons at the Lawrence Workforce Center, poring over job openings and shipping off resumes, figures losing her job at Lawrence-based Maupintour wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened to her.

“I’m not big on pity parties,” she said. “The travel industry has been, in the past, quite good to me.”

Beckman, 56, Baldwin, had worked at the escorted-tours company almost a year and a half before it closed its Lawrence headquarters in December 2001, a casualty of plummeting interest in travel after terrorists used airplanes to attack America. Thirty-eight of her co-workers also were laid off.

But the transition has been a difficult one for Beckman, who has worked since she was 18 years old. For the past decade, she earned no less than $35,000 yearly. She planned to retire from Maupintour, a company whose world headquarters had been in Lawrence for a half-century.

Tough job market

But her retirement will have to wait. Most of the opportunities she has found in her job searches pay an average of $9 an hour less than $20,000 a year.

“I’d have to have two of those,” said Beckman, who noted that, like most people, she writes checks each month to pay for a car, a house, insurance and utilities. “I’ve worked all these years to be able to do that. I’m not terribly inclined to go backward.”

Beckman has sent out dozens of resumes, often without receiving any response. One bite led to a three-month stint at a startup travel agency in the Kansas City area that failed quickly in the bleak economy.

“I shouldn’t have taken it in the first place,” she said. “But it was a comfort zone for me.”

For Beckman and thousands of other Americans, though, 9-11 and the ensuing economic fallout destroyed that comfort zone. The national unemployment rate, at 5.7 percent, is hovering near a seven-year high, according to the Labor Department. The downward spiral comes on the heels of one of the longest stretches of prosperity on record, during which the jobless rate hit a 30-year low of 3.9 percent in 2000.

The tight market and an ailing travel industry have Beckman looking for a position outside her lifelong vocation. She’s confident, though, that her skills in management, customer service and sales will translate well to another profession.

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‘Shame on us’

“I’m not afraid to work,” she said. “I’ve never felt like one type of work over another is beneath me. Honest work is honest work.”

Fortunately, Beckman said, she doesn’t have to fret over how being unemployed will affect her family. She’s not married and doesn’t have any children.

She has been getting by on unemployment benefits and giving up what she considers “treats.” Her once-weekly trips to the beauty shop have dwindled to monthly occasions. Her once-monthly pedicures have disappeared altogether. She buys fewer books.

“I’m kind of holding those pennies a little closer together than I was before,” she said.

But, given the phenomenal loss so many families suffered a year ago today and the grief that still lingers among those closest to the tragedy, Beckman said she feels blessed to have emerged relatively unscathed.

She doesn’t hold any personal grudges toward the terrorists but hopes the atrocity they plotted and perpetrated sends a message to America’s leaders.

“I hope we will never underestimate our enemy again,” she said. “Shame on us for ever letting that happen.”

The guardian of our water

By Mindie Paget

Shari Stamer drinks tap water.

It’s not an earth-shattering confession. But it’s one that should comfort Lawrence water consumers.

Shari Stamer

Stamer is the city’s water quality manager. She and the three technicians she supervises know exactly what’s in the water you use to cook, bathe, water your garden and quench your thirst.

Before 9-11, few people ever acknowledged Stamer’s role as water keeper.

But paranoia crept into everyday life after 9-11. If terrorists could kill more than 3,000 people in one day and if anthrax could be spread by U.S. mail, why couldn’t terrorists slip something harmful into the water?

They could, Stamer admits. But the close, 24-hour watch utilities employees keep on the city’s two water treatment plants would make it difficult, and chances are slim any tainted water would get to your tap.

Even though 9-11 changed Stamer’s life in lots of subtle ways, she always had taken seriously her duty to ensure the quality and safety of the very public product she guards.

“We already had measures in place to protect the facilities,” she said. “Plant security has always been No. 1.”

Studying terror

Nevertheless, the security belt tightened even more after 9-11. Suddenly, Stamer and other water officials found themselves attending seminars on terrorism and security. Plant employees began taking a closer look at their facilities and the way they dealt with people coming in and out of the buildings.

Though most visitors already had been required to sign in and wear a visitor’s tag, doors sometimes were left open for vendors who delivered chemicals, Stamer said. Now, all visitors must be escorted. Plant tours are still encouraged, but the size of the tour group may be limited, and all visitors are required to show identification.

Even Stamer is more cautious. Before a Journal-World photographer arrived at the plant to shoot her photograph for this story, Stamer cleared with her supervisor the area of the plant where the photo would be taken.

“Before 9-11, I wouldn’t have thought twice about that,” she said.

National spotlight

The 9-11 attacks spotlighted security issues at water-supply facilities nationwide. Congress appropriated nearly $90 million to the Environmental Protection Agency in an effort to reduce the vulnerability of water utilities to terrorist strikes and enhance their security and ability to respond to emergencies.

Lawrence will be required, like other cities across the country, to conduct a vulnerability assessment of its water treatment and delivery system, Stamer said. EPA funding will help counter the cost.

Such security measures were crucial before 9-11 and became even more so afterward, if only because Lawrence’s 28,000 water customers became more aware and concerned about the safety of their water.

Stamer and her staff routinely collect water samples from homes and businesses for mandatory testing. In the past, customers sometimes have been annoyed by testers’ presence. But since 9-11, customers have been glad to see someone looking out for them and have been asking more questions, Stamer said.

“All of a sudden, people took interest,” she said.

The city has sent out water quality reports with June water bills since 1997.

How life changed

“This year was the first year that I got calls and compliments on it, thanking me for providing that information,” Stamer said, noting she had taken close to 178 calls about the pamphlet in June and July. “I’m wondering if that’s a result of 9-11.”

She said she had no doubt that a few details of her personal life have changed since last year’s attacks.

Stamer used to start projects she didn’t finish. These days, she can’t stand to leave a loose end dangling.

“I have to put closure on things and make sure things are finished before I go on,” said Stamer, 51. “Life is short. You never know what’s going to come the next day.”

She’s planted more flowers and seems to derive joy from even the littlest things. At work, she’s been joking more, trying to make people smile.

And Stamer will continue her efforts to keep consumers smiling and feeling secure with the knowledge that the water they’re drinking is safe, despite what terrorists might want them to believe.

“I feel very accountable,” she said. “I’m very dedicated, and my staff is dedicated. When I drive home at night, I like to feel like I’ve done my job and I’ve done it to the best of my ability.”

The guardsman who served abroad

By Mindie Paget

We’ve all heard the recruiting pitch one weekend a month, two weeks a year.

Spc. Curtis Zimmerman of the Kansas Army National Guard had grown accustomed to that commitment.

Spc. Curtis Zimmerman

A year ago today, though, as the 22-year-old Lawrence infantryman sat in stunned silence, watching the surreal atrocity of Sept. 11 unfolding on a television screen, he knew all bets were off.

“I immediately had passionate feelings about how we should do something about this. We should send somebody over,” he said. “Then I realized that somebody’s going to be me and my unit.”

His hunch was on the money.

Zimmerman and 400 members of the 2nd Battalion, 137th Infantry which has an armory in Lawrence and the 1st Battalion, 161st Field Artillery, just returned from nearly seven months of guard duty in Germany. They relieved active-duty soldiers as part of Operation Enduring Freedom, the war on terrorism.

Though Zimmerman comes from a military family his brother, stepfather and grandfather all served either in the Marine Corps or the Marine Corps reserves he was the first to be called up during wartime.

It shattered his vision of what his eight-year stint with the Guard would entail.

‘Never really imagined’

“I had foreseen this grand picture of me just doing our training and then, in the event of a tornado or something, going out and helping people get their lives back together,” he said. “I never really imagined our unit would be deployed overseas to do what we did.

“I’m in the National Guard. We leave that for the active-duty people.”

Zimmerman, a 1998 Lawrence High School graduate, considers himself one of the lucky members of his unit. A free-lance Web developer, Zimmerman didn’t have any difficulty skipping out on his civilian job for a while. Other soldiers had to haggle with their bosses, he said.

At the very time most people’s instinct was to cling tighter than ever to family, Zimmerman and his unit had to say goodbye to theirs. Though it was difficult not seeing his girlfriend and family, Zimmerman doesn’t have any children. Thirteen babies were born to other soldiers in his unit while they were away.

With German pre-paid phone cards, Zimmerman talked to family members once or twice a week, his girlfriend nearly every day. She even met Zimmerman in Frankfurt, where the couple stayed for a week in May to mark their first anniversary.

Otherwise, when Zimmerman wasn’t on duty, he spent time on the Internet, soaking up the latest news from home. He also took a few sightseeing trips and rehoned the German-speaking skills he perfected during five years of language classes.

Missed Kansas weather

He missed “The Simpsons” and Kansas storms.

“I’m a huge fan of Kansas weather,” he said. “I was kind of angry that I didn’t get to be here for spring.”

But Zimmerman doesn’t have any regrets. He knew when he enlisted in 2000 that war was a possibility, however remote it seemed at the time.

The terrorist attacks and the ensuing fallout stirred him from a complacency he and most Americans had slipped into before 9-11.

“There really have been no major incursions on American property or the American way of life before,” he said. “We have to be ready. That’s what I realized on Sept. 11. We’re not invincible.”

As of last week, 39,357 Army National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers were on active duty in support of the war on terror, according to the Defense Department. Sixteen soldiers from the Kansas Guard have volunteered for another deployment and will leave again soon.

Zimmerman knows it’s just a matter of time before he gets deployed again his commanders have guaranteed it.

“They’ve given us the whole readiness speech,” he said. “I’ll just take it as it comes, I guess.”

The Saudi national studying in America

By Terry Rombeck

In 1995, Ahmad Alruhmaih came to the United States from Saudi Arabia with his eyes set on an American education.

Nothing not even the uncertainty after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks was going to stop him.

Ahmad Alruhmaih

“It’s worth it, big time,” he said. “I’m not regretting any moment of any day I spend in this country.”

Not all Muslims in the United States felt the same way. Some international students from Kansas University left under pressure from families who feared their children faced retaliation for the attacks.

Alruhmaih, now a Eudora resident and doctoral student in educational technology at Kansas State University, felt pressure, too. His mother pleaded for him and his family a wife and three sons to return to Saudi Arabia.

“She said it was better to stay there even if I didn’t get a degree,” he said.

Alruhmaih, 31, came to the United States in 1995 and earned a master’s degree in linguistics at Michigan State University. He studied for two years at KU before switching to the doctoral program at Kansas State. He said he hoped eventually to return to complete his doctorate in linguistics at KU.

When he’s done with his schooling, Alruhmaih wants to return to Saudi Arabia to train college students in teaching English to students in seventh through 12th grades.

Interest in Islam

Despite the initial concerns, Alruhmaih said the changes since last Sept. 11 have not been great for his family. He and his wife, Masha, have 7-year-old twin sons, Ali and Aziz, and a 14-month-old son, Emro.

“To a great extent, things are being normal,” he said. “Except one thing our faith had great exposure. There are a lot of people trying to learn as much as possible about Islam.”

Shoppers in the grocery store sometimes ask his wife about her hejab, the traditional Muslim scarf she wears in public, Alruhmaih said. Neighbors went out of their way to let his family know they didn’t feel threatened. And he was among a contingent from the Islamic Center of Lawrence who spoke about their faith at other churches and gatherings.

Many Americans, he realizes, feel threatened by Arabs. A classmate in a discussion group at Kansas State asked to be placed in another group after learning Alruhmaih was from Saudi Arabia.

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“I don’t blame people for it,” he said. “When we don’t know things, we tend to keep ourselves away from it. It bothers me that when they learn I’m from that part of the world, they don’t feel comfortable.”

A proud Saudi

There are lots of things other than terrorism Alruhmaih wants Americans to know about Saudi Arabia. The literacy rate has increased to 88 percent from 10 percent in the past 50 years. Saudis invest millions of dollars in the U.S. economy each year. They treasure the tourism and prestige associated with having some of Islam’s holiest sites within their borders.

“The only thing they (the media) talk about is the bad part,” Alruhmaih said.

When Alruhmaih and his family return to Saudi Arabia probably at the end of 2003 he’s not sure how that part of the world will have changed. But he knows being in the United States has changed him.

“It’s very, very hard,” he said. “It’s not only feeling homesick. What happens when you’re away from your family that long is you feel yourself a stranger. I lost lots of my own friends because they have their own lives now.”

Alruhmaih said he was hopeful the Sept. 11 attacks would leave a mark other than the destruction of the World Trade Center towers.

“If there is any good to come out of Sept. 11, it’s this linking between religions,” he said. “Before there was Christianity, Islam and Judaism. There’s a lot in common we didn’t think were there at first. The incident was tragic, but this is the good thing to come out of it.”