How Terror Changed One Town's Imagination

By Amanda Ripley

Marietta, Ohio, is the kind of place where people send meat loaves to strangers who've had a death in the family. It's also a place where people hang signs on their porches that read, THIS HOME PROTECTED BY SHOTGUNS THREE NIGHTS A WEEK. WANT TO GUESS WHICH NIGHTS? Nestled at the confluence of the Ohio and Muskingum rivers, Marietta is a pretty town that never quite made it to beautiful. Its long history, exhaustively documented on sidewalk plaques, features Indian burial grounds and gilded steamboats. It has one train museum and two drive-through beer stores, but only 14,500 people and not a single Starbucks.

In other words, to get further in spirit from New York City, you'd have to leave the country. But it is one of the realities of life in America after Sept. 11 that, over the last three weeks, the country has grown much smaller. Dozens of residents of this quiet leafy town have called Mayor Joe Matthews to ask about the security of the water supply. They worry about the row of manufacturing plants along the river, churning out chemicals, plastics and power. "Well, you wipe out the polymer factories and you're going to wipe out a lot of the country's production," muses Beth Burlingame, an employee of Marietta's Selby General Hospital. "All of a sudden you think, yeah, it could happen in Marietta," says Police Chief Brett McKitrick. "You hit those plants, and you could spread a lot of nasty stuff around."

People aren't crazily buying up gas masks in Marietta; gun sales at Uncle Bob's sporting-goods store have stayed steady. But reasonable people are expanding the list of things that could go wrong in their lives. Two Kuwaiti students from Marietta College's petroleum-engineering department have returned home at their parents' request. Mayor Matthews has gone on the radio to tell people to return to normal. But he also tries to be realistic. "They can fly a plane into the World Trade Center. If they want to poison Marietta's water supply, we're not going to be able to stop them."

Surely, the Ohio River Valley must rank low on the list of terrorist targets. But that might not be the point. "Right now, people are afraid," says Joy Frank-Collins, a former reporter at the local newspaper. "Maybe worrying that this area is a target gives them a reason to be afraid." People here also feel enormous frustration at being so far from the tragedies of Sept. 11. They're constantly inventing ways to connect to it. On Sept. 20, the city council passed a resolution honoring the victims. A carpet-store sign advertises a sale on vinyl, followed by the now universal GOD BLESS AMERICA. Locals have donated $17,200 to the Red Cross in three weeks, a huge pile of money in a county where the average income is $23,000. At the town's historic armory, someone has taped up the list of victims, printed off CNN's website. None of them are from Marietta.

So far, the simmering unease has erupted into one mini-scandal in Marietta. Jim and Sylvi Caporale, owners of the American Flags & Poles store on Front Street, unfurled a three-story flag down the front of their building on Sept. 11. Jim remembered learning that, after Lincoln's assassination, people had placed black sashes across their flags. So the next day he added a black banner. "I felt really strong about emphasizing my grief," explains Caporale, a big, booming man who used to be a New York State police officer.

A week later, Caporale got a call from a local veterans' group, complaining that the black sash was improper. He stood his ground. The next day, a man wearing a badge came into the store and, Caporale says, introduced himself as a police detective. He told him the sash was illegal and threatened to arrest him if he didn't remove it, Caporale claims. A lot of yelling ensued, all of it done by Caporale. He ordered the detective out of his store and told his employees to close down the shop. "Tell my wife I've gone to jail," he shouted. Then he marched down the street to the police station and turned himself in. An officer told him to go on home.

Caporale went back to his store and took all the flags down from the front. "I felt like I didn't have a friend in the world. I cried for hours," he says. That night, strangers began to call the Caporale house. World War II vets reassured Caporale, he says, that he could burn the flag if he wanted to; that was what they had fought for.

The next day, Caporale reopened the store and put the flag back up. This time, he draped the black sash over the door. The police chief denies Caporale's version of events; he claims the detective went into the store as a "veteran," not an officer. He insists no one threatened to arrest Caporale for the sash, only for becoming belligerent. All that is certain is that two men were desperate to take a stand, any stand.

At last count, people from Marietta and across the country have bought 3,000 flags from Caporale's shop. Four of them were sent to UPS headquarters in lower Manhattan. And so, for the hundreds of rescue workers who pass by that massive building each day, Marietta has made its small difference.