Eight years after the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, Syracuse University photography professor Larry Mason stood in Tundergarth Mains, an area right outside of Lockerbie, Scotland where the nose cone of the plane fell.

He wanted to stand in the spot to see what surrounded that location. It was raining that day, Mason recalled, and the lighting for a picture was poor. But just as he lifted the camera up to his eye, the rain stopped, the clouds broke and sunlight streamed into the area. Mason said that moment changed his perspective on Lockerbie forever.

After the bombing, Mason said, many people struggled with how to bring comfort to the SU community. He remembered wanting to help, but said he had trouble seeing past the victims: 270 passengers, including 35 SU students returning from a semester abroad. The friends and families of those who died. The residents of Lockerbie.

Mason’s first trip to Lockerbie in 1996 helped him define his role in the aftermath of the tragedy, he said.

“I thought, ‘maybe my pictures can help to heal that community,’” he said.

A rainbow covers Bridge Street in Lockerbie, Scotland, shortly after a strong rainstorm. The rainbow seems to be anchored at the Lockerbie Golf Course (left) and Tundergarth Mains (right), two sites involved in the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing. Courtesy of Larry Mason

He has visited Lockerbie 16 times since 1996 to take photos and teach SU students about the town’s history. Mason said photography has been a tool for him to help others learn about and remember the Pan Am 103 tragedy, as well as to see the town of Lockerbie as more than a crash site. He said he also hopes his photographs will help inspire people to honor the tragedy by bringing positive change to their community.

Mason remains dedicated to helping people remember, heal and move forward after the Pan Am 103 tragedy. But his role in doing so has changed as the SU community’s connection to the tragedy has evolved in the last 30 years.

Chancellor Kent Syverud appointed Mason as the university’s Remembrance and Lockerbie Ambassador in January. Mason said the position has affected how he views his role in helping the SU community remember the tragedy.

“In the early parts of my working toward remembrance, it was just a personal remembrance,” Mason said. “Now I realize I have a responsibility to develop the next group of people at SU who will carry on that legacy.”

Mason said he believes SU’s tradition of remembrance began only hours after the crash occurred on Dec. 21, 1988, at a small service held in Hendricks Chapel.

The campus was empty because it was an exam week, which made it difficult for him to begin grieving, he said. Everyone Mason thought he needed to grieve with were no longer on campus, he said.

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He didn’t attend the service himself. At the time, Mason was a photographer for the United Press International. He had been asked by the state bureau chief to photograph the service, but he felt he should not go because he knew some of his students died in the bombing.

“’If I go to Hendricks Chapel, I shouldn’t be a photographer. I should be grieving with everybody else,” Mason recalled telling the bureau chief.

Dennis Floss, a staff photographer at a Rochester newspaper at the time who had shot events with Mason, did photograph the memorial.

“There was just a quietness, I recall,” Floss said. “There was a clear sense that folks were sharing each others’ pain.”

Mason said that, as soon as he heard the news of the tragedy, he knew he must have taught students on the plane. The memories of those students are memorialized during SU’s Remembrance Week, held annually during the last week of October.

What is now known as Remembrance Week was not developed until the mid-1990s. Judy O’Rourke, an assistant in SU’s undergraduate studies department at the time, said the week was created by Remembrance Scholars, a group of 35 individuals chosen each year to represent the SU students who died.

The scholarship was created in 1990, and many of the first Remembrance Scholars knew people on the plane.

By the 1995-96 academic year, few scholars had direct connections to the flight, O’Rourke said. She said the students were concerned that future generations would not know the meaning behind being a Remembrance Scholar.

“If we don’t do something very personal with this, if we don’t make some change in the program, it will just become a scholarship,” she recalled them telling her.

The Lockerbie Scholarship, which brings two students from Lockerbie Academy to SU every year, was also created to expand the SU community’s awareness of the bombing, said philosophy professor Samuel Gorovitz.

Gorovitz, who at the time was dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, said the idea for a scholarship was formed after he visited Lockerbie and saw the “horrible consequences” of the crash himself.

He and his host—Sir Neil McIntosh, who coordinated an emergency council planning after the bombing— decided the Lockerbie Scholarship should be created to ensure the connection between Syracuse and Lockerbie did not fade with time, he said.

Now Mason, as SU’s Remembrance and Lockerbie ambassador, said he is working to ensure that those traditions and histories are institutionalized within the SU community.

He recently returned from his 16th visit to Lockerbie, which he attended with SU students. Showing students the sight of the crash is meant to connect them with this history of Lockerbie and Pan Am Flight 103 to prepare them to be leaders of remembrance in the future.

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“I looked around at these students, who are 30 years removed from Pan Am 103, and there sort of wasn’t a dry eye in the house,” Mason said. “They felt it, they felt the power of the places where we were.”

And Mason hasn’t forgotten his photography roots in his mission to inspire a new generation of remembrance. He spent the last few months creating an exhibition of more than 120 of his own images. The exhibition is spread over 17 different buildings, including 10 schools and colleges at SU, the Lubin House in New York City and the Faraday House in London.

The size of the project, Mason said, reflects his realization that as an ambassador he is working for the whole university and that he has a responsibility to reach everyone.

“I never had anyone tell me to be involved in Remembrance,” Mason said. “It was just people who had interest and a good conscious, and wanted to do something because it needed to be done.”

Published on October 31, 2018 at 10:07 pm

Contact India: irmiragl@syr.edu