GROVE HILL, Ala. — Lathan Funeral Home provided free sack lunches to all Clarke County first responders — law enforcement, firefighters, EMTs, ambulance personnel and others — as part of the recognition of the 25th anniversary of 9/11.
Nearly 300 Lunches
Nearly 300 lunches were prepared by the Courthouse Square Deli in Grove Hill and were available for dine-in or take-out.
Melinda “Mo” Foster delivered many of the lunches on Thursday, Sept. 10.
The delivery detail matters more than it might appear. First responders cannot leave a post to attend a recognition event. An ambulance crew on shift, a dispatcher, a firefighter at a station and a deputy on patrol are all working at different locations at different hours. Taking the lunches to them is the difference between a gesture that reaches everyone and one that reaches whoever happened to be free.
What Lathan Said
Lathan said in a statement: “It is our honor to show our appreciation to all our first responders for your dedication to our community.”
Twenty-Five Years
The 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks carries particular weight for emergency services. The attacks killed 343 New York City firefighters, 37 Port Authority police officers and 23 New York Police Department officers — the largest single-day loss of emergency responders in American history.
Observances in the years since have become a fixture of the first responder calendar nationwide, and local recognitions like this one connect a rural Alabama county to that history through the people who do the same work.
Many currently serving responders were children in 2001, or not yet born. For departments across the country, the anniversary has shifted from personal memory to institutional memory — which is part of why the observances continue.
A Local Business and a Local Deli
The arrangement is a small-community one throughout. A funeral home sponsored the effort, a local deli prepared the food and a volunteer drove it around the county.
Funeral homes occupy a particular position in relation to emergency services in small counties. They work alongside coroners, EMS and law enforcement regularly, often at the worst moments of a family’s life, and the professional relationship is close. Recognition from that quarter carries a specific meaning.
Clarke County’s Responders
Clarke County covers a large, largely rural area in southwest Alabama with a population in the low 20,000s. Emergency response across that geography depends heavily on volunteer fire departments alongside paid law enforcement and EMS, and response distances are long.
Nearly 300 lunches gives a sense of the scale of the county’s combined emergency services workforce — a substantial number of people in a county that size.