The sky was just getting dark on a cold Wednesday afternoon at about 3 p.m. on Dec. 21, 1988, when a telephone inside one of Tolley Hall’s back offices began to ring.

Ronald Cavanagh, then-Syracuse University’s vice president of undergraduate studies, took the phone call. A travel agent told him a Boeing 747, Pan Am Flight 103, had gone missing. Cavanagh asked the agent what that meant.

“Well, it’s not on the radar, and we can’t find it,” he was told after a pause. “We lost it. We don’t know where it is.”

“How many of our kids are on it?” Cavanagh asked.

The agent couldn’t provide an answer. She didn’t know. Incredulous, Cavanagh hung up and took a breath. He walked to the front of Tolley, where then-Chancellor Melvin Eggers was sitting behind his desk, preparing to attend a Syracuse men’s basketball game.

Cavanagh explained to Eggers that a plane was missing and they weren’t sure how many SU students were on it.

“What are we supposed to do?” he asked.

It had been about an hour since Pan Am Flight 103 exploded in the air over Lockerbie, Scotland. The explosion was a terrorist attack that resulted in the deaths of all 259 people aboard, including 35 SU students returning from study abroad trips and 11 people on the ground in Lockerbie. More United States civilians died in the bombing than in any other terrorist attack, before 9/11.

In Tolley Hall that day, first came the travel agent’s call. Then came radio and TV news reports saying a plane had exploded in Scotland. Syracuse officials began to make the connection. Then the university called families, families called the university and it all came together over a series of days that resulted in memories Cavanagh has carried with him all his life.

A tragedy like Pan Am Flight 103 carries an emotional weight for the grieving families and friends of victims. For Cavanagh, that emotional pull came as he picked up the phone to make those calls to families. He can vividly remember the wave of uncertainty that unfolded.

“Now, I think about it and get choked up,” Cavanagh, 79, said last month while sitting in his Syracuse home, two miles from the SU campus. He shook his head and held back tears.

Three decades later, Cavanagh knows that, in the act of scrambling to find out what had happened to the plane and who was on it, he lived in a moment he will never forget. But at the time of the first ring, Cavanagh — nobody — knew anything.

Cavanagh stood anxiously once he entered the chancellor’s office. His meeting with Eggers turned into a decision about whether to cancel the SU men’s basketball game in the Carrier Dome. After a brief conversation, they decided that because some fans were driving from hours away and because it wasn’t clear what had happened to the plane, the game should be played, Cavanagh said.

Meanwhile, Judy O’Rourke, then an assistant in SU’s undergraduate studies department, was calling the U.S. Department of State for more information. She said the now-defunct Pan American World Airways “handled the situation very poorly” by not communicating with SU officials and that the New York state Department of State wasn’t helpful, either.

“I would call the state department and get put on hold,” O’Rourke said. “I’d get hung up on. For hours. You’d call, get hung up on. Call, put on hold for 20 minutes. People truly didn’t know what to do.”

SU’s lawyers did. By 3:30 p.m., they called Eggers and told him not to make any public statements until more details were clear. Within the hour, news reports on the radio and television showed a plane down in Lockerbie, Scotland, O’Rourke said.

Cavanagh remembered calling Syracuse’s Division of International Programs Abroad. They, too, heard reports about a crash in Scotland.

Parents of SU students began calling Cavanagh’s office, wanting to know if their children were on the plane, after seeing the reports. Dozens of families called. Cavanagh instructed his colleagues to repeat the same answers.

They told parents and over: “We don’t know. I’m sorry. We don’t have the names. As soon as we find anything we feel is credible, we’ll let you know.”

Cavanagh doesn’t recall eating that night. There was no time, and the situation ruined his appetite anyway.

Eggers told Cavanagh to go to Syracuse Hancock International Airport. A connecting flight from New York to Syracuse was supposed to land, and Eggers thought it might be carrying people that didn’t yet know about the crash.

Cavanagh walked out of Tolley Hall into the dark. He hopped into his Toyota and drove north up Interstate 81 to the airport. On the way, he thought to himself: How would he explain what happened? How does he approach people who could be in shock?

When Cavanagh walked into the airport at about 6:30 p.m., people were arriving from New York — people who were supposed to be on Pan Am Flight 103 who had instead taken an earlier flight. Some friends and families of victims arrived in Syracuse unaware of the tragedy, Cavanagh said.

“Back then, there were no push notifications or cell phones,” he said. “Not everybody got the message right away. They were destroyed, crying when they found out.”

He stayed at the airport comforting travelers for about 90 minutes, he said, then drove back to campus because a colleague had phoned him. Syracuse officials wanted to start calling families based on a list of SU students they believed to be on the plane.

“Talk about wetting your pants,” Cavanagh said. “How do you initiate a call to someone’s parents saying their child is no longer here?”

When he got back to his office, Cavanagh’s first call went to a family in Chicago. As it turns out, that student was alive – his mother picked up the phone, and when Cavanagh said he was calling about her son, she said he was in the other room.

After that, Cavanagh made the first of about 10 calls to the families of students who had died in the bombing. The one he remembers most went to Dorothy Coker, mother of twins Jason and Eric Coker. Both had died.

“I’m calling about your children,” Cavanagh began. Within a minute, he said she was consoling him. Another parent had already told her that her children were killed, Cavanagh said. Dialing numbers inflicted a slow burn toll on Cavanagh, but Coker’s compassion resonated most.

“The event was just sinking into my damn bones,” he said. “And God, that was too much.”  

Cavanagh lay in bed next to his wife that night and tried to rest, but he was forced to stay awake and live with his thoughts. After a while, he got up and walked around. Several times, he said he returned to bed and tried to sleep. He couldn’t.

Finally the clock hit 5 a.m. He always went to the local gym by 6 a.m. anyway, so he got there an hour early.

Cavanagh recently said his life, let alone those of the victims’ families, will never be the same. He said repeatedly he’s had this feeling in the years since: it’s a kind of community spirit that the tragedy’s aftermath has provided the families as well as the members of the Syracuse and Lockerbie communities, and it’s also a feeling of gloominess — but not a loss of hope.

Cavanagh visited the new exhibit on Bird Library’s sixth floor, titled, “We Remember Them: The Legacy of Pan Am Flight 103.” The exhibit offers displays of artifacts related to the tragedy and depicts how the Syracuse and Lockerbie communities have since moved on.

He walked out of the elevator to the sixth floor, reading an overview of the tragedy and the exhibit. Then he walked to the left and scanned a wall honoring all 270 victims. He perused the victims’ names and their pictures, and he went silent.

Cavanagh made his way to the other end of the exhibit and looked through one glass display after the other. Every few minutes, he recounted where he was at the time, and what he was thinking at that very moment.

One artifact in particular stuck with him. It was a program from the Place of Remembrance dedication, held at SU on April 22, 1990. The Syracuse Scottish Pipe Band and the SU Brass Ensemble played. Cavanagh was among the community members that spoke. He read aloud to himself the remarks he made that day.

“This marvelous place, at once a most mundane center, a functional portal of our daily comings and goings, is now pledged as well to stand as an honored symbol of the spirit of Gateway and of Passage,” Cavanaugh said, just as he did 28 and a half years ago.

“Not a place apart, obscure or aloof and unavoidable,” he continued, beginning to shake and cry, “But an undeniable, almost irresistible conduit of our collective energies. A place at the heart of our Welcomes and Farewells.”

Cavanagh didn’t cry the day of the tragedy. Not when he was calling families, nor when he went to the airport, nor in the two days following the bombing.

Dec. 24 was a Saturday evening. Three days had passed since Pan Am Flight 103 exploded 31,000 feet in the sky and fell to the Lockerbie soil below.

Cavanagh remembers sitting with his wife, Judy, in a church pew surveying Rockefeller Methodist Church on Nottingham Road.

There was something about the candles. Maybe it was the light, he said. Maybe it was how many people were there, in unison, praying.

Whatever it was, the sight unleashed the feelings that had been building up inside Cavanagh — the feelings that began to form since the very first ring he heard in Tolley Hall.

That day in the church, on Christmas Eve, Cavanagh wept.

Cover photo by Alexandra Moreo | Senior Staff Photographer, Graphics by Laura Angle | Digital Design Editor