“Even in elementary school when I was very young, too young to know what it really meant, I’d say, they took this sperm from my dad and the egg from my mom, they put it together and they put it in my aunt,” Jillian said.Īfter trying unsuccessfully for years to get pregnant, her parents hoped for the best when Alice, a marathon runner, and another family friend became surrogates. (Courtesy of the Hoglan family) ‘Greatest gift’įrom an early age, the Hoglan children have known the story of Bingham’s heroism, as well as they have known the unique story of their own births. A family picture shows Alice Hoagland and her brother Vaughn Hoglan at a family gathering to honor Hoagland’s son, Mark Bingham, who died a hero on Flight 93 on Sept. Instead, the terrorists pitched the plane into a Pennsylvania field. One of the last passenger voices on the recording says something like “pull it up.” Several passengers, including Tom Burnett from San Ramon and Mark Bingham’s fellow Los Gatos High graduate Todd Beamer, who uttered what has become an American rallying cry - “let’s roll” - stormed the cockpit, using the beverage cart as a battering ram. What happened next on Flight 93 is the stuff of legend, recounted by relatives who also spoke with loved ones in their final minutes on the doomed flight, discovered on the cockpit voice recording played for family members months later and memorialized in movies and documentaries. Mark never received her voicemails, nor the dozens of others left by friends and family that day. He must gather fellow passengers to take back the plane. The hijackers were “hellbent” on a suicide mission, she said. “It was a life change forever.”Īs they watched the news of planes crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Alice tried calling her son back twice, leaving frantic messages on his cell phone. “Everything was surreal from that second forward,” said Kathy Hoglan, who remembers her sister-in-law’s awful expression. Mark told his mother that he loved her before the line went dead. “Three guys on board have taken over the airplane. “I’m on a flight from Newark to San Francisco,” Alice recalled her son telling her, in a 2011 interview with the Bay Area News Group. Mark was calling his mother from a GTE Airfone at the back of the airplane to say he may never see her again. She was holding Garrett in her arms when Kathy handed her the landline. (Gary Reyes/Bay Area News Group Archives)Īlice Hoagland - who changed the spelling of her last name to an early Dutch version - was just waking up that morning at Vaughn and Kathy’s Saratoga home where she had been helping with the babies born six weeks premature and pumping her breast milk for them. The triplets will be one-year-old on March 14. At age 51, she decided to become a surrogate mother for his brother’s wife. Alice is also the surrogate mother to the triplets. Alice is the mother of Mark Bingham, one of the victims of Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania on September 11. “If you don’t, it’s like him dying twice.”įile photo of Alice Hoagland preparing to feed lunch to her triplet nephews (l to r) Bryce, Garrett and Harrison Hoglan as her sister, Candyce Hoglan (r) helps out on Feb. “You have to keep the memory alive,” said Bryce, who is 20 now. 11 terrorist attacks, those children consider it their responsibility to share the legacy of their courageous cousin and Auntie Alice with their own generation, the ones too young to understand the terror and true heroism of that day. Now, on the 20th anniversary of the Sept. A year and a half earlier, she had delivered them a daughter, Jillian. Six months before the attack, at 51, she gave birth to triplet boys - Harrison, Garrett and Bryce - as a surrogate for her younger brother and his wife. He was her only child.Īnother part of her life, however, was mostly private. In interviews and documentaries and at 9/11 memorials, the Los Gatos mother became a familiar face over the last two decades, preserving the memory of her son, a 31-year-old public relations executive and former Cal Berkeley rugby player whose courage helped a bewildered, grieving nation believe all was not lost. Bingham was a victim of Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania on September 11. Alice Hoagland and her son, Mark Bingham share a hug during Christmas day, 1999. She died in her sleep nearly a year ago, at age 71, but in unexpected and little-known ways the story endures.

LOS GATOS - Twenty years later, Alice Hoagland isn’t here any longer to tell the story of her son, Mark Bingham - of how he and fellow passengers on Flight 93 tried to wrestle the hijacked plane back from terrorists and perished when it crashed into the Pennsylvania countryside.

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