'Lift a Nation' — Monument born of faith, circumstance

It was about a week after Sept. 11, 2001, and Stan Watts, the Salt Lake-based sculptor, was getting dressed and ready for the day. His wife, Renee, entered the room and showed him a photo on the front page of the newspaper.

"You should do a sculpture of this," she said.

It was the now-famous picture of three firefighters raising the American flag in the wreckage of the terrorist 9/11 attacks in New York. A striking photo, it was reminiscent of the Marines raising the flag on Mt. Suribachi on Iwo Jima.

"Every sculptor in the nation will be trying to do this," he said, referring to the expected competition for the legal rights to do the project. "I couldn't do it."

But all these years later, Watts is doing just that. He has secured the only rights so far to make a monument based upon the photo. Sometime in the next year his 40-foot-high, 17,000-pound bronze monument will be unveiled on the campus of the national Fallen Firefighters Academy in Emmitsburg, Md. The finishing touches are being given to the component statues in Watts' studio/bronze foundry in West Valley City, where they are disassembled, in their clay form, to facilitate the work. Soon they will be bronzed and then shipped east. (Using a forklift, Watts had the statues assembled for today's newspaper photo.)

Watts spent about four months sculpting the pieces. He estimates there is another three weeks of work left to refine some of the features, principally hands and faces. In reality, the monument has been years in the making, but the most difficult part of the project wasn't sculpting the clay; it was navigating the process of securing permission to do it in a highly competitive, politically charged environment.

Watts forgot about the idea after his wife suggested it until one of his clients asked him to make a small statue that replicated the photo. To do so, Watts had to gain permission from the originating newspaper, The Record of Bergen County, from photographer Tom Franklin and from the three firemen.

Watts discovered that no one had won the rights to the statue, although one artist had tried to do a politically correct version of the statue that replaced two of the three Caucasian firefighters with black and Hispanic men. The project was halted because he had not gained legal permission.

Watts' repeated calls to Bill Kelly, an attorney who represented the firefighters and the newspaper at the time, were not returned.

"Everyone was calling him," says Watts.