Lawrence Mason, a professor in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, was recently appointed as Syracuse University’s first Remembrance and Lockerbie Ambassador.

Mason will help select Remembrance Scholars, coordinate remembrance events and maintain the bond between SU and Lockerbie, Scotland. Chancellor Kent Syverud selected him for the position in January.

SU hosts remembrance events and chooses 35 students to be Remembrance Scholars each year to honor SU students killed in a terrorist attack over Lockerbie in 1988.

Pan Am Flight 103, an airplane carrying 35 SU students to New York City on their way home from studying abroad in London, crashed in Lockerbie after a terrorist detonated a bomb on board. All 259 people on the plane died, and another 11 were killed on the ground in Scotland.

The Pan Am Flight 103 bombing was a significant event for the SU community and Mason himself. Of the 35 SU students who died, eight of them were Mason’s students.

“Anybody who knew as many as eight people … if you even knew one person on that plane who died, you were involved. But I knew eight,” Mason said. “So, I really had a sense that my destiny was going to have a lot to do with Pan Am 103 in the future. I just didn’t know in what form.”

Mason has spent 44 years at SU as either a student or professor, and 29 of those years have been working with the university on Remembrance programs, Syverud said in a press release.

When Pan Am Flight 103 was bombed, Mason was a central New York photo coordinator for United Press International News Pictures. He was one of two photographers working at the SU men’s basketball game that night. It was then that Mason’s link to Lockerbie began, with an iconic photo of cheerleader Catherine Crossland unable to contain her emotion inside the Carrier Dome.

“She became, really, the heart and soul of what people saw out of Syracuse at the time of the disaster,” Mason said of the iconic photograph of Crossland.

Courtesy of Lawrence Mason

Mason made the decision to transmit the photograph, taken by David Grunfeld, to the world via the United Press International wire within an hour of it being taken.

One of Mason’s greatest priorities in the years since the bombing has been to expand the public’s knowledge of what Lockerbie is, he said. The professor has returned to the Scottish town 15 times and has brought many students on some of his trips. One of the results of his trips resulted in the creation of “Looking for Lockerbie,” a book about the town co-written with another Newhouse professor, Melissa Chessher.

The book project started as a photography exhibit shot by Mason’s students in Lockerbie, with an introduction written by one of the Lockerbie Scholars — students from the town are chosen every year to represent those who were killed in Lockerbie.

While teaching fashion photography in London, Mason decided to take a group of students to Lockerbie to use the town as a backdrop for their photography. This was the start to Mason’s tradition of bringing students to the town where the tragedy took place.

And since then, the professor has taken more than 100 students to the town.

Chessher said Mason wanted to uncover more about Lockerbie, so he took a group of student writers and photographers there.

“This is a unique relationship, that with every passing year (someone is needed) with the experience and the understanding to continue to ensure that it is maintained through time, as people’s memories fade, and people’s memories go on,” Chessher said. “I think it’s a wonderful thing the chancellor has done, and I’m just so grateful he recognized Professor Mason’s commitment to our university’s relationship with this community.”

As part of the new position, Mason is also required to travel to Lockerbie annually, but he said he would go regardless.

“Professor Mason’s photographs and papers in particular really help to give our students here at Syracuse a chance to understand more about the town of Lockerbie beyond the site of this terrible tragedy,” said Vanessa St.Oegger-Menn, the Pan Am Flight 103 archivist and assistant university archivist with SU Libraries. “I think having his papers and photographs as part of the archives really enhances the story we’re able to tell.”

Although Mason wishes the bombing had never happened, he said he thinks SU “is a better place in the aftermath.”

In 1988, people were very innocent, Mason said.

“But after Pan Am 103, we probably value our relationships a little bit more because we now understand they can be taken away from us very quickly,” Mason said. “I think I’m a more compassionate person because of what I learned from Pan Am 103 and the loss of those 35 students.

Published on February 4, 2018 at 6:16 pm

Contact JP: jphadley@syr.edu