The magic happened here, a year ago this week, when the "plane people," as they are called, were stranded in a place they never knew existed -- sleeping on church pews, eating omelettes cooked by 24-hour chefs, and watching, always, as the towers fell again and again on the television from New York.

"There's an ill wind," they say in Newfoundland, "that don't blow someone good." And in Gambo, the wind that stranded 600 airline passengers in town for four days -- as ill a one as can be imagined -- brought with the passing of a year two marriage proposals and the town's first honorary citizen, a 60-year-old Nigerian hotel owner named Samuel Beecorf, who had been on his way to Houston when his plane was forced to land.

"My heart is here," Mr. Beecorf said, proudly showing off the cake and certificate he received Monday night. "If you want to know good people, come to Gambo."

Mr. Beecorf returned this week to mark the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the place that gave him shelter when it happened. He is staying with Jim Lane, who got up each morning at 5 a.m. to make those famous omelettes. When asked to explain why he would come all this way, he tells the story of a 6-year-old boy who walked up to him one day while he stood outside the fire hall. "He grabbed my hand and looked at me, and said, 'Sam, is there anything I can do for you today?' I have never forgotten it."

Last week, Captain Shirley Reid at the Salvation Army got a call from Barbara Groh in Denver. Ms. Groh is about to marry a Swedish man she shared a pew with in Gambo -- lying "end-to-end," Captain Reid makes a point of saying. "No one sleeps together at the Salvation Army."

And travelling back for their honeymoon this week is a second couple, newly married in Houston. The locals remember the middle-aged pair sitting by the TV together at the fishermen's union hall. "I guess Gambo sparked the flame," said Vicky Parsons. "We must have just touched their hearts."

To honour the way Newfoundlanders responded -- in a reflex of hospitality -- to the passengers whose planes were forced to land in Gander when U.S. air space was closed after the attacks, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and Robert Cellucci, the U.S. ambassador to Canada, will first mark the anniversary of that day in a ceremony this morning at the Gander airport.

All in all, 6,700 stranded passengers, a few dozen dogs and cats, and two exotic monkeys en route to a U.S. zoo were dropped on Gander and the small towns around it, nearly doubling the local population in a few hours.

A team of 40 air traffic controllers worked steadily for almost three hours to land and park 69 planes at the Gander airport, and direct another 200 aircraft to safe locations. "They were coming down pretty fast," recalled Don O'Brien, a supervisor on duty that day.

When they were finished, the controllers went to work in their commercial kitchen, cooking up chili batches to feed the passengers. From miles away, locals piled food in their cars and carted it off to the Gander community centre, where the hockey rink became a massive fridge. The striking school bus drivers came back to work instantly. Residents put out signs, beckoning strangers to "Come in for a shower." The grocer stayed open all night long. The Wal-Mart ran out of underwear. "One thing people want is clean underwear," said Gander Mayor Claude Elliott, who left passengers sleeping in his home while he went to work.

No one shuts a door on a stranger here, they like to say -- they load the tables to buckling, dig out the ugly sticks for a tune and throw a party to take the mind off your troubles. (An ugly stick, to clarify, is a mop handle with bottle caps nailed to it. In Gambo, stranded Nashville singer Jillian Dawson entertained at the Salvation Army, accompanied by the jingly beat of an ugly stick. The artist later penned a song, called Waiting for the Plane.) "When they dropped down here and found love, it is not what they were expecting," Mr. Elliott said with pride. "Everyone's saying, 'Why is the rest of the world kicking up all this fuss?' "

In the year since the attacks, the plane people have returned the favour. A Gander school has received money for a new computer centre, after an executive with the Rockefeller Foundation used the school's one computer to keep in touch with her New York office. Free tickets to flights and accommodations in places such as New York, Germany and Honolulu have come in. Lufthansa named a plane Gander. A scholarship for the students in nearby Lewisporte, another place where passengers were sent, was created with spontaneous donations raised on one flight home.

The people themselves have trickled back, and a few of them timed the trip for today's memorial service. Dozens of others have kept in touch through e-mail. Mayor Elliot has even been on Phil Donahue's TV show.

On Beulah Cooper's dining room table in Gander lies a collection of Christmas cards, notes from passengers who took showers in her home, or drives in her car, and who shopped while she watched their children. There is a thank you card from the O'Rourkes, whose son was a New York firefighter missing since the towers fell; they took turns taking showers so that word of his fate wouldn't come when they weren't there. His body was found a few weeks later.

This week, Monica Burke, who stayed with the Coopers, has travelled from Seattle for the anniversary; Mrs. Cooper took her in when she broke down after calling her mom back home. "It was just like one big family at the Legion," Mrs. Cooper said. "You took to them all. We tried to entertain . . . as best we could."

For people such as Sammy Beecorf, Gambo, like Gander, is a place of people who have no equal, who can take strangers and make them family in a single night. Along with many of the other passangers, he has been officially "screeched in" with a cod-kissing ceremony. He remembers the weeping on the bus when it came time to leave, not the uncomfortable night on an army cot; the kindness not the inconvenience. "The way they are to you here," he said, "it's as if they've always known you. I will always come back here."