REGINA, Sask. — Over the course of his life, Alexander Milan Filipov — Al, to those he knew well — became known among his family, friends and colleagues as an engineer, an artist, a builder, a sailor, a church leader, an adventurer, a lifelong learner and someone with a genuine interest in the people and places around him.
But when he was killed at age 70 as a passenger aboard American Airlines Flight 11, which was hijacked and flown into the North Tower of New York City’s World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, Filipov’s son Jeff said the world lost something else as well.
“He had a way of looking at things,” Jeff told SaskToday in a phone interview Thursday, that revolved around assuming the best in others.
“His vision of things was more like we assume people are decent and there are only a few who aren’t. What’s weird about 9/11 is that … his style was partly stamped out in this experience.”
Jeff added that his father, who was born in Regina in 1931, tried to raise his three sons in that same image — “to be good and nice and thoughtful.”
“And there are fewer and fewer people who think that way now,” Jeff continued. “You don't get someone who's saying if somebody's being mean then they have a reason. Instead, you just think they're mean so you get mean to them, and then it keeps cycling.
“He tried to care about people. He had his own faults, of course, just like anyone else, but he generally was into this sort of hopeful future style of life.”
Further details about Al’s time in Saskatchewan are sparse, but Jeff said his father’s family eventually settled in Windsor, Ont.
In Al’s obituary from the Boston Globe, his son David wrote that Alexander went on to graduate from Queen’s University in Kingston in 1955, moved to Concord, Mass., in 1959 and became a U.S. citizen in 1962, making his living “as an engineer for several Boston-area companies.”
Over his life, the obituary adds, he further developed interests in exploring the Canadian Arctic, rebuilding Ford Model A cars, coaching minor baseball, golf, tennis, skiing, playing guitar, mathematics and astronomy.
On the morning of 9/11, his widow Loretta told the Concord Public Library in a 2002 interview, Al left his home in Concord to board a morning flight to California. It was to be a three-day work trip, one Loretta said she declined her husband’s invitation to join him on.
As with the memories of that day his mom shared with the library, Jeff recalled Thursday likewise hearing of the first plane to strike the World Trade Center — the one his father was travelling on — and not initially grasping the magnitude of what had happened when Loretta first phoned him that morning.
“(I) assumed it was a sports rivalry,” he said. “(I) thought a (Boston) Red Sox fan that was disgruntled had crashed his plane into the building, a little biplane, and that's actually what we assumed.”
A return call from Jeff to his mother soon confirmed the more sombre and far-reaching reality.
Twenty-five years on, Al’s larger legacy has become one of a peaceful search for justice rather than one of vengeance. Loretta and members of Concord’s Trinitarian Congregational Church, where Al was a deacon, held the first Al Filipov Peace and Justice Forum in 2002. The website for the event, which ceased operations in 2023, says it hosted distinguished guest speakers each year with the aim of promoting peace and justice among all people and encouraging attendees to work for social justice in their own lives and communities as well as around the world.
“The sad part for me is that, around that time, it wasn't that something happened and that everyone was trying to figure out a way to process it, but instead, people seized it and turned it into some sort of opportunity,” Jeff said. “Politicians were using it as a drumbeat. You’ve got your George Bush people saying ‘they're with us or they're against us’ and now they're talking about war.
“What pissed me off at the minute this happened, all the way until present, is that it became patriotism.”
Jeff also planned to continue remembering his father Friday by reading the names of several 9/11 victims from Massachusetts during a ceremony at the State House in Boston — the third time he said he’s read names at similar events in the past.
“I'll do that and I'll leave and, to be honest, it's emotional,” he said. “I'll call my mom and (ask) ‘How are you?’ and all this good stuff, but I'm not a recluse or crying. I'm not doing all that. I'm more like (it’s) time to go back to work and do things, and hopefully people get educated (about what happened).”
In addition to Loretta, Jeff and David, Al was also survived by his son Allan, two brothers (James and John) and a sister (Angeline).
"He made everybody feel like they were his best friend," Judy Walpole, the Concord church's then-business manager, was quoted by David as saying. "He just made you feel like you were the most important person, as though he got up that morning just because he wanted to meet you and talk to you."
