Carol Yontosh will see the Twin Towers every day from behind her downtown sub shop counter.
Inside the Penn State Sub Shop #1,
225 E. Beaver Ave., about 60 photos line the wall as part of a store tradition of customers posing around the world with the store's signature blue-and-white paper bag.
The bags have traveled to France, the San Diego Zoo, the Great Wall of China, Egypt -- they've even flown in an Air Force jet. Thursday, the shop made room for one more.
Behind each photo is a story -- like an embarrassed professor who went to a Penn State party and posed with the bag over a smiling topless woman's chest, or a student who discovered that one of the Hooters ladies holding the bag was his mom.
"They come in and tell me the stories and I listen," said Yontosh, the owner of the shop. "I love it."
But Yontosh, who works seven days a week at a shop that makes as many as
500 sandwiches a day, said she was skeptical when John Decker, 41, told her he had another picture to tack on to the wall.
"I just froze," she said, placing her hands over her heart.
Decker had a picture of his ex-girlfriend and younger brother in front of the World Trade Center, a Sub Shop bag in hand. It's a portrait of an early 1990s New York City, with a clear blue sky in the background.
Decker commutes each week from New Jersey to Penn State in order to complete his engineering degree -- a promise he made to himself in 1991, about the same year the photo was taken.
Decker said he always knew he had the photo, and when he returned to State College last week from New Jersey, he said he knew he needed to dig it up.
On Labor Day, he went downstairs into his basement closet and opened a shoebox filled with photos from his early college years and found the image that now adorns the sub shop's wall. About 20 years after it was taken, the image stands as a stark reminder of the world before the 9/11 attacks, Yontosh said. Now, Sept. 11 marks a day of service in memorial of those killed, and for the sub shop owner, the image serves as a reminder of a day that changed how she viewed the world.
Things are different now, she said.
"I thought no one could come in and touch us," she said.
