Pre-note: 9-11-01 was hugely impactful for me. This blog is probably the best evidence. t began writing what came to be this blog in the wake of 9-11-01, and in the past 25 years there have been over 4000 posts on a great variety of topics. But it started because of 9-11-01;
My intent, leading to this post and the one following, is to simply review what I remember from that awful time, trying to make sense of it in our history as a country. I invited others to share some of their memories, and these follow, below. The several reminiscences come from friends. I have not read them, but will after I complete and publish my own thoughts. My preference is that you read these first, then in the following post dated 9-11-01 where I’ll share my own thoughts on this difficult anniversary.
Hopefully what somebody said will resonate with you.
There was an unexpected bonus to this process. Last night, we were among about 100 in a St. Paul theatre, joining thousands of others around the country, in the premier of an important film, ‘The Work In Progress“. I’d urge attendance when it becomes available to you. Check it out.
Following are some memories of 9-11-01. There are eight so far. Ground Zero impacted far beyond Ground Zero in 2001
My reflections follow in the post for September 11, “25 Years after 9-11”. The followup post includes e-mails from the time including a family letter from the day before, September 10, 2001.
from Joyce Sep 7:
I was still living in NYC at the time; in fact, I was sitting on the floor in my bedroom packing for my move to Minnesota, scheduled for October 2, when a friend called and told me to turn on CNN right away.
I didn’t live close to lower Manhattan; my home in Queens, the largest of the 5 boroughs, was a short walk from the border with the next county, about as far east as you could get from Manhattan and still be in New York City. Even so, we could smell the smoke there, and the sky was a weird color. What struck me the most in the days following 9/11 was how quiet it had become. I was used to constant noise, of traffic, flights from La Guardia and JFK, both in Queens, flying over my house, sirens from ambulances and fire trucks. Instead, the only noises were the occasional helicopter and the occasional military plane overhead. Traffic was at a standstill. A road near my house led to one of the bridges into Manhattan, and for days the traffic on that road was backed up all the way through Nassau, the next county to the east of us. There was a firehouse across the street from me, and we were friendly with the firefighters; I used to bring the kids over so they could sit in the trucks and try on helmets. Those men and their trucks were in Manhattan, and a team from outside NYC were filling in for them, with green trucks instead of the red to which I was accustomed.
At work, there was tremendous anxiety; a lot of nurses there were married to policemen. One of my coworkers hadn’t heard from her husband since he had called on 9/11 to tell her he was headed toward the site. Fortunately, he was okay, but I still don’t know how she was able to focus on work before she heard back from her husband. I worked L&D, and we had a lot more women in preterm labor than usual in the weeks after 9/11. Some of our patients had lost their husbands.
from Larry, Sep 7: As we remember 9-11-01, twenty-five years ago this week, I always wondered how working air crews handled that day. We had two airline captains in our 1961 class at Valley City (ND) High School. Four years ago, I interviewed our classmate, John Manstrom, a Delta Captain as well as a Navy flyer during the Viet Nam war. He was in the cockpit that day. Although it’s a permanent YouTube item on my blog, I’ll share the link to the interview
here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TIygPhm46M
Keep up the interesting work, Dick!
from Gramee, Sep 8: On September 11, 2001, I was well into my 15th year of not watching television. Family and friends. Boggled the minds of family and friends.
Phone rang early that morning. My adult daughter, Beth, didn’t even say “hello.” She said, “Mom, I know you don’t watch TV, but I think you should turn it on, right now!! Something awful has happened.” She sounded very upset.
I took the phone with me to the TV I’d covered years ago with a small table cloth. Whipped off the cloth and turned on my abandoned TV to a news station.
“And what to my wondering eyes should appear…” A scene I couldn’t grasp at first. There was absolute chaos in New York City
Yelling. Fire. Smoke. Police and fire fighters. Ambulances. People fleeing on foot, away from what was left of the twin towers. Why? Because the towers had been destroyed by an airplane flying directly into them.
At first, I thought there must have been some kind of horrible accident. A plane in a desperate situation. That was bad enough. But Beth, who was still on the phone with me, said word had it that the crash was likely intentional. An attack. I remember that as the moment my brain went all WTF. We watched together via the phone, without saying a word,while we watched the horror evolve.
This is already an over-long recital of what turned out to be the beginning of our country’s most disastrous thing until Donald Trump came along. Our lives were/are never the same from 9/11 forward.
Never.
from Kathy Sep 8: The Sept 11th attack was monumental – changed the way we look at security and folks ‘different’ from us – particularly those of brown skin with foreign accents. I recall getting a phone call from my penpal’s daughter in Japan that morning just before leaving to teach kindergarteners – the 2nd wk of school. Kyoko yelled, “Mom! Look at the t.v.! Someone is crashing airplanes into the Twin Towers in NY!” I watched in disbelief…Oregon is a long way from NY and DC! I still think the impact of those events were greater felt by folks closer to the East Coast where the tragedy was occurring.
What I noticed most was the effect this had on our local Oktoberfest the next week. Ofest is 61yrs a folk fest this year…Ofest is where thousands of folks descend upon our little town to celebrate for 4 days. The year 2001 was to be different. We still held the festival but a sadness prevailed over all. Normally joyful people of all ages would be dancing, singing, eating, drinking but this year a pall covered our little town. I was scheduled to give concerts in St. Mary Church – big neo-gothic church built in 1912 by local parishioners..a jewel of a building reminiscent of cathedrals in Europe. The Ofest board decided to hold the fest and continue the activities so my concerts went on as scheduled.
I sang songs of old & well known hymns… people cried as they sat or knelt in prayer – I ended the concert with Edelweiss and God Bless America….Each concert’s end that year I received a standing ovation – something I’d never experienced before or since, but I know I was addressing the tragedy with songs from the heart and that folks needed to be in that safe sacred space I was honored to provide for them.
from Carol Sep 8: I think 9-11, for those of us old enough to have experienced both, is like the Kennedy assassination in that we all remember exactly what we were doing when we heard the news. I was talking on the phone with my daughter-in-law who interrupted to say that she’d just seen on TV a plane fly into a tall building – somewhere in Europe, she thought. Then she said the World Trade Center, and since at that time there was a downtown St. Paul building with that name across from where I worked, I totally freaked out.
I of course joined the rest of the country just frozen in place in front of our screens watching the unfolding horror for hours – forgetting to get dressed or even eat. The fact that foreign terrorists had dared to hit us so brutally on our own turf was nearly impossible to process. It shattered a sense of safety for Americans that we have never gotten back.
But also what I so clearly remember was the sudden overwhelming realization on the part of Americans that we were all in this together. All one country. OUR country. I had never experienced that before in my life, and certainly have not since. Strangers hugged strangers in the street. We attended a hastily organized memorial service that evening, complete as I recall with a huge American flag. I hope it doesn’t take another similarly catastrophic event in order for our country, which again appears hopelessly divided, to once again remember that we ARE all in this together.
from John, Sep 9: I was working, and my first home repairman stop of the day was at a house in the newer part of town to fix a balky toilet… The homeowner was watching some morning TV program, and the breaking news update was that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. As I recall, all the commentators thought that was just basically a random accident, morning will likely loss of life, etc.
I finished up, and the homeowner and I left it about the same time. I didn’t turn on the radio or anything else like that during the rest of the morning, and was only at unoccupied houses.
Sherry was at home, but she was also not in the habit of watching TV or listening to the radio; and was likely just reading books or busying herself with stuff like that until time for her afternoon soap opera to come on. At this point, it was probably three hours later.
That’s when we realized the full extent of what was now being called a terrorist attack on New York. Not much was done the rest of the day– I had no more appointments with people the rest of the day, so I just canceled everything and we were glued to the TV into the night.
I do remember initially, having to deal with a lot of fear both and myself and in Sherry, but the reality that we were literally 3000 miles away from all the incidents, with nothing else being reported, eased the panic quite a bit.
from David: Hi Dick,
I’m looking forward to your blog. My 9/11 memory began with me driving into school that morning. I was, as usual, listening to NPR on my drive in from Wisconsin. The news broke that an airplane had crashed into one of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. Details were scant, not even what type of plane was involved. I recalled that as a kid I was fascinated by the story of the 1945 crash of an American bomber into the Empire State Building and assumed that this was a similar accident. How could this happen with today’s navigation?
By the time I arrived at school, details were coming out that the crash involved a commercial airliner and there was talk of a possible terrorist attack. When the second plane crashed into the tower, that was pretty much confirmed. Televisions were turned on at school and by now the kids had arrived. The staff was told that classroom televisions should be turned off to avoid traumatizing the students. Some teachers were angry about this decision, while others had already made that decision. As events unfolded during the day, the news kept getting worse. We made it through that day and, as they say, the rest is history.
from Fred: Actually, 9/11 fell on the Tuesday I felt officially retired from 35 years of teaching. I knew I would not return to classes in September, 2001 but had counted the summer months as being in limbo. It wasn’t until the first school day, September 11, 2001 kids and teachers were in school, and I was not. That the golden years began.
I was listening to radio news and just finishing breakfast when an announcer issued a flash that one of the NYC Twin Towers was on fire. I turned on the TV to see live coverage and, sure enough, there was a tower billowing smoke. It wasn’t known for certain, but it appeared an aircraft might have crashed into it.
There was no talk about it being anything but an accident. Some bystanders claimed they saw a plane hit the tower. Conjecture continued and I kept watching. Some cameras were alwaysfixed on the burning tower, while reporters tried to get a handle on what was going on. Firefighting crews arrived. They rushed into the building and were seen heading up staircases. Brief interviews with people at a command center in the lobby or a basement area brought a sense of what their crews were doing.
I looked on when what appeared to be a large four-engine jet aircraft hit the second tower. Theories quickly evolved that this was an attack on both buildings and concerns more might follow. Then came the hit on the Pentagon and word of a plane crash in Pennsylvania had also occurred. It was a long time before I saw another passenger plane in the air, and we live near the Twin Cities’ International Airport. Occasionally, I spotted F-16 fighter aircraft I overhead.
Naturally, I continued to watch operations. Interviews with fire fighters inside the command center, revealed people above the collision points were trapped on upper floors. Firefighters continued walking up flights of stairs to get at the flames. Some people above the flames had found staircases still open and fled, but the large majority were waiting for help.
By now millions were watching the unfolding disaster on television. Camera crews had stayed inside near the fire fighting command centers at first, but now needed to get out.
Some experts began theorizing that the heat of the fire might be too much for the buildings to stand. A collapse had not been on my mine. I figured firefighters would somehow get control of the situation. The first tower began to waver and then collapsed. We knew everyone still inside, fire crews included, had been killed. When I see film of that event, I quickly turn away.
We viewers saw some ghastly scenes in the aftermath, which I prefer not to describe. But I will mention images that punched viewers in the stomach. Camera crews drove by the city fire houses. The doors were open, but……you know the rest.
Twin Towers New York City late June 1972. At this point, one of the towers had opened, the second was near complete. Photo taken enroute to Statue of Liberty by Dick Bernard.
