9-11-01 Remembered

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.