9/11/01--Where were you when you heard the news?

I was on the golf course, covering a tournament, and though I thought about saying to myself, "Screw this. I need to go into the clubhouse and see a television to know what's going on," I didn't.

When I heard that a plane crashed into the WTC, the first thing I thought was that it was a small aircraft, perhaps one doing local traffic reports or something. Then I knew something much larger was happening when I heard about a second plane and they were larger, commercial planes. One could be a terrible accident, but not two.

Later that morning someone said that one of the towers had collapsed and, having been in those buildings dozens of times, I immediately dismissed that as bad second-hand information. "No," I told myself, "that's just not possible." Only when I finally found a television a couple of hours later did I fully realize the horror.

Later that day, when all the airports were closed and no one knew how long air travel would be out, I called Hertz and told them I wasn't returning my rental car to the airport where I picked it up; I was driving 1,300 miles home and would return it there. To my great surprise, the agent on the other end of the phone said that would be just fine and that there would no additional charges for turning a same-airport return into a one-way. Since then, that very nice customer service has always made Hertz my first choice when needing a rental.

I remember driving home a couple of days later, listening to the national memorial service on the radio, exchanging stories with other travelers in the same kind of situation when we stopped for gas or to eat.

I also remember that I had to travel early the following week, and I distinctly recall boarding early because I'd been upgraded to first class. I remember looking at each and every passenger who boarded and telling myself, "Yes, he's OK . . . she doesn't look dangerous . . ." The last couple of people to board were Army reservists or some kind of military personnel, and I remember feeling better about having them on board.

I always carried a corkscrew in my toiletries kit, and it wasn't until a trip I took at Christmas that an airport security person noticed it.

 

I was in the office of the first paper I worked at, staring blankly at SportsCenter when an ad rep says, "We heard a plane crashed into the World Trade Center. Can we turn it to CNN?"

It was no more than 10 minutes later when the second plane hit, and me and the SE and ASE all said, "SHIT!" at the same time. Within seconds, everyone in the newsroom was watching TV. I remember thinking, "How the hell are we supposed to get the paper out now?"

For a paper with less than 10,000c, we did a great job of localizing 9/11. The local juco football team was to play at the Air Force Academy that weekend (which didn't happen obviously), several events were canceled, and three 747s were forced to land at the nearby airport, including one from Air Canada.

 

My experience is kinda similar, in that I was working for SI.com at the time, and since pretty much everything was canceled, I was asked to pitch in with the CNN.com crew for the rest of the week. I ended up having to go through hundreds and hundreds of emails sent to an inbox set up specifically for people to send information about their missing loved ones. We were compiling a database for the project. We also tried to go through all the video footage available to compile information from the many posters that blanketed the city. Every year, I wonder whether we helped anyone track down their loved ones. I'd like to hope so.

 

He was in an elementary school, too.

 

I had been laid off from a dot com on Sept. 10 and since I got a decent package was looking forward to spending the rest of the year at home with my son who was a year and a half at the time.

On Sept. 11, I had put him in his stroller and gone up the street to get a paper. I had left the radio on and when we got back Howard Stern had just announced that the first plane had hit the WTC. I flipped on the TV and never turned it off the rest of the day. I kept all the papers from Sept. 12 but have never gone through them. The stuff Corky posted is incredible.

My wife works for Merrill Lynch in Toronto which at the time was in one of the big financial buildings downtown and she called in a real panic because nobody knew if those buildings would be a target with all the flights that were being rerouted to Canada. JR might recall but I think the Toropnto subway was shut down that day.

Someone else mentioned living under a flight path at their local airport and how weird it was to see no planes flying. Our house is under a flight path and I'll never forget how eerie that was because it was so quiet.

 

The other thing that happened here was the Boston went completely batshit for about six hours. Copley Square was locked down. A motel in my suburb was surrounded by men with semi-automatics because two of the 'jackers had stayed there the night before. They were hauling cars out of the Logan garage. It was pretty crazy.

 

It was my third year in J-school, and ironically, I was in an 8:30 a.m. American history class - probably the first or second of the year, as I didn't make it to many that early. The class broke fairly early, but none of us had any knowledge this happened.

I was walking through the students' centre on my way to a meeting and I heard two girls talking about "they had taken the WTC and were going for the Pentagon," and I thought they were talking about a video game, so I moved on, ignoring the large crowd in the bar at that time of morning.

I went on with my meeting as usual, until a friend came up to us and asked if we saw what happened. I want to say we were watching the second plane live, but with the confusion of the day and my hazy memory, I'm not exactly sure if it was or not.

After that, the three of us went to pray for about a half hour, then we watched the coverage for most of the day - and indeed, most of the months to follow as it was everywhere in the news, even up here.

I was editing a campus weekly then, and a week or so after the fact, I still led with that on the front page... a compilation of the photos of the attack, coupled with stories about what on-campus groups were doing to raise money and donate blood at the time. It was a no-brainer, I thought, to have that piece of history recorded there.

 

Woke up around noon that day. Checked my e-mail. My mom had e-mailed asking if everyone was OK after "the crazy events of this morning." The first person on her list was a friend of hers from Europe. I didn't have cable at the time, so I logged on to the Net. I remember CNN was text based because they were getting so many hits. I saw something about terrorism in a headline and - combined with seeing my mom's friend name atop the e-mail list - figured there must have been a terrorist act in Europe. I e-mailed back some smart-ass answer about being safe in the U.S. Went back to read the CNN story, realized it was the Towers and Pentagon. Turned on the TV and messed with the antenna to get one of the networks. Saw the second tower collapse and just sat on my couch stunned for probably two hours. Then I called my mom to apologize for the smartass remark.

Went into work later that day. Amid the chaos, I remember e-mailing another friend of mine in the newspaper biz and saying "This is the most important paper we'll ever work on. You can throw out all the rules today. End of the world headlines? Yeah, today is the day to use them."

 

Heard the news when my roommate was pounding the bathroom door while I was in the shower. Quickly went to campus to my college newspaper newsroom. We had all 35 reporters working on stories. Crazy day for a newsroom.

 

I had the morning off and woke up around 11 a.m. CST, by which time the towers had already fallen. When I woke up though, the local rock station was doing the ABC news feed and I knew immediately that something was terribly wrong. It just didn't seem right. So I bolted out of bed and ran to the living room to flip on the TV, then sat there with my jaw open for the next 30 minutes. The first thought that went through my head, without hearing a word of the commentary or even having a real sense of what had happened yet, was that this was an attack.
After a while I left to do some work around town, visiting coaches and such. School was still in session, so there was a story to do on whether or not most of them would play. Some softball games went on before the magnitude of everything set in, but football games later that Friday were postponed.
I also remember thinking it was kind of silly that a shopping mall in a small town in the deep south closed for the day at noon.

 

Why stay open? No one was in the mood to shop.

 

Damn. That was the worst part for me, seeing all the "missing" bills the days and weeks after 9/11. Was at the WTC site a few weeks ago and managed to hold it together pretty well but if I would have seen a "Missing" sign still there, I would have lost it.

Also, I traveled right after air travel resumed and my flight from Houston to Denver was filled with airline employees. I was sitting between a flight attendant and a pilot who were saying, "Oh yes, I worked with him ... I heard the services are already being planned."