9/11, eight years later

Get a name. Then get the name of the station's general manager. Then get a phone number......then post it here.

 

It's hard to convey how scary it was around 2 p.m. or so on Sept. 11 when no one knew what was going to come next.

 

I'm sure we all felt it to some degree. Maybe folks living in major cities had a larger sense of fear than those in rural areas. And I'm sure those in NYC and DC felt it the most. But I can't imagine that there wasn't a single person wondering if all hell was going to break loose when the son went down. I thoroughly expected car bombings to happen in every major city on the 12th. I'm still amazed that there haven't been repeats of the Oklahoma City truck bomb whether conducted by terrorists from overseas or our own shores.

 

I remember the subways and trains being reopened later on 9/11 (almost sure the subways were opened that day, I know the trains ran to points east and south) and thinking that part two had to be a widespread biological attack that would kill even more people than the attack on the Towers.

And count me among those who is absolutely, positively convinced the plane over PA was shot down, not driven down by passengers.

 

2001: Working at AP in Detroit, fielding unending calls from newspapers and radio stations. Since it was also election day -- and not ralizing the gravity of the situation, elections went on -- I turned around came back for OT. Between shifts, driving home, I burst into tears.

2009: As I walked into work at the youth center in Midelt, Morocco, the director noted the date and said "I'm sorry."

Only noteable because he's Muslim and really, not too many Moroccans I deal with have a clue what happened.

 

I've never wanted to go "home" and hug my parents more than I did that day.

 

Someone complained in our local paper about 9/11/09 being used as a "Day Of Service." The person who wrote that said it was rather, a day of remembrance, and that doing such service (donating one's time/talents) did not honor those lost that day.

I would disagree. Could we not do both....? Remember those lost and honor them by helping others...? I think the putdown to "Day of Service" was a swipe at President Obama's one-time employment as a organizer. I didn't appreciate that. I thought the comment could have waited until after 9/11.

 

I was a junior in college and had a Lit class that afternoon. Obviously, no one felt like talking about the book, so the prof put a timeline on the board of everything we knew/heard. It started with the basics of the two planes and the Pentagon, but from there it got really sketchy. There were rumors of a plane out of Denver that had been hijacked. There was confusion about whether a plane had actually been aimed at the White House.

One of my classmates was the daughter of a U.S. Senator. She started crying because she hadn't been able to contact him all day and didn't know if another plane was heading for D.C.

 

I'm sorry I'm four days late in responding to this thread, but here we go.

For a good friend of mine, 9/9/01 was the last day of normalcy. His first child - a son- was born on 9/10/01. So his world was already changing when the events of the next day hit.

I remember waking up around 8 or 8:30 on 9/11 and hopping on the computer and logging onto AOL to check my e-mail and do some other stuff. Saw on the main news page that the major story was an airplane had hit the twin towers. Thinking it was probably just a small plane I didn't think anything of it and went about my business. Did a bunch of other stuff on the computer on and off of AOL. Then I had to log back onto AOL for something and the major story was that one of the twin towers had collapsed. I logged off and quick as I could jumped out of the chair, went into the living room turned on the TV and sat stunned watching the coverage for the next few hours.

Eventually the call came from the paper that the copy desks needed to get in early as they were adding a bunch of pages for news and possibly going with an earlier deadline, meaning sports had to clear the deck an hour before deadline to allow for the crush of extra news pages. So on my way in, across the street from our building, the competition in town (a tabloid) had a street hawker out selling their special afternoon edition they rushed out for the news. I mention this to one of the news editors who promptly sends me back outside to grab a copy.

As stunned as I was by the magnitude of what happened, I'm thankful that I had no relatives or friends, friends' relatives, or friends' friends who died in the events of that day. So in that sense I don't have the personal connection to the day that many do.

 

I still love the San Fran Exam's cover.

"BASTARDS"

 

I was a Sophomore in high school sitting in French class when the news spread. Many of the classrooms in my high school were separated by a door that led to a different classroom. A teacher from another room came in and whispered something into the ear of our teacher where they eventually rolled a TV into the classroom.

My dad had been working in Boston that day, so I was intially curious if he was okay.

I got home after school and was glued to the TV for the rest of the day/night.