9/11, eight years later

I was on-air, doing sports radio. Normally, we kept one of the studio TVs on CNN. That day, we did not. A caller told us about the first plane. We flipped to CNN and saw the second. My co-host dumped the show and switched the station to CNN Radio.

Being in flyover country, we didn't have the same palable sense of fear y'all in the metros did.

 

That's another thing I'll remember ... all the top 40, rock, country, etc., stations turning over to a 24/7 news feed for the next several days. There was almost no way to escape the coverage.

 

For Canucks and others who get CBC, there's a two hour doc showing on Sunday night, "102 Minutes That Changed the World"

http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/passionateeyeshowcase/2009/102minutes/

It was originally produced for the A&E History Channel.

 

I had worked late the night before, and was pretty tired. My wife had a bad habit of waking me up in the morning because she couldn't comprehend that getting home from work at 2:30 in the morning and being woken up at 7:30 wasn't a normal sleep pattern. (It took her years to understand.)

So, when the planes hit the WTC, my wife kept trying to wake me up. I tried to ignore her, figuring that she was just being foolish again. Finally, she told me that the Pentagon was hit, as well. Being half-awake, I figured I should probably check it out. A few minutes later, the plane in Pa. crashed. That's when it really hit me.

I told her to make me breakfast (usually I made my own) while I showered because I knew my office would call me to come in early. She didn't think they would, and was surprised when they did call, went in, did my work and went home.

The next day, I was asked to come in on my day off to help with a special edition on the news side. When I left my apartment, I looked up to the sky, and saw two fighter jets flying past. It gave me a pretty eerie feeling.

That night, I went with my mom to a memorial service at our synagogue. Our temple had just hired a new rabbi after our former one retired after 35 years. The memorial service was her first service. She was later profiled in the local paper, and said it was the most pressure she had ever felt she was under in her life.

As someone posted earlier, I also remember all the radio stations switching over to news. I also remember ESPN devoting all of their time to news as well.

 

I was asleep about 8:30 that morning when the cordless phone rang in my bedroom. That meant my roommate took the phone in with her overnight. I was NOT happy about that. Nor was I happy about it when she said my name repeatedly to wake me up to answer the phone. It was a bill collector.

As soon as I hung up the phone, I shouted at her, "don't ever wake me up to answer the phone again unless it's urgent."

A few minutes later, I heard talking that sounded really unusual to me. I finally got out of bed and walked out and saw images and heard CNN. Then I turned to my roommates and said, "what just happened?" There was an awkward laugh, then one of them said, "should we tell him?" Then they did.

The next thing I remember was getting calls from my paternal grandmother (whom I asked to compare this attack to the one on Pearl Harbor) and my dad's partner. Multiple calls from both. I remember I was supposed to go to an appointment in D.C. that day, but I was too scared to ride Metrorail to get there.

 

I do. I remember Tom Brokaw trying to sift through the information. If memory serves, he said they were hearing about a car bomb or suitcase bomb going off near the capitol (false, obviously) as well as a plane crash in Pennsylvania (true). ...

Could you imagine if we had Twitter then? Not only the reporting that would have been done with it but the rumors, etc., that would have been thrown out and checked out?

 

I was a trainer/supervisor for a company that supplied handling at an airport and had worked the night before. A friend called me to tell me to turn on CNN. I had the day off but did not know what to do so I drove to the airport where I worked. The traffic was backed up so I drove to our shop and walked up to the terminal.

The scene was amazing, all of these aircraft and airlines that our airport did not normally see were on the ground because the US and Canada closed the airspace.

The terminal was eventually closed but all the employees were asked to stick around in case more planes arrived.

I took the down time and did a bunch of recurrent training of our guys which required me to sign off on all of their records. It was a strange feeling when I left the company a year later and was turning over my files to see my signature next to Sep 11 over and over.

 

I was on hiatus from newspapers and getting ready to go to work as a substitute teacher - my first day as a sub was on 9/11/01, with six classes of middle-schoolers.

We had a meeting before school and were told to shuck the lesson plans and just let the kids watch the coverage and vent if they wanted.

I covered the Oklahoma City bombing and the initial images of 9/11 brought back some really bad memories for me.

 

A guy I knew through a friend came into the bookstore that day on Cloud 9 because he had the "real scoop" on what happened to United 93. He the proceeded to tell me how the military had shot the plane down as well as several others. That's when I realized that the conspiracy wackos were going to have a field day.

 

I slept late that morning, until almost 11 a.m. CST. By the time I woke up both towers had already fallen. My clock radio was going off, and it was tuned to a rock station that had by that time switched to the news feed. It took about two seconds for me to realize that something was amiss, and I jumped out of bed and rushed to the TV when I heard them talking about the towers falling. Without even hearing the anchors say it, my first thought was of terrorism.
All through the day, I was doing my Tuesday routine of interviewing coaches and collecting stats. We were thousands of miles away. It was a national story, but I felt insulated from the general panic. It seemed silly that they closed the mall at noon (I assumed because of terrorism fears). That night, a few of us from the paper even went out for a drink. The local bar had news coverage on.
It was also the day the news crawl on CNN and Fox became a permanent part of our lives.
Just a surreal day all around.

I never went into the WTC, but I remember when it was hit in '93. All the TV stations in New York, except I think Channel 5, were knocked off the air. Just static. It was weird.
And I remember, a few years later, going to NYC on Christmas night. The city was deserted. It was amazing to be able to drive around the streets with no traffic. If you've ever driven in the city, you know you can't tell where things are. The buildings are so tall that if you didn't know where the Empire State Building was, you could be a block from it and never know. Anyway, my friend and I whipped around a corner and there was the WTC right in front of us. The thing was so huge and we were so close we couldn't see more than the first few floors.
To think of something that massive just being ... gone ... and coming down on top of you, it's still hard to wrap my head around.

 

Well I've always wondered about that...I mean, consider that by that time the national security arms in this country should have amped up to full alert. An Air Force jet would have been in contact with that plane within seconds as the FAA began accounting for communications with each jet in the air. Knowing that communication had been made with the airline's passengers, there's plenty of room to grasp that the feds knew the situation on that plane. I'm not sure if we'd ever know the truth if it was shot down, but the feel good heroism which alerted people on the ground of what was happening on the plane is a hell of a lot better to stomach.