On Sept. 11, 2001, my older son was 5, and some mornings played video games on my computer. So I wasn't plugged into the world that morning. I didn't know that American Airlines Flight 11 had struck the North Tower at 7:46 a.m. Chicago time. I did not own a cell phone.
At the Northbrook Metra station, stepping onto the 8:17 Downtown, I heard a woman down the platform say something about the World Trade Center being hit by a plane.
At Union Station, knots of people stood around, talking. I asked one: what kind of plane hit the twin towers?
"A 767," he said. That startled me. I had assumed it would be a Cessna.
"That's a big plane," I said, thickly.
At Wacker Drive, people were pouring out of the Sears Tower, fanning out in all directions. I noticed that, as they hurried along, they looked up, scanning the sky. As if they expected to see a plane go into the building at any moment.
There was a Billy Goat Tavern on Washington, open for breakfast. I stepped inside. Everyone was just standing there in silence, watching the North Tower collapse on TV. I joined them. You could hear the eggs sizzling on the grill.
The paper was still at 401 N. Wabash. I was on the editorial board and walked into editorial page editor Steve Huntley's office.
"How do you spell 'Osama bin Laden?'" he asked. I'd never heard the name but went to my office to find out.
I used to say there were two shocks about Sept. 11 — the first was that it happened, that four planes were hijacked by 19 men wielding box cutters. Two crashed into New York's World Trade Center, toppling the towers. A third hit the Pentagon and a fourth crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers stormed the cockpit; 2,973 men, women and children died that day.
There was a time when I wouldn't feel obligated to spell out the details. But more than a third of Americans have no living memory of Sept. 11, 2001, and it would not be surprising if 9/11 is news to some — just another crumb of dusty history they didn't learn in school.
Leading to the second shock of 9/11: that it went away, or at least ebbed. Because for days and weeks and months, it seemed that 9/11 was a permanent condition, a radiating, bottomless shock, sorrow and stupefaction. But ebb it did, slowly receding, like a tide going out. And now 25 years have gone by, and attention must be paid again.
We put out "Extras" in those days — special editions to update breaking news stories, hawked at newsstands downtown. Our first was headlined "UNSPEAKABLE HORROR" — I remember looking at "Unspeakable" and thinking, "Really? 'Cause we're trying to flippin' speak it." The second was better: "TERROR!"
To continue reading, click here.
If one has a chance, visit ground Zero in NYC/ Manhattan. A moving experience. Good photo, Mr. S.
ReplyDeleteVisited Shanksville PA about ten years ago, right after they opened the memorial and visitor center. The crash site is still off limits, because it's a gravesite, but the rest of the grounds are very impressive. Animated maps show you the events in real time. That aircraft was hijacked in the airspace over Greater Cleveland, almost directly above my house. Then it made its fateful turn to the southeast.
ReplyDeleteThe Shanksville site has replaced a makeshift shrine that had existed on a high fence for almost fifteen years. Some of its countless artifacts...plastic flowers, messages, and stuffed animals predominate...are on display in the visitor center...or museum, if you will. Very similar to what accumulates at the Vietnam Wall in D.C.
Shanksville is only about 3-4 hours from here. Thought about attending for the 25th, but don't especially care for large crowds anymore. Was also worried that You-Know-Who might suddenly decide to show up--and make it all about Himself.
I visted Shanksville, too, about three years ago for me. Very impressed with the museum. Sobering. In one area you can pick up a phone receiver and listen to some of the gut-wrenching telephone messages the passengers left for their loved ones. One sticks with me: with urgency in her voice but with presence of mind, she left instructions and passwords and a combination lock number code to access her documents. She knew she was going to die.
DeleteAnd Neil: so quiet you "could hear the eggs sizzling ..."
I was on a Metra train and a man had taken a phone call. We all heard only one side of the call but no one in the train car said a word for the next 10 minutes it took to pull into Ogilvy after he said "Into the twin towers? A small plane? A big passenger plane??" The only sound I remember for those minutes is what seemed like the loudest I'd ever heard the general rumbling of the train on the tracks.
I was at work in the Sears Tower and was watching the news on my computer screen. I heard that they thought planes were headed towards Sears Tower. I got a call from a friend who told me to get out of the building NOW. I got up and took an elevator from the 75th floor praying that I would make it to the ground floor. Ground floor was in a panic and I ran out of the building and did not stop until I got to the Rock Island train station where hundreds of people were waiting to board all of the trains. Got on one and spent the next 45 minutes standing by the doors looking out at the sky wondering if I was about to die. Made it to my station, ran to my car, got home and called my husband who worked at Argonne National Laboratory and he told me they were locked in and he could not leave until they told them they could. The most frightening day of my life - spent the time until he finally got home around Midnight watching the TV and crying and praying I would be alive to return to my "normal" life.
ReplyDeleteEarly reports were thin that morning. I was watching on Good Morning America and there was rampant speculation about what kind of plane hit the first tower. They hadn't heard from witnesses yet. I saw some smoke but it didn't seem to be enough for it to have been a passenger jet. I thought, like Neil, that it was probably a Cessna.
ReplyDeleteThen as we were watching, the second plane hit the south tower, and simultaneously I heard Diane Sawyer utter softly, "Oh God."
Still, my brain couldn't comprehend what I was seeing. For a split second I even thought that maybe the commercial airline pilots from the second plane had become disoriented and accidentally crashed. Then I heard Charlie Gibson say that it "looks like some sort of concerted attack", and it finally hit me like a sledgehammer.
I worked for a woman who was born on December 7th. Not December 7th 1941, some time in the 50s i believe. She told us about how when she was growing up many people mentioned how sad of a day her birthday was; that it was a shame for her. She would laugh about it. I didn't understand either side of that story, but I did shelve it away in my memory bank.
ReplyDeleteYour piece reminded me of it. How quickly our lives become a historic footnote in the annuls of time. Our fireball the next generations blooming rose.
Thanks for the piece, Neil.
I remember. I remember. And now that despicable toad desecrates that memory by claiming he was there, in the rubble, "helping". He wasn't. He lies. The three thousand who died that day deserve better. As do the responders who have since died from breathing the noxious air while working to clear ground zero. It is appalling that many still think it was "an inside job". And more appalling that 25 years later there are people who have forgotten or never learned about the first of two terrorist attacks, the second being 1/6.
ReplyDeleteWe must repeat this again and again and again, Lynne.
DeleteThank you for saying it.
S.E. Cupp in today's paper brings that up about Dump's lies about being near ground zero helping. Not that chicken shit. A malignant narcissist indeed.
DeleteI was working in a stand alone building where we were the only tenants on the west side we had a CD player loaded with 25 CDs on random.
ReplyDeleteThe machinery is loud we wore ear plugs never heard the phone ring.
Sat down around noon to take a break and have a smoke and give a buddy of mine a call
I said hey man what's going on?
He said what do you mean what's going on are you listening to the news?
I said no why what happened he said we've been attacked. I then spoke words that I regret to this day:
I'm not surprised we deserve it
I was at a dinner with a bunch of friends a couple of weeks after. I was at that point still shellshocked and feeling so sorrowful and was stunned to learn that several people at the dinner were almost gloating over what had happened. I heard that exact phrase “we deserved it”. Many people there were of the mind that we had it coming to us because of all our evil ways. I tried to speak up about how wrong I thought they were and was shouted down. I left feeling very differently about some people that I had been friends with for years.
DeleteHunter S. Thompson wrote a very moving piece about 9/11. You can find it on ESPN.com (his employer at the time).
ReplyDeletejust read it, it was , in many ways, quite prescient.
DeleteJohn Updike’s short story “Varieties of Religious Experience”, first published in The Atlantic in November 2002, wass one of the earliest works of fiction about 9/11 by an established American writer. Its multiple perspectives are almost like a journalism piece..The story is structured as a series of brief episodes, each offering a different vantage point on 9/11.
DeleteA lawyer watches the collapse of the Twin Towers from a Brooklyn penthouse. An office worker in one of the World Trade Center towers, is trapped, and tries to reassure his wife over the phone, even as the building burns and falls.
A week before the attacks, the hijackers meet in a Florida strip club, and one describes America as “this unclean society disfigured by an appalling laxity of laws and an electronic delirium of supposed opportunities and pleasures”
And most memorable of all--a woman on board United Airlines Flight 93, experiences the hijacking over Ohio, and the passenger mutiny.that ensues. She is praying as the plane crashes in Pennsylvania.. Riveting, chilling, and still totally unforgettable after all these years.
The bronze plaque you pictured at the end of your story is a memorial across the street at the fire station. One of the NY partners in the law firm I worked at the time, was a volunteer fireman on Long Island. He was at work that morning in the NY offices and ran out of the bldg. to assist at the Towers. We never saw him again. Glenn Winuk. Our offices ran numerous fundraisers and financed the design and installation of that bronze memoriam. Next time you visit the 9/11 site, step across to the fire station that still exists there to see this wonderful and touching rememberance to the heroes.
ReplyDeleteI was on my way to work that morning when a guy selling newspapers on the street told me a plane had hit the WTC. Like you, I imagined a small plane hitting the tower, not a commercial passenger plane. When I arrived at work, I turned on the TV in the breakroom. I couldn't concentrate on work that day -- and kept going to the breakroom to see what was happening.
ReplyDeleteThe first thing I noticed this morning was how perfect the day was: not a cloud in the sky, exactly as it was 25 years ago. I began my morning commute that day from a far branch of the Metra Northwest Line, heading in to the Ogilvie terminal downtown on a quiet train, only me and a woman sitting behind me in the upper deck of the lead car. I was reading my Sun-Times and only half-listening to WBBM Newsradio on my Walkman earphones. I heard the first bulletin shortly after we began our trip, commenting on it to our conductor and the woman behind me, but none of us gave it too much thought at that moment.
ReplyDeleteBut then the second plane hit. There was so much coverage already in progress on the radio that the second hit was reported instantly, nationwide. I turned to the woman behind me to tell her about it, and I remember her looking at me so skeptically that I offered her my headphones so she could listen for herself. She did. Her expression changed dramatically.
Our train continued its usual routine, collecting our usual morning crowd, but I noticed how few had headphones on and how many seemed oblivious to the morning events so far. This would soon change, and as we made the final sweeping curve into Ogilvie, cellphones began ringing throughout. Small crowds gathered around TV sets in the terminal; I passed on by.
Our office at the time was at 101 North Wacker, the most nondescript building in all of downtown, but within the shadow of Sears Tower, and we soon learned that we would be sent home as a precaution. My wife called in hysterics after one of the towers fell. One of my financial clients was based just blocks from the World Trade Center, calling to cancel our scheduled conference, and I put him on speakerphone as he described the evacuation going on, and the sight of boats on the river ferrying people across to safety.
Our train conductor told us later that Metra still had its long morning-rush commuter trains downtown that morning and was sending them outbound on a load-and-go basis, but didn't have enough crew to cover all the cars. On his train, they deputized commuters they knew to operate the doors, assigning one per car, showing them basic hand signals and when to open and close. He himself was busy keeping people calm. He recalled one belligerent man yelling about delays in the middle of the crowded train car, tried to calm him down, and later found him standing alone in a vestibule, crying.
That evening was quiet. We live on the outermost end of the O'Hare Airport glide path, where we can see the string of pearls from nighttime aircraft lights coming into formation, but that night nothing was flying, anywhere. Somewhere in the media the suggestion had been made to fly your flag in memory of the victims, so we did, and we placed an oil lamp on the porch to keep the flag lit all night.
This morning, on WFMT, Carl Grapentine dedicated his Almanac to 9/11. He described how the events that morning unfolded for him as he was working as the announcer for the WFMT Morning Program, the very same events that had unfolded for me because I was listening to his program. First he mentioned the newsflash about a plane flying into a building in New York City, the newsflash he communicated to listeners. Then he mentioned the newsflash about the second plane flying into the World Trade Center.
ReplyDeleteFor me, the news about that second plane motivated me to turn on the TV and spend the rest of the day watching events unfold on television.
I was at work watching it unfold on a 5 inch black & white TV. Remember those? My initial response was, "I hope it was an accident." I still don't know what made me think that something so horrific could have been intentional, but my mind did go there. I guess paying attention to current events and understanding history will prepare a person for almost anything.
ReplyDeleteWe were both home that morning. At about a minute after nine, Eastern time, our neighbor next door (a widow of 70) yelled to us to turn on our TV. We did, just in time to see the second plane hit.
ReplyDeleteLater learned that the plane that crashed in PA was most likely hijacked while passing through the airspace directly over our Northeast Ohio house, and made its fateful turn to the southeast shortly afterward. Of course, nobody could see that from the ground, and anyway, everyone was inside and glued to their TV..
What I clearly recall is the total silence outside. We live 2.5 miles from Hopkins Airport. For four days, there were no aircraft taking off or landing over our heads. That didn't happen again until the Plague of 2020. No vapor trails in the skies, either. That silence became creepy.
Right after the second plane hit, we started seeing the jumpers...live...on CBS. The camera zoomed in on tiny figures tumbling through space like merionettes whose strings had been cut. To my knowledge, that footage has never been shown again. Once was enough for a lifetime. Those images remained in my head for days. Even while hiking in the woods, trying to clear my head. Saw those tiny figures above the trees.
Just read a ludicrous Fakebook post, copied from elsewhere, about 9/11 being the loss of American innocence. Wasn't that after Oklahoma City? No, wait...it was Waco, wasn't it? Or was it Watergate? Kent State? Vietnam? Pearl Harbor? WTF does that trite expression even mean?
America "lost its innocence" long before 9/11...assuming it ever had any to begin with. What we lost on 9/11 was the starry-eyed notion that we were somehow immune to attack...and that it could never happen here. But it did.
Sept 11 has now been a tough anniversary date for me for 25 years. The memorials, recollections and reflections still bring me to tears.
ReplyDeleteAs many commenters have said, the initial news left us all grappling with trying to understand and comprehend what was happening. It took time to process, even after we learned that the first plane was a large passenger jet. The lag time in comprehension may be what folks refer to as 'loss of innocence'. We had the luxury of not understanding what it all meant. And every one of us knows we'll never have that sort of luxury again.
One memory that sticks with me is the hyper-awareness of who 'knew' vs. who 'didn't yet know'. You could tell just by looking. I was commuting to work later than usual on that day, inbound on the Ike, listening to WBBM. Those listening to news in their cars were looking to make eye-contact with fellow commuters, as if they needed to connect or share the burden of knowledge , while those yet unaware were driving aggressively and were oblivious to the people in the cars around them. When I arrived at work, it was the same. I could tell by looking at faces whether people knew or didn't yet know.
I got to my office, turned on a transistor radio, and heard coverage of the 2nd plane hitting the 2nd tower. (I did not see the 'falling man' on video until later that evening). But by that point I finally understood what it meant.
The evening newscasts became my catharsis for weeks. To do my job, I had to suppress and compartmentalize my feelings, so I'd react to the news of the day when I got home. I remember crying when Queen Elizabeth broke tradition and had the band of the coldstream guards play the Star Spangled Banner during changing of the guard. I listened to Peter Jennngs cover world news most nights, and found him comforting. When I found out he had relapsed into nicotine addiction because of the stress of 9-11 and subsequently developed lung cancer, I considered him a secondary casualty of the 9-11 attack, and grieved that, as well.
People have said the best way to honor those who died on 9/11 is to again be the people we were on 9/12. It's a simplistic quote, but there is still some truth in it.
In every life there are moments that we will never forget. It comes as no surprise that everyone recalls in vivid detail where they were, what they felt, and who they were with. The first such event for me was the JFK assassination. Then MLK, Jr., followed years later by the explosion of the Challenger. But none of them rivaled 9/11.
ReplyDeleteI was preparing for work and, being a new stock investor, was watching Bloomberg TV. From their broadcast studio they showed the first image of the hole left by the first plane only a couple of minutes after it struck. It didn't look like much and no one had a clue what had caused it. It took another 15 or 20 minutes before the networks began reporting live. That's when the second plane hit, leaving no doubt this was not an accident. I called my employees and told everyone to go home. From my living room window, I could see Sears Tower and watched in horror while bouncing my gaze back and forth between the TV and the Chicago skyline.
A year and a half later, I was in NY with my daughter and was still traumatized. Against my wishes, she insisted on going to the site of the World Trade Center. In our confusion we ended up in a restricted area reserved for volunteer firemen, police and workers. In that entrance were the badges, uniform patches, letters and personal mementos from family members tacked to a massive wall of plywood. Somehow, I managed to photograph it before we found our way back to the street. I will forever be grateful that she talked me into going, because that visit brought me back to reality. Every year I relive that morning of 9/11, no longer with fear, but for the appreciation of all those people who sacrificed so much.
It was quiet here in Chicago last night and I was up late the strangest thing happened at midnight one minute after there were fireworks fireworks to celebrate 9/11?
ReplyDeleteWho does that? These people live amongst us
that is scary, FME
ReplyDeleteand NS, turn the other check on a Muslim? they wouldn't give you the time of day
And yet you would elevate them as a moral example. I know what's right. I don't need to take a poll.
Delete