Recollections of 9/11 are nothing new. This week has been filled with the stories of any number of individuals with direct ties to Ground Zero. But everyone has their own story about where they were when the towers got hit and I’m no different.
I was sitting in the exact same chair I am sitting in as I type this column. I don’t mean the same position on the company organizational chart. I mean the same Aeron Chair that I have used for 25 years at this newspaper.
At that time, a small, 19-inch television on a wall of the newsroom was always on CNN. Remember, 20-years ago Fox News had not developed and created the left-or-right choice in the 24-hour news cycle. As I recall, CNN was considered more neutral than it is now.
We had a TV in the newsroom because in 2001 the internet did not blast out breaking news in a million different directions. Cell phones hadn’t evolved past the Motorola Razr, the first iPad was nine years away and AOL (America Online) the predominant web portal, so mobile computing was a pretty new concept. If something big happened, cable news would have it first and then the Associated Press would send a bulletin to newspapers through an old satellite dish system. Local residents might remember the huge satellite dish that used to sit near the J-T office.
So the newsroom staff was working toward deadline, which in those days might have been around 11 a.m. Sometime between 8:45 and 9 a.m. I looked across the office and could see an image of the Twin Towers with what looked like a trickle of smoke coming out. Remember this was a small TV and there was no such thing as 4K resolution in those days, so the video was a bit fuzzy.
I remember asking “is the World Trade Center on fire?” One of the reporters got up and moved closer to read the ticker at the bottom of the screen. “It says a small plane has collided with the north tower,” he said. I can remember thinking to myself the smoke trail looks small enough to be a small plane, though I would have thought the exterior of a building that size would have been tough enough that a Cessna would have just bounced off. The problem was that the camera angle was on the side of the building opposite of the impact. Had CNN had images of the other side of the tower we would have known things were much worse.
Five or six people gathered closer to the screen to watch the video feed for a minute when a fireball rolled from the back of the tower. We had turned the volume up on the television and CNN declared that there had been an explosion inside the north tower.
What I was struggling with was that I was sure I had seen a small object quickly pass across the left side of the screen just ahead of the fireball. Had it not been for the fireball, I would have assumed it was a news helicopter passing across the screen, because I had seen a couple of those already in the background. Also, nobody else had reacted to anything other than the fireball, so I thought I might have been seeing things.
But still I asked “did anybody else think they saw a plane flash into the screen just ahead of that explosion?” One of our graphic designers was the only other person who had seen the second plane.
A few minutes later CNN confirmed that a second plane had hit the south tower and in that very second the world changed. An accident had turned into a deliberate act.
Creating the paper that day proved difficult because the Associated Press was frantically trying to shoot out information as it came in. Much of it was fragmented in briefs meant to be added to other stories. Much of it was also wrong. Outside of the four crashed planes, there were reports of other planes still missing and other reports of bombs going off in the nation’s capital.
I designed the front page and wrote the huge headline “U.S. Under Attack” above a photo of a plane flying into one of the towers. The newsroom staff pulled together a story about local schools and businesses closing that day.
Thinking back I can recall several impressions of that day and those that followed:
•It was a beautiful day in Marysville on Sept. 11, 2001. Neither hot nor cold and very few clouds in the sky.
•When I went home for lunch, I remember thinking how quiet the town was. From my house you can always hear the hum of traffic on U.S. 33, but not that day. There were no cars on the roads. There were no sounds of children in schoolyards. There were no emergency sirens in the distance. Marysville was still.
•I never sleep with the television on but I did for at least a week after 9/11. When I would wake up in the night I would watch CNN for a few minutes to see if anything new was reported about the terrorists or the events at Ground Zero.
•I recall thinking how wrong I was in my assumption that America was too big to attack. Perhaps an embassy or military base in another country, but never a plot on our own soil. 9/11 made me realize that any town could be a target.
•It had never dawned on me that a plane loaded with fuel, traveling at hundreds of miles per hour was a terrifying weapon. It was just something people never considered. From that point forward, a mode of everyday travel had to be viewed as a potential missile. It would be akin to someone figuring out how to make cell phones explode today.
The cartoon at the top of this page carries the common catchphrase associated with 9/11 – “Never Forget.” I think that’s a bit too narrow, because anyone school age or older on that day will never be able to forget it. Losing those memories is not at stake. What we must do now is preserve the idea of what those days were like for those that were born after 2001. We need to tell the younger generations our stories of 9/11, even if they are as mundane as mine. That is how we make sure future generations don’t succumb to the rosy idea that the rest of the world loves America, or at the very least fears us.
I think it might be time to park the slogan Never Forget, in favor of something like Share the Story.
-Chad Williamson is the managing editor at the Journal-Tribune.