As the first of the World Trade Center towers to be hit, right, billows smoke, the second tower explodes in flames as the second hijacked airplane hits it.
In five days, we will mark the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. When I got to my office this morning, as I was going through my piles and piles of email, I found one from a Dallas Voice reader encouraging us to do something this week to remind people about Mark Bingham, a gay man who was on United Flight 93 that day when the terrorists highjacked it and aimed it toward Washington, D.C.
I plan to do that later this week, here on Instant Tea. But first, I want to ask readers to share their own stories about where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about the attacks of 9-11. I’ll go first:
Sept. 11, 2001 was the first day of my new job as a sportswriter for the Cleburne Times-Review. Although I didn’t have to actually go to work until later that afternoon, when I would be covering a high school tennis match, I was up and getting dressed for a meeting with my boss, the sports editor, about my schedule for that first week on the job. My girlfriend had already left for work and the kids were already at daycare, when she called on her cell phone as she headed for her job at Sabre, a company handling flight reservations for American Airlines. The offices were out near DFW International Airport.
“Turn on the news,” she told me. “Something bad has happened.” I asked what channel, and she said, “Any channel.”
So I rushed downstairs and flipped on the TV, standing in shock as I watched news reports about an American Airlines plane crashing into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. No one was sure what was happening, how such a horrible mistake could have happened. The TV station I was watching was showing live footage of the burning tower, and then it happened: I watched it happen live on TV as the second plane hit the second tower. And then the reports started coming in of a third plane hitting the Pentagon. And I knew — as everyone else did — that it was no accident.
There are so many individual moments from that day etched into my memory. I remember driving to my boss’ house for our meeting and the shock and disbelief of the DJs on every radio station. I stopped at a convenience store for a soft drink, and stood, with a large group of other customers, staring at the TV in the store as the horrifying news unfolded further. I remember my mother calling, trying to convince us that we needed to get out of the city and come stay with them in rural Southeast Texas, away from sites that could be the targets of more possible attacks. I remember driving down a two lane farm-to-market road later that day on my way to work, and seeing the motorcyclist passing me with the huge American Flag mounted on the seat behind him.
We lived on the south side of Arlington then, beneath one of the flight paths for planes landing at and taking off from DFW International Airport. And I remember in the long days after the attacks, when all commercial flights were grounded, standing in the backyard and staring up at the empty, eerily quiet skies.
These are the “photos” I have in my head of that day.
What do you remember? What are the images, the words, that will stick with you forever? Please share them here with us this week leading up to the 10th anniversary.
I’d moved from Denton, TX to Las Vegas, NV to care for my father, a semi-invalid. That terrible Tuesday morning, I’d dressed in gray slacks, white bouse and black silk vest, grabbed my purse and was almost out the door to my job after making sure Dad was settled and set for the day. As I was, literall,y walking out the front door, my sister called, asking if he and I were ok. Of course, I said. Why? She said to turn on the TV: We’d been attacked. Somehow, that didn’t make sense to me. Attacked? By whom? Why? I hung up and went to my father’s room and turned on his TV, waking him as gently as possible, In disbelief, Dad and I heard Katie Couric say something about a terrible accident; a plane had flown into the World Trade Center. A few minutes later, we watched the 2nd plane fly into the other tower. It was obvious to everyone who saw it that it was no accident. My Dad, grasping the like-rending situation for what it was, turned his white and haunted face to me, peered at me over his glasses and said quietly, “The world is going to chance again, and I don’t want to be here to see it.” He didn’t. He went into the hospital 2 days later and never came out. He died October 29th, 2001, the day before my 51st birthday. To me, he was another victim of 9-11, having decided to give up on his life at that moment. It’s the day I grieve for him, as well as the lives of all the people who died that day, the people who’ve died as a result ever since and all their families. My Dad never knew how horribly right he was, thank God.
I was living in Golden, Colorado at the time. We were drinking coffee and watching The Today Show. Our youngest daughter was in college and living at a sorority house…I called and told her to turn on the television, history was happening before our eyes. I remember it like it was yesterday.
I just moved to Dallas and had only been working at UT Southwestern Medical Center a week. Around 2pm, I was informed by a coworker that everyone was leaving early today. He said that someone had flown a plane into a building in New York and that they were closing downtown Dallas and anything nearby just in case there were more attacks. I paid no attention to it and continued on with my work. It’s not until I got home later and started watching the news that I saw how devastating this was. I will never get the image of someone jumping from one of the towers out of my head. I never cried so hard.
It started like so many others in the Fox 4 Fort Worth bureau, at 7am, but I was in a particularly good mood that morning. I’d been on vacation the weekend before, and had flown back into town 12 hours earlier.
I had a routine down. I’d read both newspapers, call the dispatchers of various local fire and police departments, listen to the morning news on an AM radio station and gobble down some oatmeal and a cup of coffee. I remember talking with the noon newscast producer–she wanted us to cover tuberculosis testing at a local high school.
A rack of TVs hung on a wall behind me. They were tuned in the order of the local channel carrying them–Fox, NBC, ABC, and CBS. Around 7:45am or so, I turned around and saw the first pictures out of New York of the first tower. We didn’t have any pictures like that on our air, so I used the internal IM program to ask my counterpart at the main station if they were also seeing the CBS video. He said yes.
I continued with my morning preps, pausing ever so briefly when the first reports said a commuter plane had struck the tower. For some reason, that seemed odd to me, although I remember the story of how a plane hit the Empire State Building years earlier.
At 8 a.m. I turned around to look at the coverage again. All four local stations were broadcasting it. Then, a large plane moved into the picture frame, and hit the second tower. I gasped. Less than a minute later, I got a call from my boss, the assignment manager. She said we had gotten a tip that the first tower was hit by an American Airlines plane, and we needed to get a news crew to their headquarters in northeast Fort Worth ASAP. So, I called people in, and juggled crews to get them in place.
As the crew was setting up, we got the first word about the Pentagon attack. 30 or so minutes later, the reporter at American Airlines called, saying that an air traffic controller source of his told him about a plane that was missing someplace over eastern Ohio or western Pennsylvania. I didn’t realized the towers had collapsed until a fellow employee mentioned it to me.
The rest of the day was a blur. Crews needed to be sent to the airport, to the joint reserve base, to schools, to downtown. Live shots were juggled, information was relayed. The enormity hadn’t hit me. In the news business, you often have to bottle up your feelings to get the job done.
Normally, I would have left for the day at 3:30pm, but I was asked to stay until 7p. Around 6p, I turned back around again to see what was on the TV. They were showing pictures of the U.S. Capitol, where several lawmakers had gathered on the steps. They sung “God Bless America.” And, I started crying.
Driving home that night, several things stood out. Almost all of the music radio stations were broadcasting news. There was hardly anybody on the roads–traffic was like an early Sunday morning. And, the skies were eerily quiet, without the familiar rush of jet airplanes passing my then-apartment near the airport.
At tge time i was living in south ft worth and had worked all day and night on the 10th at the adam’s mark in downtown dallas i probably got home about 7 am and promptly fell asleep. A few minutes later a friend called and told me to turn on the news and my roommate and i watched in silence as the world transformed before our eyes.
I grew up near an airforce base in eastern new mexico and moved to dfw shortly after college. I’ve always seen and heard air traffic in the skies above me and the absence of the familiar sights and sounds in the days that followed 9-11 spooked me.
I’m glad that as a people, we are resilient. I hope we never have to put that resilience to the test again.
I awoke in my home near the TCU campus on 9/11, turned on the TV, and sat stunned by the images and reports from New York City about the attack on the World Trade Center Towers. In moments, my phone began to ring, and students of mine from Brite Divinity School began to call. “Can you believe it?” “How can this be happening?” “Where is God today, and why is this happening to us?”
Since my home was within walking distance of campus, students began to show up at my door. By 10:30 a.m., 18 seminarians were filling all the seats in my living room, sitting on the floor, watching and listening to the news coming from New York, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, Pennsylvania. It all seemed “too bad to be true,” but there it was, unfolding before our very eyes on CNN. As lunchtime approached, I knew I didn’t have enough in my pantry to feed a crowd like that, so I called to see if KIng Tut Restaurant on Magnolia Street in was open. I asked the students how they felt about going to eat there, and to a person they said it was the best thing we could do on a day like this.
The proprietor of King Tut was and is an Egyptian Muslim, a tall man named Amin. He also does most of the cooking. When we showed up at the restaurant doors with nineteen people, we were welcomed, and we filled the front room. Amin and his wait staff seemed thankful that we had come, easily the largest group they served all that tense, long day. it was a small act of justice and solidarity, to dine at a Muslim-owned and staffed eatery when we had a city full of other choices. But for that part of the day, no one was Muslim or Christian, student or professor, patriot or outsider. We were all just Americans who needed to stand together and give each other strength.
I can’t believe it’s already been 10 years. I was still living with my parents in Texarkana, TX, working part time and getting ready to start another full Fall semester at Texarkana Community College. Since classes had not started by that time I was awake early to get ready to go to my job at JC Penney in Central Mall just off of I-30 in Texarkana. Almost as soon as I turned on the TV in my bedroom the news cut to New York and thick smoke billowing from the upper floors of one of the WTC towers. I watched in disbelief thinking, how could a pilot hit something that large? Almost as soon as that thought crossed my mind the second plane hit. I began running through the house trying to find my parents telling them in a shocked, yet excited tone, to “TURN ON THE TV! TURN IT ON!” My mother, out shopping was reached by phone as I stood within feet of a large TV in my parents livingroom with my father in silence. Living in a small town, you feel so detached from a large city like New York although you feel a connection to the people there experiencing the struggle to survive in the upper floors of the two towers. Shortly after came news of a plane hitting the Pentagon and then one downed in a field in Pennsylvania. I went on to my job at JC Penney in the only mall in Texarkana, TX and sat with my boss, Janice, as we listened to a radio in a stockroom of all the details. When the first tower collapsed, we just look at each other, wide eyed, and neither of us knew what to say. The entire mall remained a ghost town from open until close that even with a few people coming in just to see who was out about town and pick up a few things. Most had solemn looks or just dismayed faces as if they were waiting for someone to give them words of inspiration or perhaps to wake up from a dream. As I went to bed that night all I could think about were the people who were gone that day who woke up just like it was any other Tuesday morning and began their daily routine. Their religion didn’t matter, their race, social status, sexual orientation. They were all human and when the planes went in to the buildings all things that divided them ceased to exist. There were no boundaries, no “social norms” and it became people trying to help people in need in that city.
On 9/11/01, I worked as Communications Director at the Cathedral of Hope. I had the Today Show on the TV and I was getting ready for work when Katie and Matt interrupted the TV show with a live shot of the World Trade Center Towers and what they described as a terrible accident. Within minutes, it soon became clear that the first plane to hit the Tower was not an accident. I was paralyzed in fear in front of the TV and I called my son and then I called Rev. Michael Piazza. Michael gave the church staff instructions to open the doors of the Church and to create a safe place where people could go in our community – to pray – to be together – to grieve. People started coming to the Church almost immediately. There were so many questions: Why was this happening? What can we do? The common need was people wanted to talk to family, friends, to hold people and express our love for one another. If I remember correctly, the Cathedral of Hope not only served as a community house of prayer, we also had a prayer service that night. Chris Jagger, who worked at KEGL at the time, called and wanted to do a fundraiser the next morning on his show for the Red Cross. Chris and his crew broadcast LIVE at 5am on Sept. 12 and his KEGL listeners pledged $45,000 in 3-4 short hours to help all those affected by the tragedies the day before. Sept. 11, 2011 did change us and I never want to forget the feeling of how much I love my friends and family and how grateful I am for my freedom.
I got my stations wrong! Jagger was with 102.1 The Edge when he broadcast his show live from the Cathedral of Hope. He has an amazing heart and people gave up their wallets for him!