per the trump thread, it appears we need one of these.

 

post your 9/11 thoughts or news here.

 

i can start — my spouse works in the same office building as cantor fitzgerald, the most hard hit business on 9/11. they lost nearly everybody. anyway, every year they have a big charity event on 9/11 and lots of people attend. meaning the building is crawling with celebrities. im sure she or her coworkers will have some pics, so i can post something later.

Really good book on what happened.

https://www.amazon.com/102-Minutes-Unforgettable-Survive-Inside/dp/0805094210

102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers

 

Only 4 people, from above the impact zone in the South tower, made it out alive. No one escaped above the impact point in the North Tower. There is some detail about communication problems with police, fire and one helicopter that was above the towers....

the pilot was convinced that the towers were going to collapse. But didn't have a way to communicate with the NYFD, not that the firemen would have believed him anyway.

For some comic relief:

 

I was in 5th grade... my teacher received a phone call from her mom telling her that a plane had hit a tower.

 

Being the irresponsible person she was, my 5th grade teacher rolls the television set into our classroom and turns on the TV. About 2 minutes later, my entire class watched the second plane hit the tower in real time. I still remember the classmate sitting behind, in front of, and to each side of me on that day.

I was 22 and getting ready to begin my sophomore year of college (don't ask) the next week. All of my buddies/roommates had already left for work. I don't remember much about what I did that day other than watch TV. When they got back from work each had a case of beer and one guy had stopped at Waterbeds N Stuff and picked up a Metallica "Kill 'Em All" flag. We weren't staying sober for this!

I was a freshman at Ohio State, slept in until 4pm-ish (no joke), woke up and watched the aftermath.  Of course, this is pre-UO and I was a very active member on SkyscraperPage.  It was the first time on that website that it shut down for a bit of remembrance (MayDay and Rich should remember that).  On top of that, that day birthed SSP's "rival" SkyscraperCity.  There was a SSP forumer's father that was killed in Tower 2 and I'll never forget the guy's last post before he left the website to take care of his family.  In a way, I'm glad I slept through that day.

 

Of course, I hate saying this, there was a lighter side of that day that I will always remember:

1). My mother telling me "Oh God, not again.  Why wasn't Britney Spears on that plane?" (talking about a plane crash in reference to Aaliyah dying not too long before 9-11)

2). My grandmother in Denver calling me panicking in the morning (I was half-asleep) after the Pentagon was hit "We're all going to die!" and me telling her "Turn off the bad TNT movie, granny!" and hanging up and going back to sleep.

3). THEN, my best friend calling me "Yo dog, I think a plane hit one of those New York buildings" and I naturally thought it was a Cessna as it isn't the first time a tiny plane crashed into a NYC building (re: Empire State Building).  I shrugged it off (I am NOT a morning person) and back to bed.

 

And then some other mess...

1). My aunt is the head of the African-American Studies department at CUNY and she, at the time, was working at BMCC in Fiterman Hall.  She was going into work, got out of the subway while looking up, saw the 1st plane crash into the towers, turned right back down, and hopped on the train back to Brooklyn.

2). My cousin was working in the Pentagon on 9-11 and was luckily on the other side of the building.  Apparently he helped out the first responders and "did good" according to his mother.  Heroic effort but he still owes me $75.

3). I was in New York City that August for family reasons and going to the Dominican parade.  It's strange looking back thinking that I was there a month before the skyline drastically changed. 

 

Meh, I'm done.

I was off from work. My wife worked in Foggy Bottom about 3 blocks from the White House at a daycare center. She left for work at 7AM and didn't come home until 11PM because traffic was gridlocked and parents couldn't reach their kids. I kept thinking that if a jet had crashed into the White House instead of the Pentagon my wife likely would have been injured or died. She held it together for the little kids but when she came home she hugged our seven-year old and cried for an hour. Nobody knew how many jets there were and everyone downtown thought they were going to die.

 

I remembered cell lines being down almost immediately and we just moved and didn't have a landline installed yet. I had to go to a payphone (how times have changed!) to get ahold of her to make sure she was ok then call everyone in Cleveland. Watched fighter jets do circles over our area almost all night.

 

I worked at Dulles Airport at the time and still had to work my schedule. The airport was silent. Silence at an airport is surreal. United Express repositioned an aircraft and it sounded like a fighter jet with all that open space carrying sound.

I started my freshman year at UC a week or so later. I'd been up most of the night and, like ColDay, was sleeping while all the stuff was going down. I was living at my parents' house, still, and my dad knocked on my room door and told me about the WTC towers being hit and the Pentagon. I was very disoriented and muttered some expletives and asked if WW3 had begun. Went out to the living room and watched the TV coverage the rest of the day, including watching the towers fall.

 

A year prior, I'd gone to NYC to move my brother into his dorm in Brooklyn. I recall waiting in the moving van for my bro to go pee at the WTC mall, looking up at the towers, before crossing the Manhattan Bridge after getting off the highway and going through the Holland Tunnel. With that semi-fresh in mind, I could sort of picture the chaos and panic at the ground level while watching the buildings burn.

 

When Bush started vowing to chase the terrorists, my fears greatly increased of a draft starting since I'd just registered with Selective Service. I certainly did start to receive a lot of phone calls from recruiters, which I tried to avoid (Caller ID had just started to receive wide adoption). Finally, I spoke to one and told him what you were not supposed to ask or tell about, and I was astonished that it worked and I never received another call.

 

It's weird to think that next year is the 18th anniversary of the attack, as I was 18 when it happened. Soon I'll have lived more than half my life post-9/11. I'm thankful I was able to spend as many years as I did in the pre-9/11 world, and that I'm old enough to remember it. May none of us see another event so earth-shattering.

Was 28 and on the way to my first work related Trade Show at The Javits Center in NYC. Never made it. Our plane got to Atlanta where we were supposed to get the flight up to NY but the ground stop was already underway when we touched down. There were SWAT looking guys in black with guns & dogs running about Hartsfield Airport and the salesguy i was traveling with, who was a frequent business traveler realized how bad it was and called a rental agency vs waiting in line as he figured the airport was a target too. As we got our rental I saw a group of older corporate guys in suits split a car with a bunch of college bros going the same direction. We were all the same briefly. Got back later the next afternoon and a few weeks later even got my luggage which was a big surprise. I missed all the tv at the time and only heard updates on the radio. Binged on it all once it was on the web in later years. Stupidist part was not having a cell phone and calling all the people who I told I was going to a Trade Show in NYC and they assumed that all Trade Shows were at the Trade Center. Lots of quarters were used, parents assumed i was gone and even called Delta whos rep was rightfully freaked out and clueless like we all were on what was going down. The trade show I was going to was looted for any medical related items & food by the city then cleared by bulldozers who crushed all the displays to the side to use Javits as a medical zone for the all the suspected wounded. Hadn't flown on a commercial plane since and had only once before as a child.

So I guess I'm a bit older....  I had similar experiences in college during the Challenger explosion and the Fall of the Berlin Wall.  I also distinctly remember ... out of college, the night that GHWB started bombing Iraq. Felt very eerie on the streets that night. 

 

When the towers were hit, I was at my office and had my first ever cell phone in my shirt pocket that kept vibrating.  I was in a stupid meeting about office policy when the secretary came and told us about the first plane. TVs were turned on, but oddly, business continued at my office all day, though everyone was in shock.

Resposted from the other thread....

Today I'm going to show my wife the Betacam video I shot from the WTC plaza outside looking up at the World Trade Center towers and from the observation deck of the WTC in June 1985 as an 18-year-old man fresh out of Kenston High School. It was an Amtrak trip with my parents, since deceased, from Cleveland to the East Coast and was my high school graduation present.

 

On 9-11, when I got home from work at Sun Newspapers after covering the evacuation of downtown Cleveland and 9-11's impact on transportation services, I saw the smoldering ruins of the WTC on TV and remembered my 1985 trip with my parents. That's when I lost it.

All these youngins!  I was 29 at the time, and had just dropped my toddler son (now a freshman at OSU) off at daycare.  My wife (now ex) called me to let me know what was happening, and insisted I go get our son from daycare and stay home from work that day.  Somehow she thought his daycare in Rocky River was going to be a soft target....

Legacy?  I don't think young people care about it at all. 

 

 

Oh also, while it was going on I tried calling my folks' house which was only 500 feet away -- house phone to house phone -- but the phones didn't work 600 miles away in Ashville Ohio. I was still like, "OK, I can see that."