Each Sept. 11, Americans relive the horror of those who died in New York, at the Pentagon, and in a Pennsylvania field. I hope today’s high school and college students born after 2001 spend a little time pondering the day Osama Bin Laden launched his private war on the United States.
I’ve heard firsthand some stories told by 9/11 survivors and watched painful documentaries. Personally, I talked with a diamond jeweler with a bum heart who walked miles from midtown Manhattan to Queens over a bridge with his clothing covered with thick ash. I talked with a chauffeur who saw the first plane hit the towers. I talked with an acquaintance who recalled hearing the first plane’s engines and looked up to see American Airlines Flight 11 flying low over Manhattan, although she was spared seeing the crash.
My own 9/11 story is not so dramatic.
On Sept. 10 I woke up two hours out of New York City in a motel where Delaware Valley University put me up after I spoke there Sept. 9 to athletes and student club members about my research on the history of hazing deaths in America. The phone rang with a request from a TV talk show producer for me to to be interviewed that evening in New York City on a national talk show about my nonfiction book, “Wrongs of Passage.” The producer offered a hotel bed in the city and roundtrip from Pennsylvania by limo.
That same Sept. 10 night I had an appointment to interview a Muhlenberg College fraternity pledge recovering from a serious hazing injury. I considered saying yes but, in the end, turned down the producer. I feared my canceling the interview with the pledge would be adding insult to his injury. (My publisher’s PR director called the motel immediately to rebuke me for my decision to forsake national attention for the book).
That evening the pledge got cold feet about revealing the intense hazing of his chapter. He turned up many hours late, while I sipped coffee in his mother’s kitchen and watched the talk show on TV I had been asked to appear. I had already packed my recording gear when the hazing victim showed at last, and we went to his bedroom to talk on tape.
This interview for my 2004 book, “The Hazing Reader,” turned out to be of crucial importance for my research and ended long past midnight. About 3 a.m. on Sept. 11, I arrived at a buddy’s house to sleep in the commuter city of Allentown, Pennsylvania. A dentist and amateur pilot, Ken was gone to work already when I awoke at 8 a.m.
I ate cold cereal and showered with plans to commute by bus to the Wall Street bus station. First, I had plans to meet a friend at the Strand Bookstore who was flying to Manhattan from Indianapolis. Second, I needed to appear hours later at a cable TV studio for a documentary based on my investigative article of a college death for an Indianapolis newspaper. As I patted my friend’s dog, Aspen, to say goodbye just before 9 a.m., Ken’s home phone rang. I picked up.
Michael, Ken’s nephew, informed me that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. A college English professor told our class he was shaken in bed in a New York hotel on July 28, 1945, when a B-25 Mitchell bomber crashed accidentally into the Empire State Building. Surely this was another catastrophic accident, I thought.
“I’m headed into New York,” I said to Michael. “I’m leaving now.”
“Turn on your TV,” Michael said.
I hung up to witness United Airlines Flight 175 hit the World Trade Towers. That moment, I knew it had to be a hijacker piloting the plane.
I called the cable network to ask for guidance. Should I still come into the city? The producer’s phone’s voicemail picked up.
I sent an email to an acquaintance, a reporter at ABC who I planned to get a beer with when each of our work days on TV ended. “Stay the hell out of New York,” he wrote back.
I phoned the bus terminal. All commuter buses to New York were frozen. The plane of the friend I planned to meet turned back to Indiana midair. I reached the cable show producer who rescheduled our taping.
My Allentown buddy quit work early and came home. He said the world had gone insane and suggested we fish for trout in the Poconos. There I indulged in a strawberry ice cream cone. The reality hit me that ice cream was a simple pleasure that Wall Street victims would never enjoy again.
Three weeks later, I drove from my Midwest home east to New York and filmed the missed documentary. I drove there by Budget rental pickup truck with a tarp covering my luggage. New York police searched the pickup several times. I told them I grieved for the loss of their colleagues.
On Sept. 24, 2001, I drove from the New York taping to the University of Vermont to be interviewed for a national education teleconference on hazing. The IT director told me his niece, who worked as a waitress in one of the Twin Towers, did not contact the family until late the night of Sept. 11. For hours, they feared the unthinkable happened to her.
Flash forward to today. Right after the Twin Towers tragedy, I started a memorial website to the victims that I kept going for around five years. I’ve since visited the Lower Manhattan memorial to the dead and bristled after street hawkers tried to sell me Sept. 11 souvenir postcards and booklets.
I ask myself certain questions this weekend to which I have no answers. What if I had canceled the interview with the injured pledge and awoke in a Manhattan hotel on Sept. 11? What if I ate breakfast on Wall Street that beautiful Sept. 11 morning? Would I have tried to cover Sept. 11 for the Indianapolis paper that I freelanced for at the time? No one really knows how they will respond in an emergency until they are actually in the throes of an emergency.
The ABC TV acquaintance did his job and covered the horrific scene of Twin Towers workers leaping to their doom to escape fuel-fed flames. I never dared ask him how he found such courage. He just did his job like New York’s finest firefighters, police and on-duty military did their jobs.
My own story doesn’t amount to much more than a hill of beans, but I will never forget that all those people killed by terrorists were ordinary people like you and me. For the next three years, I kept a database with contacts to the families of fraternity and sorority alumnae and members killed in any of the 9/11 attacks. Donors were able to directly assist the families with scholarship money. I keep in touch with many people who sent me personal stories about the victims to put on the site.
Today, I hold sacred the memory of all 9/11 victims and the celebrated and the unsung 9/11 first responders who showed the world their backbones of steel and died giving their all.
