Where Were You When The World Stopped Turning That September Day?

Everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about 9-11.

I was at home in bed in Marysville just waking up a little before 7 a.m. when my wife, Debbie, called from her work. Before she said a word I heard in the background a plane had crashed into the Pentagon. It must have been from a TV they had on.

She said a plane had crashed into one of the Twin Towers, and that I should turn on the TV.

I did, and I was riveted to it for hours. It was surreal. It seemed more like a movie than real life. It was horrific to watch people jump to their deaths rather than burn in the fire. I could not believe it when the first tower collapsed. How could that happen? I hoped everyone got out safely.

TV news speculated on how the towers collapsed. Something about gas from the plane leaking down each floor then catching fire. Even 10 years later we are still hearing of conspiracy theories. Lots of speculation about how many people died, overestimating to be more than 10,000.

I prayed that the people in the other tower were getting out as quickly as possible after seeing what had happened. Then, sure enough, the other one fell.

TV showed the chaos of what was going on. People running all around trying to find loved ones. Police and firefighters risking their lives to save others. I will never forget it.

I was working at The Herald in Everett at the time. I actually was shocked they hadn’t called me in early to put out a special section. But they must have been as mesmerized as I was at what was happening.

I did go into work about an hour early, and yes, we did decide to put out a special section. It was mostly going to be wire stories and pictures because it was of course happening across the country. But we also decided we needed a local reaction story.

I’m proud to say I was chosen to write the story. I started it out with “Another day that will live in infamy.” I played off the famous phrase spoken by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Other than that attack, I could not think of any other of this magnitude so I thought the phrase was fitting.

The rest of the story was local reaction. Most of the copy came from our team of reporters, who made calls out to people they knew and others just on the street. Because of Everett’s Navy base with the aircraft carrier the USS Abraham Lincoln, our city was concerned about an attack there. We looked for people who may have lived in New York or who had relatives there, and so on.

The internet wasn’t anywhere near as popular as it is now, but it was just starting to be very important to newspapers so I put the story online piece by piece as it came in.

We put the special section together and printed it. It was the most dramatic piece of history I have ever been involved in, and I’ve been in the business for 30 years.

I pray I never have to deal with that horrific of a story again.