Everyone who was alive on September 11, 2001 has their own story about the day, so here is mine.
It started out as a routine Tuesday for me. At the time I lived on Willowood Drive in Greece, was married to Mary and our daughters Kristi, 15, Tracy, 12, and Melissa, 10 all lived with us. I was working the evening shift at WHEC Channel 10 in the control room and was due in at 3:00 PM. Mary was teaching at Brookside School and the girls were all in school that day. My plans before work were to go shopping and then attend a meeting of the group, SHHH, Self-Help For Hard of Hearing People.
For reference, the times of the plane crashes on that date were 8:46 for the first plane into the World Trade Center, 9:03 for the second, the Pentagon at 9:37, and a field in Shanksville, PA at 10:03. The first tower collapsed at 9:59 and the second one collapsed at 10:28.
It was shortly before 9:00 AM when I was driving to Wegmans and had WCMF radio on in my car. I heard them discussing something about a plane crashing into the World Trade Center. I knew that a plane had hit the Empire State Building in the fog in the 1940's. The damage was a hole on the side of the building, which eventually got repaired. I pictured this incident being something like that. They did say something on WCMF about air traffic being restricted from the New York City area. As a private pilot myself, I tried to comprehend what this would mean for routing air traffic away. "What a mess," I thought. I surely did not grasp the magnitude of what was happening at that moment.
I went into Wegmans and completed my shopping trip, all the while wondering how a plane could have crashed into the World Trade Center in this day and age, and thinking about the air traffic situation. It was around 10:15 when I got back in my car, turned on the radio, and that's when it all hit me about what was going on. While I was shopping, the second plane hit the Trade Center, a third plane hit the Pentagon, and a fourth plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. As shocking as it was, it didn't take much for me to figure out that this was some kind of an attack on the United States. But who? And why?
My home was only 5 minutes from Wegmans, so as soon as I got in the driveway, I left the groceries in the car, ran into the house and turned on the TV. All I could see from the aerial shots was a tremendous amount of smoke and dust over southern Manhattan. I was shocked! I could not believe what I was seeing. What I didn't know was that the first tower had already collapsed. Just then, my phone rang. It was a reporter from a newspaper....I don't remember which one. At the time, I was president of the Rochester Pilot's Association and they wanted my thoughts on the national aviation airspace being shut down. I told them I was just learning of everything and didn't know what to think or say at this point. I have no idea if my comments got published or not.
I continued watching for a few more minutes. In all the smoke and dust, I did not realize that the first building had already collapsed. The phone rang again. It was my mother asking me if I was watching this, and if I had seen the plane crash into the building. Up to then, I had not. As we were talking, I had an eye on the TV and then I saw the second building collapse. I said to her, "The building just collapsed!" Only then did I realize that the first one had collapsed a half hour earlier.
My mother, at that point, had been fighting pancreatic cancer. She passed away 8 months later. It's sad for me to know that she spent the last 8 months of her life in the post-9/11 world.
After we hung up, I continued watching the events unfold on TV. At some point, I managed to get the groceries in from the car and put away. I received a message that the SHHH meeting was cancelled, and I was asked to come into work earlier, at 1:30, to stand by for whatever was needed on the crew.
I remember that Mary called me at one point, worried about our daughters' reactions to all this. I reminded her that, like her in her own classroom, their teachers would be handling the situation with their students. That seemed to calm her down about our daughters. I did leave a note on the table for all of them to read, when they got home, expressing my feelings and offering hope that they were handling this OK.
I arrived at work at 1:30 and don't remember what I did for the first hour and a half. Probably just sat around, watching coverage from NBC and waiting on standby in case I was needed for something. I was scheduled in Master Control at 3:00, and that's when I took over.
Master Control was the position on the crew where you run all the programs and commercials that go over the air. At the time, our programs came from videotape machines. a satellite feed, or the NBC network feed. In this case, we were running everything from NBC since they had the resources to show what was going on in New York City, Washington DC, and Shanksville, PA. I was asked to stay in Master Control for my entire shift, including my lunch break. We usually rotated crew positions, but on this day, we all stayed in one place for the whole shift so that everyone could focus on one job and there would be no confusion with people changing around.
NBC was based in New York City near Ground Zero. Since no one knew where these attacks came from, NBC didn't know if the network might get knocked off the air or not. They sent messages to their affiliate stations, advising us to keep local programming on standby in case the network feed was lost. Therefore, part of our job was to keep the regularly scheduled programming running on our tape machines so that we'd have something to go to if we lost the network. In the meantime, the news department was keeping up with the local angle. We actually already had a crew in Albany because of another story that we had planned to cover, but that was cancelled and the crew was sent to New York City to get as close as they were able to get to the World Trade Center.
Through my shift, I continued to keep track of the programs we were running on standby. All of the commercials were cancelled so we could run news coverage as a public service, which was the original intent of television and radio broadcasting. I did keep track of the commercial schedule, just in case for some reason they decided to start running them again. If I recall correctly, I think we went three days without airing any commercials. That's a lot of lost revenue!
Most of my shift is a blur to me. Just seeing endless repetitions of videos of the planes crashing into the buildings, the collapses, and all the dust and smoke.
We broke into network coverage several times to give local news updates, and we ran a full half-hour newscast at 11:00 PM. I actually have the program log from this day. Program logs are required to be kept for a certain number of years and then they can be destroyed. When the logs for 9/11/01 and 9/12/01 were slated for shredding, I was able to obtain them. At this point, if I was able to find a suitable museum that would treat them with the historical respect that they deserve, I'd be happy to donate them.
I signed off my shift at 11:38 PM. I went home and tried to sleep with visions of buildings collapsing dancing in my head.
I recall that in the immediate days after the attacks, the whole country came together. No one knew what was going on or who was behind this. For a brief moment in time, we were all Americans and the rest of the world was united in support of our country. It saddens me that over time, politics and crazy conspiracy theories emerged and have divided us.
