My mother remembered Pearl Harbor. In the sixties, I remembered the Kennedy assassination. Since September 11, 2001, the “where were you when” question has been about 9/11.
Since I’m writing this on 9/11/24, I’ll focus on that experience.
It was a regular work day for Joan and I at our QDP Corporation office. Prior to leaving the house, we saw the news clip about a “small plane” that had flown into one of the World Trade Center (WTC) towers. A terrible accident, but it wasn’t going to stop our day.
After travelling the six miles to our office and settling in, Joan turned on the small radio she had on her desk. We did not have a TV in the office and this was in the pre-streaming era.
Shortly after the news was on, Joan called out (my office joined hers, but I couldn’t clearly hear and didn’t listen to her radio) that a plane had flown into the second tower — and the small plane we heard about was now a passenger plane….so we understood there was a more major event.
The she cried out,
One of the buildings just collapsed.
I distinctly recall commenting,
That is impossible. You realize how big those towers are. You must have heard that wrong.
Then the second building….and we decided to close for the day and go home to watch about it on TV….. and pretty must stayed glued to the news for the next several days.
Note: what follows is a side-note addition, but I hope you will find it interesting.
Our younger son, David, had just started classes at Duke University, with its significant international student body that included numbers from both Jewish and Muslim communities.
I called, out of some concern, but mostly just to calm my slight anxiety about the potential (I thought) for student unrest. His response caught me off guard.
We are very safe in my dorm, Dad.
I should note that dorms on the Freshman Campus at Duke (yes, a separate campus about a mile away from the campus you see online) were not the huge complexes of many larger universities….. His particular dorm, for example, had four floors and no more than a couple hundred students.
As a professionally trained information-gathering salesperson, I pressed him on that answer. He hesitated, but eventually added more context:
Dad, are you familiar with the King of Jordan?
I know who he is.
Well, his son is in my dorm …. and we are very safe.
I learned about some in his dorm who were not students. Also, about how the Prince of Jordan liked to evade his protection detail and would (on one such occasion) recruit fellow students who sneak him out of the dorm to get pizza. The challenge was to see how far they could get before caught. We had a discussion about the potential downfall of such games.
When David’s brother, John, traveled from Tennessee Tech University to visit and check in on his brother, John learned that the campus really had been buttoned up as they wouldn’t allow him entry until David vouched for him.
Similarly, in the way my mother recalled going to her high school classes the day after Pearl Harbor, and I remembered walking home for lunch from Tenth District Elementary School shortly after hearing about President Kennedy, I will never forget what I was doing on 9/11/01…and neither should you.