Darkness on a Sunny Day – where I was, what I did on Sept. 11, 2001

Ed. Note: Motorvatin’ has been put in Neutral this week to let me shift gears, so to speak and relate what I was doing on my generation’s version of a Pearl Harbor-, Kennedy Assassination-level event.

By Charles Bolinger

Editor

Even though it’s been nearly 25 years since it happened, my recollection of Sept. 11, 2001 remains vivid.

Then, as now, I worked for a newspaper, though back then I was merely a reporter. I worked for the North County Journal, one of a bi-state network of weeklies. We printed twice a week, Wednesday and Sunday; there were no digital editions. 

I had to be up early on that Sept. 11, a Tuesday, to drive to one of the suburbs that comprised my beat to cover a new phenomenon: identify theft. As I sat in Bridgeton City Hall (a St. Louis County suburb) that day, listening to a man explain how easy it is for a stranger to seize your identity and start charging things in your name and using your name and social security number for other nefarious activities, another man burst into the chamber.

I remember those chamber doors – huge, wooden and heavy. It took a lot of effort for me to push one open then and I was 30 and in far better shape than I am today. Something critical must have happened to make someone charge in here like those doors didn’t exist. 

We all turned in our seats to stare at the intruder, someone I didn’t recognize but he must have been a city hall staff member. He started babbling about attacks – airplanes flown into the World Trade Center and into the Pentagon. He spoke so fast and so excitedly, he was hard to comprehend since I had been focused about learning about identity theft. 

As he spoke, my cell phone rang (I forgot to mute it). It was my editor, telling me to get my tail back to the office ASAP. We had a major situation unfolding.

I gathered my notepad, pen and bolted from city hall; ID theft would have to wait, but it’s proven highly evergreen since 2001.

I drove back to the office, giving up my usual pop/rock radio station for that news/talk stalwart station here, KMOX. I understood what my editor meant as I processed what the announcers summarized but I found it really difficult to make myself believe it was true.

Until that day, the most under-utilized part of my beat was Lambert-St. Louis International Airport as it was known then. The airport’s director was a man named Col. Leonard Griggs, best known for his unique mustache and his acerbic demeanor. After I started working for the paper a month earlier, I attended a few airport committee meetings he ran and remembered two distinct things from those forums. First, they took place in the mid-afternoon and committee members were served the thickest apple pie slices I’d ever seen accompanied by glasses of milk. Second, I’d never seen such a group of yes-men and yes-women in my life. Only one member had the courage to ask why the airport did something vs. the rubber stamps used by the others.

After a brief visit to my newspaper office, which was in chaos – phones ringing, Internet overloaded, people running back and forth between their desks and the ancient black-and-white television we had, trying to get more information – I was sent to Lambert for a press conference.

Press conference does not adequately describe the gigantic fish bowl I entered. I have never seen so many media outlets in one place and I may never again. All three major TV stations in St. Louis, Fox, CBS and NBC were there, along with ABC and PBS. KMOX radio, NPR and other news and talk radio outlets sent reporters. Printwise, the city’s only daily, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the weekly African American newspaper, the St. Louis American. I wouldn’t be surprised if the St. Louis Argus and the Evening Whirl also had reporters there. I estimated I was the smallest fish in this media pool, so I tried to keep my head down and my wits about me. 

After I was back at my desk, I filed my stories and there were many of them that would get published over the next month or so. It was odd not to hear jets taking off or landing for most of the next week. 

I don’t remember when I first heard about the jet that crashed in Pennsylvania, its ultimate target was guesswork back then – the White House, the Capitol, the Washington Monument? But it was impossible to forget the sound of the second jet plowing into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, a site I had hoped to visit one day, even though major cities are not high on my tourism bucket list. 

While I knew that the NYPD and NYFD wouldn’t abandon the rescue efforts; it seemed hopeless and illogical that those first responders would be able to rescue large numbers of people. And what about those trapped above the floors where the jets burrowed into the skyscrapers’ superstructures? Seeing those dots commit suicide because they jumped from 1,000+ feet in the air…

Then the towers collapsed, ending any last-minute hopes for more survivors. The images of the dust, debris and shrapnel blowing along nearby city streets in Manhattan looked like a haboob blew in off of the ocean.

New York City has since rebuilt the area, with One World Trade Center at 1,792-feet-high, replacing the World Trade Center, which were approximately 1,365-feet-high each.

I don’t watch much in the way of new television programs or movies; I tend to watch programs I grew up with and CBS’ vigilante TV series, “The Equalizer,” offers many different perspectives of the Twin Towers during the 1980s. I watch the episodes wistfully, even though I’ve seen most of them before.

Motorvatin’ will be back in gear and moving forward on Oct. 2, if not sooner.