Tag: 9-11

Landmarks

I found myself this week looking back a few years, when, well …

“I used to use that as a landmark. Something’s got to go back up there,” Ariste Reno, of New York, formerly of Chicago, told me when I visited the World Trade Center site on the first anniversary of its destruction.

I thought about the National Tower at Gettysburg, which was imploded July 3, 2000, and said so later that day to Mark McGinnis, Gettysburg College Class of 1976, who was in California waiting for a telephone cross-country conference (Zoom had not been invented yet) when the north tower died and with it 10 of his friends and colleagues.

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Remembering 9-11

Doing the job(Published in the Gettysburg Times, 9/13/2013)

I was crossing Baltimore Street on my way into the Adams County Courthouse when my phone buzzed. It was my spouse calling from work. A second plane had crashed into the Twin Towers.

When she called about the first one, I thought some pilot was going to be very glad he’d died for that mistake. But two was not a mistake.

“We’re at war with someone,” I said, then hung up and made my way to the emergency communications center in the courthouse basement, where I remained the rest of the day, watching an endless loop of passenger jets slicing into the two towers in lower Manhattan, and the towers collapsing on themselves, killing, at that time, untold thousands of office workers. Continue reading Remembering 9-11