Never forget. That’s what we’re told.
“I was at my aerobics class at the YWCA that morning, and as I left at about 10 a.m., the woman at the front desk said something terrible had happened. I rushed home and turned on the TV in time to see the towers collapse. I remember I cried all day,” said Lumina News and Wrightsville Beach Magazine graphic designer Cissy Russell.
Emmy Errante, staff writer and photographer, attended Wilmington Academy of Arts and Sciences on September 11, 2001. The entire student body was herded into one room.
“They set up an old dinosaur TV and the whole school gathered around to watch.”
In the seventh grade at the time, what Errante remembers thinking was: What are the World Trade Centers?
“I was in my sixth-grade math class when the news broke about the first plane crashing into the Twin Towers,” said staff writer Miriah Hamrick. “All students returned to homeroom and we watched the news for the rest of the school day. I had never heard of the Twin Towers and barely knew what terrorism was, so I didn’t understand why teachers wore sad expressions on their faces and called for war. I wish I had been older or smarter when it happened, because the implications of that day stretched into my adulthood and I still have to catch up on things that happened when I was a kid, to understand what’s happening now.”
Office manager Kim Benton said she was way up in the hills of Ashe, N.C., getting ready for her husband’s grandmother’s funeral. The day was already somewhat auspicious for Benton. Two years earlier her grandfather had passed away on that same date and seven years earlier to the day, she and her husband were married. They celebrate their 20th anniversary this 9/11.
Cole Dittmer, staff writer, said, “I was walking down the hallway of Williston Middle School. My friend told me about it. It just seemed kind of foreign. I remember thinking, ‘No, that’s not right.’” When he entered the classroom, the television was already on. “It was the kind that was stuck up in the corner of the ceiling strapped to apparatus.”
An announcement came across the loudspeaker at Cape Fear Academy and Thomas van Arsdale’s ninth-grade class assembled in the common area. His younger brother was in lower school. “We were allowed to call our parents,” van Arsdale said.
But his parents were already on their way to the school to pick up their sons and take them home.
“I watched my parents watch the news,” he said. “My dad is not an emotional person — I may have heard him belly laugh four times my entire life — he worked with someone in the financial industry in New York whose floor took a direct hit; I could actually see him tearing up.”
Art director Shawn Best was living in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Towson, Maryland. Like the van Arsdales, she went to school to pick up her daughter and son.
“We didn’t have cable TV at the time but we were cat sitting for the neighbors. They had CNN and all the breaking news channels,” she said. Her brother-in-law worked at the Pentagon.
“When the planes hit there, we got really concerned about Griff. The whole day was spent following really closely the Pentagon hits.” Her sister-in-law’s family members were New York firefighters. “It touched us pretty closely,” she said.
Combined with anthrax scares and Amber alerts, commuting to work in the days following she remembered, “It started a whole ball of worry that never stopped.”
Worried about her brother who also commuted to D.C. to work in the Pentagon area, Susan Zedella Miller was a senior at Otterbein College in Westerville, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus. She began that morning as she always did, by listening to the Bob and Tom comedy show on the radio.
“They were talking about a plane flying into the World Trade Center,” she said. “I thought, ‘That’s not funny.’” The djs told their listeners to turn their televisions on. Downstairs in the large house she shared with four other girls, she turned on the big wooden console TV.
“I was just really confused,” she said. “This was before we all had cell phones.” She ran to her class to tell her teacher she had to go home and stay by the phone to make sure her brother was safe. Her teacher responded, “I’m surprised you’re here.” When she returned to the house, at least 15 people were gathered in her living room watching the events unfold around that relic television set. “They all looked up at once and said, ‘Your mom called. Your brother’s fine.’”
When she remembers that day, three things come to mind: thinking it was a joke; is my brother OK; “I can’t believe you’re here.”
In 2001, that day in September, the Wrightsville Beach Magazine was one year old. Lumina News would not be born for eight more months. Pat Bradford was getting ready to leave for an appointment as the first jet hit the first tower.
“Like everyone from that day, this image in slow motion is forever burned in my mind,” she said. Then the second plane: “This was when I knew with certainty this is a terrorist attack. The crash into the Pentagon and United Airlines Flight 93 downed in a heroic victory in the field in Stoneycreek Township, Penn. confirmed it to me. It was a highly emotional time. I will never forget the flood of emotion, watching the emergency responders rush toward those burning buildings and up those stairs; my son is a fire captain, (his father before him, a chief) and I knew if he were there he would be doing the same. Those images haunt me.” That night there was a flotilla meeting, which had erroneously not been cancelled and a check presentation photo that had to be taken. Those who came out all stood around in shock. As across the country Americans came together in prayer and love, beach residents held a candlelight vigil on the street corners.
“I remember it as a precious time of unity in this country.”
Marimar McNaughton was in Mashoes, N.C., a right turn off the old Manns Harbor Bridge. She was en route from Southern Shores, where she lived, to Columbia, where she was employed by Pocosin Arts. She had met some quirky people who lived in Mashoes and thought she would take a detour, look around, see if she could imagine living there, even though it was the top of the 9 o’clock hour and she was already late for work. She was listening to NPR when she heard the news. She looked around. The tide was high on the Croatan Sound that morning, nearly flooding the surrounding marsh. She drove the remaining 30 miles past East Lake, across the Alligator River, through the rural woodland swamp to the seat of Tyrrell County where her coworkers and a crew of board members were waiting to make a decision.
Pocosin Arts held its Steamed-Blue-to-Red-Hot Lively! Hard Crab Dinner and Art Auction as planned the following Saturday and had record-breaking attendance and sales proving the redemptive power of art to heal combined with the redemptive power of gathering with like-minded friends.
It was a tender time of making eye contact with strangers in grocery store lines. Do you remember?
Perhaps senior account executive Jill Sabourin sums it up best:
“9/11 was a very significant day in our lives. We were living in Hollidaysburg, Penn. My husband, Ron, traveled extensively, but was home that day. He was upstairs when the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center. I called up to him to quick come down. Shortly after that our phones started ringing. People were concerned that he was in the air. He could have very easily been traveling that day. We decided almost that day that we didn’t need to live in central Pennsylvania any more. We always knew we wanted to live by the ocean. That is how we came to live in Wilmington, N.C.”
