Twenty-five years later, the tears still fall

Last April I sat on a bench, crying my eyes out.

I was in a museum.

It was the Flight 93 Memorial site where 40 souls lost their lives on September 11, 2001 in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Several of the exhibits had earphones where you could listen to snippets on history.

I had chosen to listen to a collection of recordings donated to the museum.

Those recordings were the voices of Flight 93 passengers who called home and left their final messages on answering machines. They spoke of love to their families. They realized they probably weren’t going to make it home again.

The emotions brought on by those voices overwhelmed me. I took off the headphones, sat on a nearby bench and cried. I knew the bench had been strategically placed nearby and that many other tears had been shed there.

I was brought back to my own memories of 9-11.

I was the publisher of The People-Sentinel, a weekly newspaper in Barnwell, S.C. It was deadline day and we were all working on the edition which would be published the next day.

The production manager, Chris Emory, knocked on my door and entered quietly. She said I might want to turn on the tiny portable television that sat on a credenza behind my chair. 

She indicated that something big was happening.

We watched the first videos of an airplane hitting the World Trade Tower in New York City. We were stunned, watching live, as a second plane hit the tower.

I walked out of my office which was adjacent to a large open room where most of the staff worked. I called them all to attention and told the staff what had happened.

A room that had been full of voices went silent.

Decades earlier the federal government had created the Savannah River Site where plutonium was stored and nuclear triggers were made. The Site was four miles from our office, and we wondered if it could be a potential target.

When a third plane hit the Pentagon, we wondered where the next attack would come from.

Our editor and reporters stopped what they had been doing and began to figure out a new plan for the front page. New stories. New photographs.

The tiny television continued to give real-time reports. My next report to the staff was that all air space over the United States was closed.

While still trying to do her job, Chris Emory worried. Her son was an aviator in the military. It’s hard to concentrate when you are frantic about your child.

The stories came together. A tour bus of school children headed to SRS was turned away at the gate. There were armed guards there, closing the facility to the public.

We reached out to people we knew who worked in the towers, or family members waiting for news.

I contacted a cousin whose husband had just contacted her. He was late going to work at the Towers. He heard the news halfway there and started calling to assure his family that he was okay.

My son called from Georgia Southern University where he was a freshman. He told me of a girl sitting on the steps of one of the buildings, crying. Her family lived in New York. She couldn’t get hold of them right away. A stranger to him, my son sat with her and felt his heart breaking.

I found that everyone in the building had reached out to their families, one by one, making sure they were ok.

At lunchtime I went into a local Walmart and asked for American flags. They weren’t sure they had any since patriotic holidays were over. We found a bunch of small flags on sticks. I bought them all, carried them back to the office and put one on every desk. I still have mine.

Somehow, some way, we put the paper together and waited until the first editions started coming off the press. Our writers had some of the finest breaking news stories of their careers. Our staff had worked as a team – production, press, inserters, delivery staff and even advertising and accounting pitched in whatever capacity was needed.

Early the next morning I stopped by the same Walmart that had newspaper boxes outside. I bought several copies of The State. I still have those newspapers, immediate records of history.

In the coming days and weeks, more and more stories evolved. Everyone, and I mean everyone, had a story of a friend, a family member, an acquaintance.

We learned of the souls on board Flight 93 who gave their lives to prevent their airplane from becoming one more missile guided by adversaries.

Today it has been 25 years since 9-11. It is still very real to me.

And when I remember that day, I still cry.