Where Were you September 11th?
I was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on a business trip for a staff meeting. I watched as the second plane hit the tower on a TV in the lobby of the Embassy Suites. We started our staff meeting and the Group President came to the conference room and told us we should leave, there was a plane somewhere in the area that had been hijacked. My boss continued the meeting for a while and then we made plans to get home.
We tried to return rental cars at the airport and the police told us to leave the area. I ended up giving my car and my hotel room to a person on the staff from Canada. The borders were closed and he was stuck.
Four of us headed back to Milwaukee in another rental car. We pulled into a large rest stop on I-80 along the way. There crowd of people there eating lunch. There was some chatter, but for the most part, you could have heard a pin drop in a place you usually couldn’t hear yourself think.
Later in our journey under beautiful clear blue skies, we saw a plane heading east. It stood out because under normal circumstances the blue sky would have been covered with the contrails of aircraft. Days later we realized that must have been Air Force One returning the President to Washington.
I grew up in New York and New Jersey. I had been in the World Trade Center many times. It was an awesome sight. The escalators rising from the Path station to the lobby looked like the stairway to heaven they were so long. I had eaten in The Windows on the World a couple of times for business. It was incredible to look down out the windows and see aircraft below you.
The next time my alumni magazine from Lehigh University arrived, the In Memoriam section that was usually a half page, was three pages long. Each entry started with “Died, September 11.”
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