9/11

So today marks the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington, DC and Pennsylvania. I've spent time reflecting on what I felt then and what we now know about the attacks.

First, a little background. I'd accepted a radio job in Woodward, Oklahoma a month before, and my folks had come up from El Paso to see me. They spent some time knocking around the area, since Dad has family whose roots are more toward Enid. Saturday, September 9, we'd gone to the Oklahoma State/Louisiana Tech football game at (then) Lewis Field on the OSU campus. Turned out to be a close game, won by OSU late. I well remember Dad laughing and waving in time to the Waving Song, which the OSU band plays when the team scores. He seemed to be a little kid, and it made me happy to watch him.

We drove back to Woodward the next day, since the boss called a Sunday afternoon meeting. The folks drove home and I went in to the station.

The morning of the attacks started the same way as many others did-- out of bed about 7:30 for a shower and into the kitchen for breakfast as I listened to the station. The news we carried at 7:57 am talked about a plane crashing into the World Trade Center. I didn't think a whole lot about it, since there had been an incident involving a kid flying a small plane into a building in Tampa a month earlier. Now when the news finished, our morning guys (station owner and one other) typically started talking about whatever. Not this time. This was my first indication that something was not right. They were watching the TVs in the studio and were speechless.

Arriving at the station close to 9:00, I recall splitting my time between checking the news wire and watching the screen in the studio. I was a news and sports guy at the time, and I spent some time getting MOS (man on the street) interviews, eventually riding out to Woodward Regional Airport and spending a few hours covering a bomb threat. It turned out to be false, but you have to follow up on it, since we really didn't know the scope of things quite yet. It's about 2 pm and I hit the drive through for a quick bite to eat.

This part of the afternoon is a bit sketchy in the memory banks-- I guess I went back to the station to edit sound bites for our local newscasts. I believe it was this afternoon, maybe four or five pm when I went to St. John's Episcopal Church (my church, for the time being) for a healing/reflective service. More audio editing followed back at base camp.

I made it home about 9:00 that night, and finally sat on my couch, watched some news reports and tried to process what happened this day. I was in full work mode and adrenaline was racing, so I'd not followed the news reports very closely and hadn't done any emotional searching yet. I think I went to bed about 11, since the next day figured to be as full as this one, as we started to make sense of what happened.

Our station stayed with the network news coverage instead of normal programming that day, and went with more somber music to fit what became a time of national mourning. I think some parts of Oklahoma didn't play football that Friday (I know I didn't want to cover or watch any), but the Woodward Boomers played Saturday evening against Great Bend (my first Kansas high school game) and won. There was also a city-wide service at the First Baptist Church Friday night, in place of football.