My husband and I have never gotten into the habit of daytime TV, but every morning we automatically switch on the radio (dial permanently affixed to NHPR) and it serves as background sound while we go about our morning routines.
Twenty years ago yesterday, though, the news wasn’t just background sound, and our morning routine was anything but.
By 9 in the morning on September 11, 2001, alerted by shocked and shocking bulletins on public radio, we were perched on the edge of out chairs, staring, dumbstruck, at the smoldering ruins of one tower of the World Trade Center in New York City.
And at 9:03 a.m. we watched in horror as a plane flew deliberately and unerringly into the second massive tower and when, an hour later, it cascaded to the ground in a frightening explosion of dust and debris.
Shortly after that we were joined by the pest control guy who’d been winter-proofing our house foundation against the warmth-seeking critters who regularly sought our basement for shelter each winter. We three all sat staring, without speaking and almost unbelieving of what we were seeing and hearing on the screen.
After maybe half an hour, the exterminator got his wits together enough to go on to his other appointments for the day, but the two of us remained riveted to the set for the rest of the morning, and for most of the next few days. I think we were joined in our horror and bewilderment by most Americans anywhere near a television set.
In my lifetime, Americans have seen many national tragedies captured on tape and displayed in wrenching detail on our televisions.
The assassination of John F. Kennedy was probably the first, with tapes of the doomed motorcade, the agonizing wait at the Dallas hospital, the swearing in on a cramped plane of Lyndon Johnson while a stunned and blood-soaked Jackie Kennedy stood, head bowed, next to him.
And there have been subsequent sorrows brought to us in fresh, bleeding color in the comfort of our living rooms. Footage of the endless outtakes of the conflict in Vietnam come to mind.
But for sheer breath-stopping horror it would be difficult to top the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings and the first class seat we had for it 20 years ago — and all of it relived for us now. It was a nationwide trauma.
It’s startling to remember anew how both riveting and horrifying the immediate coverage of the aftermath was, and how, out of respect for the national tragedy, the channels that weren’t covering it simply suspended broadcast. Even would-be Home and Garden TV viewers found themselves tuned in to somber music and a printed message of grief.
What we saw on functioning channels was wrenchingly sad.
A small army of people who wandered the streets in New York almost in bewilderment, posting handwritten notes, “have you seen this person?” taped to snapshots of smiling men and women who were almost certainly lost for good.
The pain-etched faces of bone-weary firefighters whose comrades (300 of them!) had been lost in the initial rush to save the buildings’ inhabitants.
Television’s lofty anchors, on the air for hours, turned themselves into grief counselors, talking to and trying to reassure bewildered callers.
Peter Jennings, perhaps then the most august of the lot, found himself in a heart-rending conversation with a distraught young woman named Jacqueline who was looking for her husband, who had worked on a top floor in one of the vanished buildings. Could Peter, perhaps, read her telephone number over the air so anyone with any information could call her? Jennings was warm and gentle as they talked.
“I’m six months pregnant and have twins,” she said in a light, soft voice near breaking as she earnestly explained what was, to her, perfectly reasonable. “I need him at home.”
Her husband turned out to be with a firm that lost 700 people that day.
So the hours went, with a litany of loss and seemingly endless sorrow and grief.
The piles of rubble were still raw three days later when President George W. Bush stood on them to address the exhausted workers, and, when a worked yelled “I can’t hear you,” addressed them with a megaphone.
”I can hear you! I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people, and the people, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”
In the days and weeks that followed, even as HGTV and its fellow cable channels returned to their regular programming, cameras were never far from the rubble of the Trade Centers.
Eventually though, the wreckage of the towers was cleared away and the sites were redeveloped. What appears to be a tasteful and soothing memorial occupies part of the land.
George W. Bush is now an elder statesman, long out of office.
Peter Jennings went back to being a lofty professional, then retired, and is now, sadly, deceased.
Jacqueline’s fatherless twins are likely now young college students.
And I’m not sure we ever saw that particular pest control guy again. But I’ve no doubt he, too, remembers that morning.
(Monitor columnist Katy Burns lives in Bow.)