By Hank Silverberg, ADVANCE CORRESPONDENT
On Sept 10, 2001, I was a reporter/producer for Washington’s All-News Radio Station, WTOP, working the afternoon/evening 3-11 shift.
My job at the time was to cover breaking stories at night, like town meetings and crime, but also to help set up live interviews for the morning drive team.
On that night, I was working with WTOP Sports Director Dave Johnson on what we thought was a major breaking story. Dave had learned basketball Legend Michael Jordon would be coming to play with the Washington Wizards.
We worked until 1 a.m. setting up reaction interviews for the morning anchors, and left the newsroom feeling it was a job well done. It would be a superb morning drive.
But none of the interviews scheduled after 8:46 a.m. Sept. 11 ever made it on the air.
I was sound asleep when the first plane hit the World Trade Center—awakened by a frantic phone call from one of my daughter’s Girl Scout leaders who wanted to talk to my wife about canceling the meeting that night
I asked why.
“Well, because of the bombings,” she said.
There was a second delay in my sleepy, foggy brain.
“Bombings?” I asked. “What bombings?”
She started to tell me about the first plane hitting the World Trade Center but I never heard the end of the sentence. I hit the TV remote and turned on CNN just in time to see the second plane hit the towers live at 9:03 a.m.
I was out the door in five minutes, headed for my car and the radio station.
I called in on my cell phone.
“Go to Dulles International Airport,” said the editor.
I headed that way, but got a call back minutes later and was told to forget it. The airport had been closed. Come in to the station.
As I headed up I-95 I could see the smoke coming from the Pentagon which had been hit by the third plane at 9:37 a.m.
I learned later that my colleague Jonathan Warner, on his way to work for his regular shift, had looked in his rearview mirror just after he passed the Pentagon and the plane hit the west side of the building.
I couldn’t get onto I-395 which had been shut down. At the mixing bowl, all traffic was detoured onto the Beltway headed toward Fairfax County and eventually Montgomery County. Maryland. I got into D.C. the long way, from the west end on River Road. It had taken me 90 minutes from pajamas to the newsroom. Much of the highway traffic had been headed out of the city.
At the radio station, calm chaos. Almost everyone had reported in or had headed to key points of the disaster. All commercials had been scratched, and it was full speed ahead.
Shortly after I arrived, I received a tip from a friend I knew in the Senate Press gallery on Capitol Hill. The entire complex was being evacuated. We learned later that was because they thought Flight 93, which crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania at 10:03 a.m., was headed for the Capitol. I believe we were the first to report it.
My assignment that day was to go on the air live every 20 minutes and give a summary of the latest information which was coming in fast. I did that for 15 hours straight. Many of my colleagues worked much longer hours.
Basketball was irrelevant for weeks. Commercials and sports reports were canceled for days.
The world had changed forever.
Reporters cover lots of tragedies, and sometimes the devastation of it all doesn’t hit us until the end of a day. The death toll for 9/11, 2001 was 2,977. But it didn’t really hit me what it all meant until I got home late that night, turned on the TV, and watched the towers fall again, saw the hole in the west wall of the Pentagon that was still smoldering, and viewed the wreckage on the ground in Pennsylvania. It struck me that I hadn’t been in danger that day, but thousands of other people were.
Every generation has a seminal event that radically changes their view of the world.
For my parents it was Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
For my generation, the Baby Boomers, it was November 22, 1963. when the mood the country changed, a precursor to the rest of the turbulent 1960s. The Kennedy assassination prompted changes in security and access to presidents, and for many of us it increased our interest in politics and world events with the reality that political violence was not isolated to third world countries.
9/11 changed everything again. Millennials may not have noticed right away. We lost some of our security that day. Oceans no longer protected us from attack. And we lost some of our freedom.
The United States is a different place now.
