As I started writing this essay, it dawned on me there is one question I never asked either of my parents. My mother (born in England in 1932) was 7 years old on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland triggering World War II. Dad (born in Alabama in 1936) had just turned 5 years old when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and America went to war. I never asked them where they were or what they were doing when those events happened. For no other reason than curiosity, I wish I had asked those questions. Everybody knows what today in history is and anyone who is old enough to have the memories of that day can tell you exactly where they were when they heard the news.
It was Tuesday and I was in my office in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada on the phone with one of the church members. She was an American living over the border in New York. During our conversation, she mentioned that she heard a news report of a bomb exploding at the Pentagon, but did not have any details. Once off the phone I went to the men’s room and then stopped in the room where some ladies gathered every week to work on quilts to sell as a fund raiser for a Christian school. I mentioned my phone conversation and that a bomb wet of in D.C. One of them said they had heard about it and that a bomb had gone off at the World Trade Center.
I went back to my office and turned on the radio to WBEN in Buffalo, NY. They were in live coverage (CBS News, I think) of events in New York and DC. I decided to go next door to the house and turn on the TV. I went in and turned on CNN who had footage of the smoke coming out of the north tower. From the right-hand side of the screen came a plane that slammed into the south tower. It took a minute for it to sink in what just happened, in fact my first though was that it was CGI.
Not much got done work wise the rest of the day. I bounced between CNN, CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corp.) all the major television news outlets and the radio. WGR in Buffalo didn’t talk sports like they usually did. The morning show was a male-female duo whose names I have long since forgotten, but I remember the female co-host saying she was willing to grant a wide margin of error as to whose a** we kicked for the attack. For the most part, that was American sentiment that day.
In Canada, there was a swelling of good will and support for Americans. Our neighbors displayed American flags in their windows and yards. Like American airspace, Canadian air space was ordered closed and planes had to land wherever they could find a runway long enough to land. Out in Atlantic Canada, so many planes landed that hotels quickly ran out of rooms. Gymnasiums were quickly made into emergency shelters to accommodate the overflow. In the town of Gander, Newfoundland with a population in 2001 of about 9,600, the people took in around 7,000 stranded travelers, some of the town’s residents opened their homes to total strangers for several days.
Pundits were expecting up to 40,000 dead, but thankfully, the numbers were much lower at 3,000 dead, including 24 Canadians. Many more have had long term effects from the attacks, those being physical and mental.
The long term political and social effects of the attacks are still be felt and argued about, especially in America, but I didn’t want to get political for this post, so we’ll save those discussions for other posts at other times.
