`Evil tried to destroy our family’
Former Post-Star reporter’s work featured in `The Last American Newspaper’
By Ken Tingley
This year, I didn’t want to remember 9/11 and I’m not sure why.
It wasn’t really a conscious choice. I knew what the date on the calendar meant. I just didn’t want to acknowledge it.
My experience that day 21 years ago was different than most. I was directing the news coverage for my newspaper so I did not spend a lot of time watching television. One reporter had a man on the phone who was trapped in a building near the World Trade Center. Another reporter was talking to a man who had just escaped the Pentagon. Our reporters were finding the attack had touched so many local people personally. Some were still waiting to hear from loved ones.
I guess I didn’t really have time to process the event. That would take years.
I remember being in the Smithsonian a few years later and walking through an exhibit on 9/11. They were playing the live news feed from that morning and I found myself totally captivated. I wasn’t reliving it, I was living it for the first time. I had never seen any of the TV coverage.
After 9/11, the trauma was never far away in the succeeding weeks, months and years. It’s heartbreaking when your 5-year-old asks why all the buildings keep falling down.
There was still smoke rising from the smoldering ruins at Ground Zero when I covered a New York Giants football game at the Meadowlands a month later.
I remember flying home another time and seeing the gaping hole in lower Manhattan from the air.
Later, I visited the hole in the ground personally.
I bought and read the 9/11 Commission report.
Later, I visited the cascading waterfalls in the footprints of each of the Twin Towers, and then the 9/11 museum when it opened.
Two years ago I visited the site in Shanksville, Pa. where Flight 93 came down.
For each anniversary, for each special remembrance I seemed to learn something new about the tragedy. Then in 2014, it became personal. I started my column from September 19, 2014 this way:
Let’s start at the end of the story.
The last day.
The day Tim O’Brien died.
That’s what I had to do when I went looking for the name of a Hartwick College basketball star I last talked to 31 years ago. I just wondered how his life turned out.
He worked for Cantor Fitzgerald. You know the story now. He was only 40. He had a wife and three young children and was working on the 105th floor when the first plane hit. It was probably over quickly.
I learned a lot about Tim O’Brien after that. How he met his wife. The success he had made of his life and the family that surrounded him.
That column was important to me. I included it in my first book “The Last American Editor.” But it could not stand alone. It needed a second column to tell the whole story.
It was more than a year after the first column ran that I received an email from Tim O’Brien’s sister, Kathleen Tighe. She thanked me for the kind words about my brother and apologized for not writing sooner or knowing even when the piece was written.
She mentioned in passing she had lost her husband that day, too. He worked with Tim at Cantor Fitzgerald. Two fathers of seven children were lost that day.
That stays with you.
I told Kathleen I had visited the 9/11 Museum in New York and made a point to listen to the family recordings about her brother that she and her father had made.
She seemed happy to hear that.
“Because if you listen,” she wrote, “you will hear a story - a story of a brother, father, husband…”
I told Kathleen I would be thinking of her and her family on 9/11. But I pushed those thoughts away this year until “60 Minutes” last night. The CBS news program did an hour-long segment on 9/11 and the firefighters lost that day.
I started thinking about 9/11 and Kathleen Tighe and her family.
Six years earlier she told me her family was living their lives again. Her youngest had just started high school and was playing soccer like her father and basketball like her Uncle Tim.
“Evil tried to destroy our family, but I am happy to say it did not succeed,” Kathleen wrote.
That’s still hard to read, but maybe it is important to remember.
I included that column in my book, too. You cannot have one without the other. There is tragedy and then hope.
Last year on Sept. 8, I noticed Kathleen had preordered my book with the two columns about her family.
I emailed her and told her again her family would be in my thoughts on the 20th anniversary. I explained I included the column on her because it has a message of inspiration we all needed to hear. I also asked her for an update on the children.
She responded on Sept. 11, 2021.
She explained she had lost her dad the year before.
“He was my rock and soul after 9/11,” she wrote. “We still forge onward knowing Tim and Steve and alive in our hearts.”
She said she would be happy to update me on the kids and left a phone number.
But I never called.
I suppose I didn’t want to add further pain, but it helps to know that life goes on.
Her youngest would be in college now and have no recollection of her father or uncle. I can’t help but wonder whether she was half the basketball player as her Uncle Tim.
Passing of Joe Rota
Sad to see the passing of former Town of Dresden Supervisor Joe Rota at the age of 89 last month.
Joe, who was a retired New Jersey policemen, regularly emailed me his thoughts on a variety of issues while also submitting letters to the editor to The Post-Star. He sometimes called, too. I did at least one column on Joe where he described an encounter with a bad guy at a New Jersey diner that could have escalated into him shooting the suspect, but Joe refused to go for his firearm. He took a lot of pride in never firing his revolver in the line of duty.
Joe was 89 when he passed and if his obituary is any indication he lived a full life. I will miss his correspondence.
Meeting Randall
Anyone who has regularly read The Post-Star over the years will remember the work of former reporter Thom Randall. Now in his 70s, he is still out there covering stories for Sun Community News. On Saturday, he was in Lake George covering the car show.
Thom is featured in at least two chapters of my new book “The Last American Newspaper.” The first was about his reporting in New York City the day after 9/11, while the second was an expose he did on the Madden Hotel in Glens Falls.
His work goes to the heart of why community journalism is so important.
The reporting on the Madden Hotel put the problem in the spotlight and eventually led to it being sold and torn down. Glens Falls is still benefitting from that story 15 years later.
“The Last American Newspaper” is now available at Ace Hardware.
So sad, tragic, and utterly pointless for us to be attacked. Wonderful lives lost for no purpose.
Great column Ken - so heartbreaking to hear of the deaths and what it does to the family's - God Bless them at the time and forever - how do you go through something like that without Faith in God or at least some person or something, thanks Ken, as I said!!!