Remembering 9/11

Sep 11, 2021

Morning Update

Saturday, September 11, 2021

By Ken Tingley

It took me years to figure out I did not experience 9/11 the way most people did.

I was in The Post-Star newsroom. I was directing coverage, planning a special edition, offering reporters advice while catching 15-second glimpses of television coverage. There was no time to be horrified.

I was at my office desk before 9 that Tuesday morning. I didn’t leave until after 1 a.m. The day remains a blur.

A few years later, there was a 9/11 exhibit at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. As I watched the televised news coverage of that day, I realized I had not seen any of it, that I had missed the unfolding drama because I was trying to figure out how to cover the biggest news story of my lifetime. I sat there transfixed unable to look away.

So when I started writing a book last year about the work we did at the newspaper, I went back and read the newspaper’s 9/11 coverage. I devoted an entire chapter to that day. It was probably the first time I read some of the stories. There simply was not the time to do it in the moment, especially that moment.

Fourteen different reporters delivered 25 local stories that day.

Last year, I went back and interviewed several of my colleagues about what they remembered about the day, about how we did our jobs - Bob Condon, Pat Dowd, Mark Mahoney, Martha Petteys and Thom Randall.

They all had their own stories.

Their own memories of that day.

“What really stands out in my mind was the mobilization that you initiated in the newsroom,” Randall told me last year. “How serious everyone was. How uncertain we were about our future. You had sports people writing stories and we were all so serious. Everyone had these stone-faced, resolute expressions. I was so proud to be part of that newspaper that day. When they came off the press, it blew me away.”

Randall is 72 now and still writing for local newspapers.

Later that evening, Terry Pluto, a sports columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, came into my office. He had flown in that morning to give a writing seminar for our sports folks. He said he had to tell me something.

“The atmosphere in the newsroom today was one of people with a purpose,” Pluto said. “There was no panic.”

That means a lot all these years later. There is pride in those people.

That Sunday, I reported these thoughts to our readers in my “From the Managing Editor Column:”

“When our reporters and editors heard about the unfolding tragedy Tuesday, they headed to work immediately and most didn’t leave until late in the night. They were not allowed to show their emotions, to let the enormity of the situation, or their anger, affect what they were writing. They had information to report, stories to write and pages to construct. That’s what we do in the newspaper business. It is the curse and it is the blessing.”

Our front page that day had a unique headline. I never saw it duplicated in any other newspaper anywhere.

“My God” is screamed at the top of the September 12, 2001 edition of The Post-Star.

Pat Dowd was our News Editor that day. He was in charge of the copy desk and the production of all our news pages.

He remembered insisting to me early in the evening that “My God” needed to be the headline.

He remembered we argued about it.

“My argument was this: This is… unprecedented…” Dowd told me last year while choking out the words.

Then there was silence.

Pat Dowd was back there again and choking up remembering it all over again.

Randall later convinced me to let him take the train the next day into New York City. It turned out to be was the last train they allowed into the city.

Randall remembers being unprepared.

He remembered wearing dress shoes that eventually gave his feet blisters, because there was no subways running and few taxi cabs. But the reporting was dynamic.

“It was a ghost town,” Randall remembered last year. “The air was dusty and putrid from the stench of the burning rubble from Ground Zero.”

Randall believes he made it as far as 10th or 11th street downtown.

“People were walking north past those barricades and some of them covered with that grey dust from the collapse of the buildings. There was no traffic. It was incredible. The streets were empty. People walked dazed right down the middle of the streets.”

The reporting did not end there.

It went on for weeks and weeks.

Our community came together. It mobilized an effort to do all it could for New York City. It was inspiring in so many ways.

That was all covered, too.

But looking back two decades later, you can’t help but wonder, what happened to us, but more importantly can we ever get it back like we did on that day 20 years ago?

9/11 memories

The context for 9/11 came later for me.

In 2014, I searched online for a basketball player I had covered at Hartwick College in 1982-83.

His name popped up associated with his employer - Cantor Fitzgerald. He was on the 105th floor of the first tower that day. He had a wife and three children. Later, I got an email from his sister. Her husband had worked with her brother. He was also at the World Trade Center that day.

“On that day, we lost two fathers of seven children (ages 13 to 6 months),” Kathleen Tighe wrote in December 2015. Four of the children were hers.

I will always remember what she wrote next:

“Yes, we are living our lives again. The baby is a freshman in high school playing soccer like her dad, and basketball like Uncle Tim. My parents continue to attend the game of the grandchildren (24 of them) as they did for Tim and rest of the brood. Evil tried to destroy our family, but I am happy to say it did not succeed.”

Earlier this week, I sent Kathleen an email to tell her I would once again be thinking of her family on 9/11.

Both of those columns are included in my book “The Last American Editor.” When I looked at the list of who had ordered the book earlier this year, I noticed Kathleen’s name.

Five years ago I told her I hoped my questions about her brother and husband did not cause her further pain.

“It does not cause further pain at all,” she wrote back. “To the contrary, I find it rather comforting to know that our loved ones are remembered.”