Remembering 9/11

This Sunday is the 10

^th

anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and on United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania. Although the attacks happened 1,000 miles away, they deeply affected people in Washington County.

Jim and Linda Six of Ainsworth were worried that their daughter, Angela, was on one of the hijacked planes. Angela lived in New York City and worked as a flight attendant for Northwest Airlines. On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Jim was having coffee with his friends when he heard the news.

?Someone said a plane hit the World Trade Center but they didn?t say anything about the size,? Jim said. ?Another guy came in and said two planes hit it. I told them, ?I wish you guys would get your stories straight.??

Jim said Linda was watching the events unfold on television and that she was in tears.

?We knew Angela was flying out of there but we didn?t know which flight she was on,? Jim said.

Angela was scheduled to fly from Newark, N.J., to Miami that morning.

?The news started giving the flight numbers of the planes,? Jim said. ?We knew it wasn?t her plane that hit the building because the planes that hit were not Northwest.?

The Sixes learned later that day that Angela did not go to Miami because her plane was diverted to Toronto, Canada.

?Their captain called us and told us where they were and that they were all right,? Jim said. ?Because they were out of the U.S., they wouldn?t let them off the plane for a long time. They didn?t know what was going on.?

Angela told her parents that her plane was directly behind United Airlines Flight 93 on the runway at the Newark International Airport. Flight 93 was hijacked that morning and crashed in a field near Shanksville, Penn. She said her plane flew close enough to the World Trade Center that the passengers could see the first plane hit the tower.

Mike Zahs was a teacher at the Washington Junior High School at the time. He remembers hearing the news that morning from Erik Buchholz, who was then a teacher at the junior high and high school.

?None of our televisions worked at the junior high because they hadn?t been hooked up for the year,? Zahs said.

Zahs hooked up a television in the library, where he conducted his classes for the rest of the day. Zahs said he wished all of the students would have watched the news that day.

?I felt bad that here was something the kids should have been watching and none of them were,? Zahs said. ?I always thought we should teach kids to appreciate the news because the best history is learning the news.?

Zahs said he began every class, regardless of what it was, with a discussion of current events.

Zahs remembers that ?terror? was not a word people said often before Sept. 11, 2001. He told his class that, for some people in the world, terrorism was a ?normal part of their day.?

?To experience terrorism here was something very different and foreign to us,? Zahs said.

Dave Hoffman was the principal at Lincoln Elementary School at the time, just as he is now.

?I remember it like it was yesterday,? he said. ?We had planned an administrative team building activity, but we got the call not to go because there was something going on.?

Hoffman learned about the terrorist attacks on television. He and the other administrators talked about how to broach the subject with the students. Hoffman decided not to say anything to the students but rather to send a note home to parents that they should talk about it with their children.

?I told the teachers, ?Don?t turn on the TVs,?? Hoffman said. ?We didn?t want to scare the kids and make them think it could happen here at the school. We wanted to make sure the kids concentrated on what they should.?

Over the next few days, Hoffman went from one classroom to another to answer questions about the attacks.

?The kids asked ?Why? Why would they do this??? Hoffman said. ?It was such a complicated answer, just as it is today. What we stressed was that the students were going to be safe.?

Jim Cluney is the minister at the First Assembly of God Church in Washington. On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, he and others were putting up sheetrock in the sanctuary of the new church.

?As soon as we heard that a second plane hit the tower, everyone dropped everything and went home,? he said. ?I think most everybody thought the first one was a wayward plane that got into the area and hit the building. But when the second one hit, we knew [the World Trade Center] was a target. Then we heard about the one in Pennsylvania and the one that hit the Pentagon. By then, it was like, ?Where is this going to end???

Terry Anderson works at a funeral home in Washington and had just arrived at the funeral home when he heard the news. He checked the Internet throughout the day for updates about what was happening on the East Coast.

?It seemed surreal,? he said. ?I do remember, at the end of the day, after all the planes had been grounded, seeing the jet stream from Air Force One. It was taking the commander in chief from Omaha to Washington, D.C.?