MPCHS remembers 9/11

MT. PLEASANT — The tradition of the Mt. Pleasant Community High School band playing the National Anthem in remembrance of 9/11 continued this year with Band Director Brad Cook.

“I’m only going to talk about this for a few minutes because we’re going to play at exactly 7:46,” Cook took his students before taking the opportunity to tell them about his experience as a high school senior in Marshalltown when the Twin Towers were struck. “For those of you that don’t know 7:46 is when the first plane hit the tower. That is the exact moment that, that happened, so we’re going to play at that exact moment.”

“That was a really rough day,” Cook said. “It completely changed the world in ways that you don’t understand because you don’t remember what the world was before that day happened.”

As Cook told his story, he acknowledged that this group of students never knew a world before 9/11 and that many aspects of life were different in 2001.

Cook recounted attending a normal marching band practice that day at 7 a.m.

“We had practice right through first period just like you all did,” he said. “So, this is very normal for me, this is what I grew up doing.”

Cook commented on the fact that Sept. 11, 2001 was not like the dreary rainy day of Sept. 11, 2023 that brought the band inside for this traditional act of remembrance instead of around the flagpole as normal.

“ … bright blue sky, the sun was out, not a single cloud in the sky, it could not have been a nicer day,” Cook recalled. “I distinctly remember my high school director starting out the day ‘it’s a beautiful day for marching band,’ and it was. It was an absolutely gorgeous day.”

Cook detailed how practice went all the way through first period ending around 8:45 a.m. and when he entered his school, “it was just buzzing.”

“You could just tell something weird was going on because people were out in the hallways,” he said.

For Cook, this was abnormal, because when they would return from rehearsal the halls normally remained empty during classes.

“Teachers were buzzing around, students were buzzing around, we knew something weird was going on,” Cook said.

According to Cook, he was in a bubble for those first moments of that school day. His band room did not have televisions and people weren’t running around with smartphones in their pockets.

Cook said, “There was no way of knowing without a T.V. or a radio,” because the internet was still relatively young, and it simply was not the norm to constantly be on it.

“We went to our second hour as normal,” he said. “But what was unnormal was that every teacher in the building had a T.V. on. … and that’s very not normal at all.”

“To turn the T.V. on, that meant that something bad was happening,” Cook told his students.

Cook recalled getting to his second hour class around 8:55 a.m. only 10 minutes before the second plane hit. While he didn’t see it happening in real-time, he vividly remembers watching the first tower fall in replays.

At exactly 7:46 a.m., Cook refrained from telling more of his experience and instructed students to raise their instruments.

The sound of the national anthem filled the band room as lyrics of bombs bursting in air and the gallant American flag still standing readily accompanied the music in the minds and hearts of those listening to this display of patriotism in Mt. Pleasant Community High School’s band room.

Comments: AnnaMarie.Ward@southeastiowaunion.com