NPR was muttering in the background as I rose late from bed. I slept with the radio on and tuned to the National Public Radio station in St. Louis, Missouri, but was usually on the way to work in the advertising department of the Famous Barr department store at that hour. I came out of the shower and toweled off to the murmured sounds of a commentator speaking of airplanes doing something.
Raeann Minella, the creative director to whom I reported, woke in the Millennium Hotel to “an exquisitely beautiful Tuesday morning” in New York City. She turned on the TV to check her watch against the local time then went to prepare for work, a photoshoot in the city. She paused briefly when she heard the TV commentator say that an airplane had flown into the World Trade Center. Watching TV as she dressed, Raeann was startled to see the tail of a plane sticking out of the side of the building and thought that someone had made a big mistake and flown his private plane into the building. As she continued to prepare for work, she got a call from one of her sons. “Mom,” Chris cried out, “is what I am hearing true? Have two planes hit the World Trade Building?”
Chad Revelle, an art director who reported to me and had accompanied Raeann to New York for the photoshoot, was also staying at the Millennium. I called Chad “Mr. Wolf,” after the character from the movie “Pulp Fiction” who handled grisly emergencies and organized the clean-up work. On this morning, he met with our boss and the two of them proceeded to the subway for the trip to the photo studio on Chambers Street.
St. Louis is on Central Standard Time; by the time I arrived at work at approximately 8:40 a.m., there had been about an hour of misery in the United States. At 8:45 a.m. ET, a hijacked American Airlines Boeing 767 slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. Eighteen minutes later, another plane plunged into the south tower. One of my first thoughts was about my eldest child. Lisa worked for a financial planning company headquartered on Hudson Street in New York City. Hudson Street is very near the World Trade Center. I called Lisa at work, and she did not answer; I called her home in Jersey City, and she did not answer.
In New York City, Raeann and Chad exited the subway blocks away from their Hudson Street designation; the subway could not continue. When they reached the surface of the street, Raeann described the air as “dark and smoky, and (it) smelled like fuel.” At the studio, models were crying and leaving, and the assistants were grabbing cameras and heading to the roof of the building. Raeann dropped onto a photographer’s gear case and the studio owner came up to her and said, “Everything just changed.” On the roof with the assistants, Chad told me that he saw the collapse of the North Tower, and another plane get escorted away from the area by two F15 fighter jets.
In St. Louis, I was still frantically trying to find my daughter, but on a call to the studio, the owner asked me to continue to task his staff with shooting assignments, as he wanted “things to go as naturally as possible.” I tried, until one member told me, “I can’t do this! I saw people jumping out of windows!” New York City was locked down, and Raeann and Chad were confined to the studio until 2:00 p.m. When they left the building, they found that the streets were blocked to traffic, but the sidewalks were open. Chad is a 6’ 5” giant, and Raeann is a slight 5 feet. The city of New York was afoot, and the air around them was green, and full of dust. The walk back to their hotel was a three-mile trudge, and Chad told me that he felt that Raeann was being ping-ponged about. In a move that surprised her, Chad reached down from his commanding height and took Raeann’s hand. Raeann told me that the gesture was “very sweet and comforting;” Chad told me that he was being “Papa Bear,” and wanted his boss to walk behind him as he cleared a path. The dust was thick as they walked those “three green miles” to the hotel. In St. Louis, I finally reached someone at Lisa’s job, who told me that she had not come in to work, but he would try to reach her.
That night, Chad was awakened by the ringing of a fire alarm; he thundered down two flights and pounded on Raeann’s door and the two of them ran down 14 flights to the street. They decided to check into another hotel. In the morning there were no cars available to rent and of course, no flights, so the studio owner lent them a truck to drive back to St. Louis. After driving 12 hours out of the City, they stayed at a hotel for a brief sleep, then got back on the road. “It took us 28 hours of driving to get back to St. Louis,” Chad told me. The truck was hard to drive, and “the only radio station we could get was NPR.” He slept for 2 hours in the back seat while Raeann drove, and when he could not get calls through to his wife, bought another cell phone. After a brief stop at Raeann’s son’s house, they made it home. Chad told me that three days later, while sitting on the couch, he “just lost it.” And I sat with Raeann in her office as she told me of the silent, eerie march of shattered humans through the green dust.
I found my daughter that day, and my mother in Pennsylvania was safe, my sister in D.C. was safe and my two coworkers — my friends — had survived. Raeann wrote to me that her wish is “that … all Americans will take a moment out of their day to … remember” those who lost their lives and those who fought to save others.
We three will.
