It's one year later. Where were you then? Where are you now? How have you changed?

It's one year later. Where were you then? Where are you now? How have you changed?

Rono Dutta
President
United Airlines
Elk Grove Township, Illinois
The world has been through a lot. The employees of United Airlines have been through a lot -- and more. It wasn't until two weeks after September 11 that I gave myself permission to grieve. I was at the opening night of the Chicago Symphony. I just listened to the music and cried. And kept crying.

I am still grieving. But shock has given way to determination. September 11 forced us to get rid of the BS in our thinking. Before September 11, we wanted to be the biggest and best airline. Today, we just want to survive. Before September 11, we believed that size would forgive a lot of our errors. Now we have no room for error. Before September 11, we took a lot of things for granted: that business would always get better, that demand would grow. We no longer take anything for granted.

That said, our sense of purpose has never been greater. We are returning to our core values. Whether it's in advertising, product positioning, or the way that we view ourselves and our customers, we're more sincere in what we say and what we do.

Rono Dutta ( rdutta@ual.com ) and another top executive at United Airlines had gathered in then-CEO James Goodwin's office to report that air-traffic control had lost contact with United Airlines Flight 175 when Goodwin notified them that a plane, which was reported and later confirmed to be American Airlines Flight 11, had just struck the World Trade Center. From there, they watched on TV as their own plane struck the South Tower. Moments later, they learned that they had lost contact with United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania about an hour after the initial attack.

Tom Leighton
Cofounder and chief scientist
Akamai Technologies Inc.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
The day that took the life of my friend and cofounder was also the day that demonstrated the value and the power of our technology.

It was Danny Lewin's idea to take an academic project that we'd been working on, enter a business-plan contest at MIT, and create Akamai. He was our chief technology officer, and he was on board American Airlines Flight 11. Not a day goes by that I don't think about how Danny's death has changed the lives of the people here.

Yet the day that we lost Danny was also the day that this company shined. It was a peak day for Internet volume, and many sites simply couldn't handle it. We signed up all kinds of new customers on September 11 -- news sites, airlines, and government agencies -- and handled their traffic. For many Internet-service providers, the only traffic they could deliver that day was Akamai traffic.

Today, there is a heightened sense of urgency. We've always believed that the work we do is important; now we believe it more strongly. We always took our work personally; now it's even more so. I spent at least four hours a day with Danny for several years. He was killed while working for the company that we created. If that doesn't create an extra edge, what would?

Tom Leighton cofounded Akamai Technologies in 1998 with Danny Lewin and a team of scientists at MIT. Leighton had been working late with Lewin the night before September 11.

Joseph Noviello
Executive vice president, chief information officer, and director
eSpeed Inc.
New York, New York
We are proof that when tested, even under brutal circumstances, people rise to the occasion in miraculous ways.

The morning after September 11 and the days and weeks that followed, we worked around the clock to restore our systems and save the company. People did whatever it took. Those whose managers had died showed their skills as natural leaders. Their instincts for what to do were so strong. They figured out how to contribute based on what they knew. Many of us slept on cots at our computing center in Rochelle Park, New Jersey, where we had duplicates of everything that was destroyed at our offices in the World Trade Center. ESpeed was up and running when the bond market reopened two days after the attacks.

The need to get back to work was intense, and it was amazing how much everyone accomplished. We worked to restore this company for Fred Varacchi, our president, who was such a mentor to me, and for Joe Giaccone, our global infrastructure manager. I can walk into Rochelle Park today and see the eSpeed-orange wall that Joe insisted we paint. It was his passion and persistence that convinced us to create the backup data center in the first place.

Fred, Joe, and so many of the people we lost that day had such an effect on me. I am now more aware than ever of the effect that I can have on other people -- and the commitment that requires.

Joseph Noviello and four eSpeed executives were scheduled to go on a fishing trip the morning of September 11. Cantor Fitzgerald, the bond-trading firm, and eSpeed, an electronic-trading operation almost wholly owned by Cantor, lost 658 of their 900 employees.

Anna Switzer
Principal
Public School 234
New York, New York
People think we were evacuated. We weren't evacuated. We evacuated ourselves. Parents were calling the school and alarms were going off and the building was shaking. As we left, the second tower fell.

I am a much better principal because of what happened. And we have much better teachers too. We share something that's hard for other people to understand. I am much more aware of the power of leadership in a crisis and that leadership can come from so many people, regardless of their formal roles.

At the time, we didn't realize that we wouldn't be back in our school for another five months. The kids wanted normalcy -- their old classroom. We couldn't give them their building. But we could give them their work. In the course of their daily assignments, the kids found comfort. So now we have beautiful artifacts that show what we all experienced this past year. The work is what got us through.

Anna Switzer ( info@ps234.org ) was in the school yard of Public School 234, which is four blocks away from what is now ground zero, when she saw the first plane hit. When the second plane hit, she says, "all hell broke loose." Of the school's 655 children, all were safely relocated. As the second tower collapsed, the last 90 kids were marched two and a half miles uptown by Switzer and a handful of staffers. Over the next five months, students and staff moved three times before returning to their school.

Paul Steiger
Managing editor and VP
The Wall Street Journal
New York, New York
I turned 60 in August, and I've been in this business for 36 years. I can't say that work has become more important as a result of what happened -- it's always been important. But the tape has been running so much faster. There was the horror of September 11. There was the horror of Danny Pearl's death. And it's been one of the most intense years for business coverage: Enron, Andersen, WorldCom, among others.

Our resolve to get stories into the paper and to get them right has never been greater. The Journal's culture has dominated in just an extraordinary way. What we've done is to apply our existing values with greater rigor and more focus -- because the challenges are so much bigger. I have seen such amazing performances from so many people -- at a time when you might expect nothing but sand in the gears.

Paul Steiger ( paul.steiger@wsj. com ) was in his office in the World Financial Center, across from the World Trade Center, when the first plane crashed into the North Tower. The Journal's main offices were evacuated by 9:15 AM, and its staff members were scattered for the rest of the day. Some regrouped at the Journal's South Brunswick, New Jersey office, while others worked from home. On September 12, the paper reached 1.6 million of its 1.8 million readers. Under Steiger's leadership, the Journal won this year's Pulitzer Prize for breaking news.

David Emil
Former owner
Windows on the World
New York, New York
I lost my business on September 11. Big fucking deal. My loss shouldn't be mentioned in the same breath as the loss of life.

The fact that 79 people died while working for my company has radically changed my life. I feel a huge responsibility to the people who lost their jobs. I feel an entirely different level of responsibility to the families of the people who lost their lives.

But I'm not superhuman. The physical destruction of our place of business meant the destruction of the business itself. I can't create 350 jobs from whole cloth for the survivors. And no matter how much I do to help raise money for the victims' families, I understand that there will always be raw emotion -- anger and distress -- over an inconceivable loss.

So all I can do is keep building and creating. Noche, a restaurant that we opened in Times Square last June, was the completion of the work of Christine Olender, a senior employee who was killed on September 11. Five years from now, I can imagine that there will be a fabulous building in lower Manhattan, and there will be a restaurant at the top of it that I would like to operate.

David Emil's Night Sky restaurants operated Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center. Windows, along with another restaurant and a bar on the top floor of the North Tower, employed 450 people. All 79 who were on duty that morning died. Windows of Hope, a fund that assists families of victims in the food-service industry, has raised more than $18 million.

Joseph Pfeifer
Deputy chief
New York City Fire Department
New York, New York
Heroism? It's about doing an ordinary thing at an extraordinary time. It's what those 343 firefighters who died on September 11 did, including my brother. I know now that when he was coming down from the 30th floor of Tower One, he stopped on the 10th floor and told the captain of Engine 7 that his crew needed to switch to the other set of stairs that led out directly into the lobby. About 30 seconds after they evacuated the building, the tower came down. My brother didn't make it out.

You don't run into a burning building if you don't believe that your essence is being a firefighter, if you don't believe that you can make a real difference in someone's life. But we can't always run toward everything. We did as much as we could that day. We knew what was happening. But what we didn't know was that a high-rise building could collapse. The concept wasn't part of our language, our procedures.

Today, I'm working with a team to help make fire departments safer. Firefighters will always be the first responders no matter what acts of terrorism are wreaked upon Americans, so we're trying to figure out how to make that response safer and still save lives.

Joseph Pfeifer was the first fire chief to arrive at the World Trade Center on September 11 -- in under four minutes. He recently finished working with the New York City Fire Department and McKinsey & Co. on a report on September 11.

Bernadette Kingham
VP, communications and marketing
Saint Vincent Catholic
Medical Centers
New York, New York
There is no such thing as being too prepared for the next disaster, and planning, we have come to learn, requires a serious commitment to collaboration.

September 11 tested the flexibility of more than 100 hospitals in the New York area to respond collectively to a tragedy. Early on, it became clear that our disaster plans were too insular -- families in search of loved ones had to go through the mental anguish of traveling from hospital to hospital, because there was no single place to find out if and where a patient had been admitted. Today, we are developing a central system to locate patients and share information.

We feel a tremendous sense of urgency to be prepared for the next disaster. Nationwide, hospitals know they need to beef up their planning efforts. But in New York, we're actually sitting around a table and making that happen.

Bernadette Kingham ( bking ham@saintvincentsnyc.org ) heard the first plane flying low overhead from her office at St. Vincent's Manhattan, the closest trauma center to the World Trade Center and one of eight hospitals in the Saint Vincent Catholic Medical Centers system. More than 1,000 victims were treated by the network.

I was home (working on the computer) with CNN news playing in the background. I heard the first broadcast, and I thought perhaps it was an accident, that a small plane had hit the first tower; my hubby and I stood transformed, watching when the second plane hit. We hugged and cried and I remember him saying, "They are trying to take down those towers!" Then as the towers collapsed one after the other, I feel to my knees and sobbed. He was already putting up our flag in the yard, when they announced the Pentagon being hit.

That night, I felt the need to get on the Internet and read all I could about the "first" bombing of the WTC in 1993. The truck-bomb which exploded in the basement parking lot, killing 6 people. I read the court findings, studied up on who all the major players were, etc. From what I read that night, 11 months ago, I became convinced that Iraq would eventually be tied-in with the 9/11 attacks. I am puzzled why it is taking so long for our government to take action against Iraq. I guess it has something to do with our dependence on oil.

How I have changed? I don't have as much faith in our leaders as I once had. I am more conservative. I believe that the FBI should be rebuilt from the ground up. I am more aware than ever what a great Country we live in. I am more aware of the sacrifices made by police, firemen, etc. And I have become disenchanted in the petty problems of men who get paid to play games (professional sports). Before 9/11 I had been taking freedom for granted and now I am trying to get my thinking adjusted and my priorities straight.

I was usually on FR early most mornings, but that morning I was checking on the progress of my apartments that were hit by a flash flood in July. I was doing my best to cope with the stress of the flood and having a very difficult time emotionally. I came home and checked my messages. There was a message from an employee telling me to turn on the tv. I turned on the tv before the second plane hit. I went back in the bedroom to tell my husband and turn on the tv in there for him to watch when the second plane hit. All I could do was hug my husband and cry.

Our son had taken the bus to work that morning and he called to ask me to come and pick him up. I wanted my husband to go with me as I didn't want to be alone. By the time we got there (downtown Cincinnati) the police had most of the streets shut down. My son had to walk to the end of the exit ramp and we picked him up there, got right back on the expressway and headed home. It was very strange seeing all the streets shut down here.

We had a vacation scheduled for Sept. 23 and didn't decide for sure that we would go until just a couple days before we were to fly out to CA. We weren't afraid to fly but I didn't want to be away from my son and mother. It was a very subdued vacation, not at all like most of the previous vacations.

Everybody put out American flags. Many of them are still out. I think that helped my son cope with what was happening, as he would come home from work each day and tell me how many flags he counted that day. He counted flags each day for several weeks.

After the second plane hit, I did the most irrational thing -- I took my car and filled the gas tank.

I can top that. I live in Manhattan, and my mother somehow got through on long-distance late that afternoon to tell me that, if I hadn't done so already, I should fill the bathtub up to the top with water, just in case there was another attack that caused a citywide power failure.

I told her, no need, I'd already bought sufficient bottled water, and that in any case if one more thing happened to the city that day I'd probably just go ahead and kill myself. :P

I put a small fag up above my cubicle. It's still there, and It won't come down until after 9/11/02...

Wolfstar.... Keep the flag up forever!

I was getting ready to teach reading for my first graders when my colleague down the hall came running in and asked if I had heard about the WTC being hit by an airplane. I thought... "That's impossible...You don't fly an airplane into the WTC on a clear day. (I heard that the weather was gorgeous in NYC that day.) I tuned into the radio right away and heard the worst. Teaching that day was a blur, but our school blew it by not wanting anyone to say anything, either to staff or to the children. I thought, screw it, and I told the kids something did happen, and they will find out once they got home.

Later on, as I was putting my nine year old daughter to bed, she told me she was afraid to go to sleep. I told her God would protect her. She then said, "How come he didn't protect the others who died?" Some things can't be explained, but I assurred her that God was with them, and they are now with God.

I also told my son to come out and listen to the sky. The first time ever, since the beginnings of comercial aviation, that there were no planes flying. We went outside and listened, but all of a sudden heard a jet. We found out a day later that it was an Air Force Recon. jet patroling the northern United States.

I live in Manhattan, and my mother somehow got through on long-distance late that afternoon to tell me that, if I hadn't done so already, I should fill the bathtub up to the top with water, just in case there was another attack that caused a citywide power failure.

Now, I can see doing that. Nobody knew what might be coming next that day, and you were in the big middle of it. Did you have any instinct to run? There you were with something very real to fear, but I was sitting down in Central Texas acting looney! If I'd stopped to think I would have known Texaco wasn't going to run out of gas before the day was out, and terrorists were highly unlikely to have any interest in the area around Waco. I can't remember doing anything so idiotic before in my life. Possibly my defense mechanism kicked in and forced me away from the tv for a few minutes because it was all too horrific to watch.

I was home sick. Count on me to get the first cold of the flu season. Came down with it over the weekend, Sept 8-9. Called in sick to work on Monday and was marginal for Tuesday morning.

But Monday night I couldn't sleep. Normally -- even during times of illness -- I'm an early riser. Normal wake up time is 4:00 A.M. And that would have been the case, sick or well. But due to the lack of sleep, I rolled out around 6:15. And the events at the WTC were already unfolding.

I got in the car to go to the doctor, turned on the radio, and heard Hugh Hewitt (he was on during the morning back then) say "Ladies and gentlemen, Tower 2 has just collapsed." That was enough. I got in front of a TV and stayed there all day.

I'm only sorry I didn't pop a tape in the VCR to record the Fox News coverage that day. There's nothing like having a video record of events as they happened. And we'll never see that part of the coverage in its entirety again.

Here in the MST zone, I had already done my morning run, showered, and turned to CNN as usual while I toweled off before work (remember the "jobs" that many of us still had back then?). The first crash had occurred just a minute or two before. The hole looked deceptively small in the long-tange camera view, as though some dentist in a Bonanza had gotten horribly lost.

As soon as the second plane hit, I knew it was more than an accident. I was amazed to hear the CNN crew continuing to treat it as an accident for another fifteen minutes. I remember them chatting away about 'navigation errors at JFK'.

I remember it was one of those clear, dry September days that just make you feel good to be alive. My beloved husband, his parents and I were heading to Canada to make wine (we live north of Detroit). We left the house at 9 am for a 10 am appointment. As we were crossing into Canada via the Windsor-Detroit tunnel at 9:30 or so after spending our ride chatting and laughing, the Canadian tunnel official informed us that we ought to turn our radio on because, as he said, "All hell was breaking loose in the U.S."

When we finally made sense of what was going on, we were already through the tunnel, so we continued on to the wine shop. Sandy, David, and Gerry at the wine shop were listening to the news when we arrived, the dread and fear and sadness registered on their faces. "My God, we cannot believe this...we are so sorry...," they said.

We made our wine and bottled up whatever we had made previously and left, solemn, heartbroken, and hungry, but instead of eating lunch in Canada as we usually do on these excursions, we queued at the bridge--the tunnel was already reported closed--hoping to get back home, listening all the while to radio reports as events unfolded.

After three hours of waiting at the bridge we crossed into Detroit, frightened, relieved, and still hungry. We stopped at a Coney joint for lunch near our home. There they had TVs and we saw those horrible images. What a jolt seeing actual images of the planes hitting, the towers collapsing; the radio reports couldn't convey the viceral impact of the video images.

At that point I just wanted to get home. My fifty-eight year old mother, who has travelled to far-flung places across the globe, was on her maiden visit to New York City after having passed through it on many overseas trips. They were camping at Liberty Park, directly across from Battery Park and the WTC, in her friend's RV.

We quickly ate and left so I could go home to check our answering machine. The light was blinking and I just started blubbering as I heard her wonderful, bright voice say, "We saw it...we are okay."

My mother and her friend cut short their trip and came home quickly through Canada. She said that it warmed her heart to see so many American flags flying side-by-side with that of Canada as they made their sad way home.

I saw the second plane hit live on the TV over the treadmills. I screamed at the stupid CNN announcer who wondered if there was something wrong with Air Traffic Control, "Say the T word, it's terrorism!"

I literally could not watch CNN that day. I spent about five minutes channel surfing and all it took was to hear that puke Aaron Brown talk about not rushing to judgment and what could America possibly have done to precipitate such a heinous action. After that, I was with Fox News all day.

Maybe the terrorists will do us all a favor and fly into the CNN building. (No such luck, but I can dream.)

It was obviously early here on the West Coast and my cousin called and told us to put the TV on. When I saw what was happening, I turned to my husband and asked him the date. I told him to remember this day because it was the day the world changed.

After 9/11 like everyone, I rethought my life. I signed up to do a 3-day, 60 mile walk for breast cancer. This was something I would never, ever have thought of doing. Not only am I not a physical person, but I am not a group person. I rarely sign up for group activities like this. When I told everyone I was going to walk 60 miles, they all laughed. But I did it. I trained and I trained and I met other women and walked and walked more. on April 16th of this year I completed the 60 mile walk.

While on the walk, I had a spiritual awakening. I knew that if I could do the walk, I could do anything I put my mind to. I was tired of working in offices. I had been doing marketing and PR for the last 20 years. I was unhappy in my job. I decided that I would do something completely different with my life.

I had gone to a paint your own pottery store here in town and had a great time. People looked like they were having fun and it looked like a good business to be in.

Long story short, July 10th I opened up my store, MASTERPIECES, Paint Your Own in La Mesa, CA. I am having the time of my life. It is hard work, but so satisfying. I meet wonderful women and great kids. I'm learning things about myself I never imagined.

9/11 woke me up inside and made me realize that life is for living.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.