I was asleep. That’s the great irony. I worked in newsrooms for a lot of big stories — the OJ Simpson trial and verdict, the Centennial Park bombing, Colombine, trials from Timothy McVeigh to Robert Blake, terror attacks from Centennial Park to London, wars from the Balkans to Iraq, and the deaths of Jerry Garcia, Yitzhak Rabin, Princess Diana, and on up to Ronald Reagan and John Paul II.
Comes the biggest news event in my lifetime — I hope to ever see a bigger one — I was a sleep. I was working nights. I fell asleep with the TV on, but it was on HBO, so they didn’t cut in.
Working nights, before the Do Not Call registry, I’d learned to sleep through a ringing telephone. There were probably a dozen phone calls before the one that finally woke me up a little before noon.
(Groggily) “Hello?”
“Are you watching?”
“Watching what?”
“The World Trade Center is gone.”
“No, really. What?”
“Turn to CNN. “
(Silence)
(More silence)
(Many expletives deleted)
I ended that call and started calling around. My mom was on her way to a convention in Virginia Beach, and was waiting in the Atlanta airport when the planes were grounded. Mom, my sister and I formed a phone triangle, both of us following the news on TV and the Web and passing it on to Mom, who then shared it with the other airport refugees (the TVs in the airport are automatically shut off when there’s a plane crash).
Mom finally got home about 4 PM. She got her luggage back three or four days later.