By Bob Ray Sanders
bobray@ star-telegram.com
It was a day when the usually bustling newsroom momentarily stood still in shock, collapsed quickly into mourning and then relied on pillars of prayer and patriotism for support.
I had never seen anything like it, but then the country had never experienced anything like what happened on that September morning 10 years ago today.
Preparing to leave home for a company meeting, I noticed that the
Today show had cut to a live shot of smoke coming from one of the World Trade Center towers, and hosts Matt Lauer and Katie Couric were speculating that "a small plane" had crashed into it.
Shortly afterward, a second airplane -- clearly a commercial jetliner -- crashed into the second tower, and it became obvious that America was under attack.
I rushed to the office, where other staff members were showing up on impulse. We gathered around newsroom TV monitors and watched in horror as the first tower crumbled into a cloud of dust; then the second.
Seasoned reporters and editors hugged themselves, held their hands over their mouths in disbelief and watched helplessly before frantically setting in motion plans for trying to cover the catastrophic event.
The news got worse as reports came in about the attack on the Pentagon and the plane crash in Pennsylvania.
At one point, Executive Editor Jim Witt asked me whether there was something we should do, inside the building, to try to bring some sense of solace for the staff.
As others planned an extra edition and considered how to cover the tragedy, I put together an agenda for a "memorial service" -- something I'd never seen done at a newspaper -- set for noon.
I asked someone to find a U.S. flag, and suddenly one was placed prominently in the newsroom. Where it came from, I don't know.
Just before 12 o'clock, people silently gathered in the middle of the newsroom for what would be a 25-minute memorial.
We prayed in the name of "God, Jehovah, Allah" and read scripture from the Torah, Bible and Koran. We spoke of pain, peace, unity, freedom and love of country.
"By the time I got to the newsroom, we were hurrying to try and put out an extra that we could get out on the street before noon," Witt recalled. "It's the only extra I can remember in my 25-year career at the
Star-Telegram."
It was also the first time he remembers that we printed an editorial on the front page.
For big national stories, we often depend on the wire services, but knowing that the airports would be locked down for days, "several staffers volunteered to drive to New York City to try and add local angles to the stories coming out of the devastation," Witt said.
"I was skeptical because I wasn't sure the thousands of dollars it would cost would bring us unique content but agreed that we could send two vans full of reporters, [an] editor and photographers."Once it was decided we would "go to the story," Managing Editor Kathy Vetter led a team of 10 reporters and three photographers who drove
three vans straight through to New York, leaving around 5 p.m. Sept. 11 and arriving in New York on the night of Sept. 12.
As they drove, listening to news reports on the radio, they knew their job would be to try to grasp the magnitude of the disaster and then try to make sense of it all, Vetter said.
"Of course, there was no way to make sense of any of it," she said. "Most of the people on our team were old hands at covering tragedy: the Oklahoma City bombing, the massacre at Fort Worth's Wedgwood Baptist Church and so on. But none was prepared for what we found in New York. Thousands of missing-persons posters on every surface; the smoke rising from lower Manhattan as we approached from New Jersey; the ash left on goods in retail stores near ground zero."
Witt said: "It was one of the best decisions the staff ever talked me into during my 15 years as editor of the
Star-Telegram. We were part of the Knight Ridder chain of newspapers at the time, and even though there were several papers much closer to New York than we were, they didn't make the effort while we got there within 24 hours and essentially became the 9-11 bureau for Knight Ridder."
Star-Telegram staffers did a superb job, some spending weeks covering the story from New York City.
Vetter confessed that "even though we did our best to be objective and to report the facts of the investigation and tell the stories of the people, living and dead, we did make one concession to emotion: I ripped an image of an American flag out of the newspaper and taped it to the window of our hotel room."
And oh, the flag placed in the newsroom that day? It's still there.
Bob Ray Sanders' column appears Sundays and Wednesdays.817-390-7775
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