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As I get older (full disclosure, I’m not yet 70, but I can see it from my back porch), I tend to look back at my life and remember, with amazing clarity, certain days.
I know I’m not unique in this. I’m sure everyone has an event where they can recall exactly where they were and what they were doing when it occurred. In my life there are a handful of “those days.”
For me, November 22, 1963, was the first of those days, and I don’t think I’m alone. For many of us, we lost our innocence on that day in Dallas when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. There were many reasons I loved JFK. Growing up Catholic, there was a sense of pride that the young, handsome president was “one of us.” I was in first grade at the time and when the announcement came over the schools PA system in the early afternoon I was in shock and there was no happiness that we were let out of school an hour or so early. My strongest memory of that afternoon was walking into the house and seeing my father, who had not yet left for his afternoon shift, cradling my five-month-old brother who was crying, and trying desperately to watch Walter Cronkite deliver the latest news from Texas.
The shock of that day enveloped the nation. At the age of six, I realized, perhaps for the first time, that there was real evil in the world. If someone could kill President Kennedy then it is possible for any bad thing to happen.
Aside from the loss of my grandfather a couple years later, the next time one of those days happened for me was on December 18, 1980. I had graduated from college about a year earlier and was living by myself for the very first time in a tiny apartment in Escanaba. I was watching Monday Night Football on a big black and white TV handed down from some family member. During the game between the Patriots and Dolphins, Frank Gifford handed the announcement over to Howard Cosell who told me, and the world, that John Lennon had been murdered outside of his apartment in New York City. I was in disbelief. Again the unreal feeling that if this could happen then there’s no ceiling on evil in the world.
I remember turning off the TV and taking a walk outside. There was a light snow falling on that December night. I distinctly remember walking on First Avenue south, a block away from the bright lights and stores of Ludington Street, feeling sorry for myself and for the world. John Lennon, my favorite Beatle, was gone. If a person who dedicated so much of himself to peace and love could be ripped away from us so violently, then, in my young adult mind, there was no limit to evil in the world.
The latest, and certainly most significant, of these type of days took place 25 years ago today. I was working at Keweenaw Memorial Hospital (now Aspirus) in Laurium. I got a phone call on that Tuesday morning from my wife, Maryann, asking if I was listening to the radio. I was not. “A plane crashed into the World Trade Center, in New York,” she told me.
Of course at first I thought it was an accident and figured it was a small plane that hit the world’s biggest building. I went down to the second floor visitor lounge where I knew there was a TV. There were already a couple of people there watching the life coverage of the smoke pouring out of the hole made by the jet. Slowly the number of people gathered in lounge grew and we watched in horror as a second plane struck the second tower. We were still watching, transfixed, about an hour later when the towers collapsed.
What is etched in my memory is not so much what I was watching on TV that morning. But whom I was watching it with. Looking around the small visitor lounge there were a few people of mixed ages obviously visiting patients, there was a custodian, a couple of nurses, and administrative aid and one of our surgeons. A group of people from varied backgrounds and social status. But at that moment, we were all the same. We were Americans and we were watching our country being attacked as it had never been before, or since.
I don’t remember the names of any of the folks watching with me. But I remember the faces. Shock, sadness, grief.
I had not experienced anything like it. The moments I mentioned earlier, while tragic, could not compare to what I was watching. In many ways, the country I grew up in was gone, or at least changed in such a way, we may never go back to what we had before 9/11/01.
On today’s front page we take a look back at that Tuesday morning 25 years ago. One of the stories focuses on students who weren’t even born, but who’s families lives, and indirectly their own lives, were impacted by the events of Sept. 11.
We will forever remember that day. A quarter of a century later, we still hold the memories of those who died, their families and the thousands who were impacted by the events that unfolded in the aftermath of that attack. We cherish those lives.
We will never forget, September 11,2001.
Mark Wilcox is a long-time Upper Peninsula journalist and currently serves as Community Editor of the Daily Mining Gazette. You can contact him at mwilcox@mininggazette.com