You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
9/11/01
That’s Crazy Man. 11 years have passed. Seriously, crazy. Where has all the time gone?
We all remember where we were. It’s an indelible moment in the American collective.
Like millions of us, I was going to work.
I look up at the TV, waiting for a traffic report and suddenly, Diane Sawyers breaks in and says “we have a report of an explosion at the World Trade Center.”
It was a day of surreal terror after that.
I’ll never forget my boss calling me and ordering me to the airport.
The airport?
I need you in New York he yells.
I’ve got nothing with me but the clothes on my back.
New York?
I got like 2 dollars in my pocket, New York?
Get on a plane and get to New York he orders.
His instincts were purely news. In a quixotic world, it’s probably a good move. Go to New York. That’s where the buildings are burning right?
He knew we were dealing with something unlike anything we had ever dealt with. It’s like ordering a news crew to the USS Arizona on Pearl Harbor day, or Berlin the day the wall was torn down.
The problem is executing that plan. How do you get to the belly of the beast when the world is exploding around you?
New York? Where was I going? How was I getting there? How would I shoot it and broadcast it and get the information back to Nashville? All these thoughts raced through my mind.
He couldn’t know all this at 8:45 am.
I drove to the airport and then everything changed.
That’s when the planes started to land. One after another after another. Every plane in the air was ordered to the ground.
Suddenly Nashville International was a parking lot.
Suddenly the New York plan was nullified. I couldn’t fly to New York or Memphis or anywhere else. The world was grounded, the world had changed forever.
We had passengers filling the terminal from all over the country.
They had stories of what it was like to be in the air and then ordered to the ground. We interviewed them all.
It was frightening, it was compelling. At times it felt like the end of the world.
This was our story and we couldn’t even broadcast it.
Peter Jennings was now on TV wall to wall and he would be for the better part of the day.
I interviewed people at the airport and waited to go live, but that break would never come. What we had to say in Nashville just couldn’t compare to what was going on in N.Y. and Washington and Pennsylvania.
Collecting news and not reporting it is like catching fish and throwing them back. It was frustrating.
I remember a semi truck driving around the quasi deserted streets flying a flag that read: FREEDOM TO DIE.
I thought it frighteningly poignant at the time.
After a 15 hour day, of collecting news and waiting to report it to the Nashville audience, we finally went on around 10:30 that night.
By then I was at a service station in Franklin Tennessee where there were rumors of price gauging and long lines.
People were lined up and the fear in the air was palpable.
I went in to the service station and confronted the manager. I asked him if he was jacking up the price of gas.
He said no, and then told me to get off the property.
People cheered as I walked back to my news van.
I remember going on live TV and telling viewers to relax, that there was plenty of gas for everyone and that things were going to be OK.
I believed it then and I believe it now.
A viewer called me on my cell phone and thanked me for bringing a sense of calm to an otherwise frantic day.
911 was a galvanizing moment in history.
It changed all of us. It made us remember. It made me appreciate every day.
We will never forget. I will never forget.
And that is crazy.™