t was a day no one will ever forget.
It began for me as a happy one, my birthday. I awoke to find a
birthday card on my dresser top. It was from my wife and daughter.
I drove to work on the lovely late summer morning. As always, I
took the New Jersey Turnpike. There is a spot where the Manhattan
skyline becomes visible and you see the twin towers of the World
Trade Center. The sight had always thrilled me.
Minutes later, I was in a meeting in Travel Weekly's editorial
department when Henry Magenheim, our Florida editor, came in and
said: "You can see it from our windows."
"See what?" I said.
"The World Trade Center's burning. A plane hit it," he
answered.
My first thought was of my older son who works in the World
Trade Center complex. He had lived through the bombing attack in
1993, escaping through the smoke-filled stairwell to the street
many floors below. Now this.
I assumed it was an accident, but within minutes we knew
differently. A second plane, a second crash at the other tower, and
then word that the Pentagon was aflame, and the realization that
for the first time, America's mainland was under a direct,
coordinated terrorist attack on several fronts.
People gathered in our office halls to look out of the windows
at the smoke billowing from the Trade Center across the river. Soon
the smoke formed a mushroom cloud and I thought of the famous photo
of the Hiroshima attack at the end of the Second World War.
I tried calling my son at his office and on his cell phone but
couldn't get through. His mother called me, crying. His brother
called to see if I had heard anything.
People in the office were crying, some fearful that family
members and friends who worked near the trade center might be
lost.
Our editors gathered around radios. One went across the street
to buy a portable television set at the appliance store. A few
began to work on gathering the first bits of information for a
story.
Around 11 a.m., more than two hours after the first attack, my
son called. He said he'd escaped from the trade center and gotten
onto a ferry boat to New Jersey.
As the boat's passengers looked back at the Manhattan skyline,
one of the towers collapsed. Minutes later, the other tower fell to
the ground. The famed twin towers were gone.
I was a small child on Dec. 7, 1941. I knew it was a grim day
for America, but it was a fuzzy, distant event to a child so
young.
This was all too real, all too vivid, my own grown son in the
middle of it. But he had lived and I heard his voice, the best
birthday present I could get.