9/11: Gettysburg professors and students remember where they were
The World Trade Center was once an iconic part of the NYC skyline. Photo credit: time.com
By Sarah Van De Weert, Opinions Editor
“The pilot got on the intercom and said, ‘I have a very important announcement to make, so if you’re awake you need to listen. If your neighbor is not awake, you need to wake them up immediately.’”
“‘Professor Neller, have you heard?’ ‘Heard what?’ ‘The world is coming to an end.’”
“…[I] sat [in the CUB] and watched some of that coverage as it was being played out in real time and that’s where I saw the first visual images of what was going on and everyone in that room was dead silent, nobody was talking…you could tell the gravity of the situation.”
“That Tuesday morning, I said goodbye to my dad who was going on a business trip for a few days, which wasn’t that uncommon.”
September 11, 2001. 8:46 a.m. 9:03 a.m. 9:37 a.m. 10:03 a.m. Where were you?
Gettysburg remembers.
“I was in a plane. I had spent the summer doing research for my master’s degree in Tanzania, so I had been awake for 36 hours at that point,” recalled Professor Cassie Hays. “The pilot got on the intercom and said, ‘I have a very important announcement to make, so if you’re awake you need to listen. If your neighbor is not awake, you need to wake them up immediately.’”
“He went on to say, ‘The United States is under attack. The United States airspace has been closed to air travel.’ We were supposed to land in New York about 9 in the morning on 9/11 or 8:30, so we were not very far away. He said, ‘We do not have enough fuel to return to England. So we’re now trying to find a place to land in Canada.’ Of course he said, ‘I will let you know when there’s more information.’ Very quickly, he came back on and told us that it was the Trade Center towers and we were landing in New York, so there were a good number of New Yorkers on the plane. So there was some hysteria.”
They finally found a place for us to land in Nova Scotia, so we land on the tarmac and we sat on the plane for another 8 or 10 hours—they didn’t have anywhere to put us. We sat on the plane long enough that the toilets got full, we ran out of food, we started to run out of water…and meanwhile there’s still people who are hysterical, nobody can get through on their cell phones. I managed to get ahold of my folks in Kansas…my poor mother had somehow gotten it into her head that I was in the plane even though it couldn’t have been possible, but I was flying into New York that morning so…”
They let us off the plane and I remember looking down the tarmac and there are hundreds of planes just lined up— hundreds and hundreds of planes. And this was a big international flight, there were hundreds of us on the flight,” Hays remembered.
I had been awake 72 hours at this point and I have this vivid memory of going into this room and there being a bunch of, just a bunch of televisions, and everyone was absolutely dead silent, standing and sitting in this room and people were just crying, just tears streaming down their face. And I remember I was so tired I could not make sense of what had happened. They kept showing it on a loop. I just remember being utterly confused and in shock.”
Professor Hays was able to arrange for a bus to take herself and other stranded Americans to a ferry, which then was able to take them across the Canadian- US border into Maine.
Other faculty, like Professors Todd Neller and Timothy Shannon, were here on campus.
“I was in my office in Glatfelter 209,” recalled Neller, “And I had taught an 8:30 a.m. class in which I had one student and he had a class thereafter, I was in my office for office hours and he swung by my office door and with this stunned expression said, ‘Professor Neller, have you heard?’ ‘Heard what?’ ‘The world is coming to an end.’”
And he exited, left that hanging in the air. Not knowing what he was upset about, I went from my office down the hall to see what was going on, found other faculty members trying to get access to news and such and learned about the first hit. I recall later that morning that another student came to my office, really concerned and somewhat teary, anticipating that this would very likely mean war and since that student was in ROTC that he would very likely be going and that was the case eventually.”
Professor Timothy Shannon recalls that, “On campus that day, everyone was pretty much in a state of shock. Very quickly the college set up video reminders in the CUB that had the news coverage going on and so I walked over there and sat and watched some of that coverage as it was being played out in real time and that’s where I saw the first visual images of what was going on and everyone in that room was dead silent, nobody was talking…you could tell the gravity of the situation.”
Other faculty members were still in school at the time of the attack.
“I was in graduate school, and it was the morning I was discussing my master’s thesis research project with a professor,” said Professor Brian Meier. “Another faculty member came into his office and said, ‘Hey, did you hear? A plane just hit the World Trade Center.’ And I had been to New York a few times and knew how many people were in there. And my first reaction was oh, a plane crash. You know, like everybody else, an accident. We ended our meeting and I went to the Student Union to watch TV and that’s when we started realizing it was a terrorist attack. So the rest of the day, I spent basically glued to the TV like most Americans.”
“I was in undergrad,” recalled Professor Natalie Barlett. “And I was in class that morning… so I did not find out about it until I left class…when I left and walked through the union they had the television on, and I don’t even think it hit me at that point what was really happening until later when I got back to my dorm room, and we turned the television on and saw how big of an event it really was.”
Professor Kathy Delaney was living in Long Island at that time, when she heard the news.
“I heard it over the radio. The first plane. And then I called my husband who worked at Brooklyn to tell him, because he was already at work so he did not have access to the media. I said, ‘So they are saying something about a plane crashing into the World Trade Center.’ At that time we did not know it was a huge airliner—we were just thinking it was a small plane or something like that. He said, ‘Well, I will go up to the roof,’ because he could see the Trade Center from where he worked— it was literally right across the river—and as a result he got up there with some other colleagues and they witnessed the second plane going in.”
Current students, although young at the time, remember that day as well.
Junior Cynthia Lee said, “At school, I remember my third grade teacher talking about grammar, specifically nouns. My classroom was strangely dim despite the blinds being open. In the middle of the lesson, one of my classmates was called to the office for early dismissal. Then another and another. I was jealous that so many people got to leave school, and I eagerly hoped that my name would be called next. Nobody knew what was going on, and later I heard that the teachers were not allowed to turn on the TVs to watch the news.” I was so excited when my name was called for early dismissal that I didn’t catch on that it was not a good thing, and it was not until I got home that I realized that something was wrong. The whole memory is a blur of panic and confusion.”
Lee lost her father, a passenger on American Airlines Flight 77, which struck the Pentagon.
“At eight, I did not know what terrorism was or what the World Trade Centers or the Pentagon was. I understood the plane crash part, but it wasn’t for a few years that I learned how much it affected the nation. I lived in my own little sheltered bubble, and it seemed like the rest of the world carried on while my family was experiencing a crisis.”
It has been twelve years, and the mention of 9/11 still sends chills down people’s backs,” Lee stated.
On that day, the American people vowed to never forget what happened. Twelve years later and America has not forgotten. We will never forget.
