The (Racine, Wis.) Journal Times
Sep 11, 2021
“Tom, this is Liz,” Elizabeth Young, our features editor, said at the other end of the line. “You have to get down here.”
“What are you talking about?” I replied, not entirely awake yet.
“Oh!” she said in realization. “Turn on your TV.”
I’ve been a professional journalist since 1990. For all but 7 of those years, I’ve been an editor. Reporters frequently have to drop what they’re doing and go cover something, but editors’ work is almost always scheduled. The one exception for me was Sept. 11, 2001.
On that day, I was The Journal Times’ news editor, overseeing the editing of the daily news pages. We had made the Tuesday paper, the one dated Sept. 11, the night before.
Because I worked nights, as did Terry, and because our 5-year-old was in the second or third week of afternoon kindergarten at Jefferson Lighthouse Elementary School, everyone in our house was asleep when the phone rang just after 9 a.m.
I turned the TV on, and saw one of the images that no one who remembers that day can ever forget: Black smoke billowing from the towers of the World Trade Center, and the on-screen graphics indicating that commercial airliners had struck each of the towers.
Dick Johnston, our publisher at that time, and the late Randy Brandt, then our managing editor, had decided that we would publish an extra. It’s the only extra The Journal Times has printed in the past three-plus decades.
When I arrived Downtown, people were gathered around the newsroom’s high-mounted TV, gazing upward in shock and disbelief the way so many others were across America that morning.
There were facts that we learned in the subsequent days, months and years:
• President George W. Bush was reading to children in a Florida classroom when he received news of the attacks. Air Force One, with the president back aboard, would spend that afternoon and early evening darting around the nation to keep him safe.
• Passengers on United Flight 93 from Newark, New Jersey, scheduled to travel to San Francisco, had learned of the two planes that struck the World Trade Center towers, and of a third that had struck the west wall of the Pentagon. Their flight had also been hijacked, and they decided that they would fight back.
• Col. Marc Sasseville and Lt. Heather Penney of the District of Columbia Air National Guard had been sent to find Flight 93, and had received “shoot to kill” orders. But they had scrambled in unarmed aircraft, meaning they had been sent on a kamikaze mission.
None of those facts were known to those of us working at the corner of Fourth Street and Wisconsin Avenue that morning and early afternoon.
We looked at the bulletins being sent by the Associated Press. We watched along with our professional colleagues on the 24-hour news channels as the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed to the ground in Manhattan and the Pentagon burned. We gathered the news as best we could.
Ron Kuenstler, one of our staff photographers, had been dispatched to General Mitchell International Airport in Milwaukee. He captured an image of a woman, who declined to identify herself, reciting the rosary as she watched on TV with others inside the terminal. He made it back in time for him to process his film; our photographers were still shooting with film in 2001. That photograph appears on Page A3 of today’s Journal Times.
Somehow, some way, we pulled together enough information for an eight-page extra, which printed at about 1:15 that afternoon.
“America attacked” was the headline on the front page of the extra. As you can imagine, it’s the largest headline I’ve ever put on a page.
The subhead says “Terrorists strike New York, Washington, Pennsylvania.” The only thing we knew at midday that Tuesday was that a fourth plane had crashed “outside Pittsburgh,” as the AP reported; we didn’t know that Flight 93 had crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, because its occupants had fought back against the hijackers, that the passengers and flight crew had saved countless lives, and spared the lives of Col. Sasseville and Lt. Penney, by preventing the terrorists from reaching their target.
After proofing the extra down in the pressroom, I brought a few copies of the extra up to the second-floor conference room, where Randy Brandt had gathered the newsroom staff. There was spontaneous applause; I don’t think any of us knew what else to do in that moment.
Then we discussed what we were going to cover in the Wednesday, Sept. 12 paper.
When I picked up our 5-year-old from Jefferson Lighthouse School that afternoon, I had already decided not to say anything about what had happened in the world that day. There was still time for childhood innocence; learning about the evil in this world could wait.
Tom Farley is managing editor of The Journal Times.
Commmentary link: https://journaltimes.com/news/local/commentary-by-tom-farley-on-9-11-you-have-to-get-down-here/article_d44fb881-b813-5b61-bbc2-e9ace513728e.html
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