Where I was when the world stopped turning
I realized that, unlike everybody else, I hadn't yet shared my Sept. 11 story. Having learned today that another terrorist attack is almost a certainty (to which I say, at the risk of drawing td's ridicule again, "duh!"), and never wanting to miss a chance to be like everyone else, might was well share now. These memories were also jarred loose by a semi-routine cleanout of various e-mail inboxes, which still had remnants of early September e-mails. There's no larger point to this; it's simply a recounting of some of the more odd things that flashed into my mind that day.

The newspaper we gave to readers on the morning of Sept. 11 was dull, dull, dull. Our 1A centerpiece was about the woes of the local farmers' market, and that ran on Page 1 because we really had nothing else. It was the latest in a run of dull papers. We needed some news in the worst way.

Well, not long after those dull papers thudded on driveways all over Texas, we got news. In the very worst way.

I took my daughter to school that Tuesday, as usual. I was pumping gas at 7:50-something a.m. CDT when the morning radio gag-fest suddenly turned serious. The gag-fest news reporter guy said, "We have a report that a small plane has hit the World Trade Center." As the numbers clicked away on the gas pump, I flipped to the AM news mouthpiece. What I heard stunned me. I didn't understand any of the words, but the guy was screaming at the top of his voice. I had a really prescient, intelligent thought, something along the lines of Wow, this must be bad.

Still pumping gas (hey, the minivan's got a 20-gallon tank), I called home on the cell phone. I told The Wife to switch over to the news. "I have no idea what's actually happening," I said, "but it's bad."

The radio news reports were still basically confused garble when I got home. It all came into focus thanks to the Today Show: smoke pouring from one of the towers of the World Trade Center. It was about 8:10 CDT. Now they were pretty sure it wasn't a small plane at all, but a jetliner. An American flight from Boston was unaccounted for. I rushed to the computer and punched in aa.com, American Airlines' web site. I went to their flight tracker and got all the flights from Boston. The first one on the list: Flight 11, to Los Angeles.

I went into the kitchen to make the Young Daughter's breakfast. My cereal pouring was interrupted by my wife, who said, "Katie Couric just said, 'What the hell is that?' "

Katie Couric's way too cute to be using language like that. I put the cereal box down in time to see the second plane hit the second tower on live television. "Holy shit," I said quietly, so The Boy -- who really wanted me to turn back to PBS -- wouldn't pick up an addition to his vocabulary. "We're under attack."

It was 8:30 a.m. I called The Boss. I said something intelligent like, "Looks like we've got a big one here." I asked if I should come in now or wait until later; clearly it was going to be a long night. He said wait. I went back to the TV. The Young Daughter still hadn't gotten her cereal, and she was not happy about it. I backtracked to solve that problem.

The TV people were confused, but handling it incredibly well, I thought. After all, we were under attack. They could be excused for being a bit flustered. The Wife and I discussed pulling The Old Daughter out of school. She wanted to. I didn't. I thought it would scare her unnecessarily. The Wife fumed for a while, but agreed.

Then: "There's been an explosion at the Pentagon." I said it out loud again: "Holy shit." Decided that those were words my 2-year-old son probably needed to know now. My mind was 35 miles south, at the office. This is going to be 32 pages, at least; big graphics, maps, pictures, what the hell is going on? Then another flight, United 93, unaccounted for.

Just before 10 a.m., the phone rang. It was a co-worker. "The Boss says come in now." In my other ear, from a local TV reporter, I hear the words, " ... Independent School District ... " Then, The Wife. "That's it," she said, "I'm going to get her." I started to protest, then stopped. Apparently some school district in the area -- not ours -- was closing school for the day. That was the clincher for her.

Meanwhile, my mind was racing, and soon, so was my Oldsmobile Alero. I made the 33.8-mile drive to work on a Tuesday morning in 30 minutes. You do the math. I found out that my car's speed is electronically limited to 112 mph. We're either putting out an early edition, I thought, or they're locking down the building.

Turned out it was both.

I got out of the car and stood in the parking lot for a second, trying to get my pulse rate back down to normal. It hit me then that this was the Biggest Story Ever. I don't know how to do this, I thought. I don't have any idea. It was as if my brain had been wiped clean of everything I had learned over the past 16 years.

As soon as I was in the building, I was herded to a computer terminal and told I was designing the cover of our Extra edition. Deadline was 2 p.m. God only knew what more would happen between now and then. I didn't worry about it. I started designing, and fast, because everybody on the newspaper's masthead -- the publisher himself, the editor, the executive editor, the managing editor, and assorted others -- was standing behind me.

I hit the button on that page at 1:58, and turned my attention to the regular paper. The final page count was 48. I don't remember a lot of specifics from that exercise. We were just hunting and gathering and trying to determine what was true and what wasn't.

Midway through the day, an e-mail from a guy in Sports: "They're saying 50,000 people might have been in that building. 58,000 were killedin the Vietnam War." Upper management was clearly grappling with the story too; they were trying to cover it like we would any other Big Story, not wanting to realize that this has transcended Big Story and gone past Life-Changing Moment.

When you're a production-side journalist, you sometimes forget that the characters in the stories are real people. The bigger the story, the less real they seem, because all you're concerned about is production. It hit us like a bucket of cold water about 11 p.m., when the pictures of the people who were on those planes began coming in. I was scrolling through them with a photo editor. Flashing on our screen was picture after picture of real people, people who had boarded an airplane on a Tuesday morning like millions of people had before them. People who were killed in an gruesome example of humans' capability to be inhumane.

I was in the office until 2 a.m. the next day, which meant I missed the most interesting and intriguing part of the day -- what normal people were doing on this most abnormal of days.

The Wife called in periodically to report on the real-world hysteria. Gas stations posting prices upwards of $3.99 a gallon. Lines forming for $3.99-a-gallon gas. She said the Extra edition I had just designed -- which we were giving away -- was going off the trucks faster than people could get there. She said some guy offered her $5 for her copy. She refused, because she didn't know if she could get her hands on another one. The surrealism was almost palpable. She said it was like being in one of those disaster movies, where all of the people who weren't actually involved in the disaster were milling about like stunned zombies, not quite sure what to do with themselves. Her most striking moment, she said, came at a stoplight. She was behind a car whose windows were already painted. On the back was a simple thought: "PRAY."

I told one of our business editors about the gas-price thing. She didn't believe me. I sent her a link to a story on a wire. She still didn't believe me. She was rather angrily not believing me by now. I delivered a printout of a photo of a guy putting "$5.99" up on his gas-station sign. She hollered over to one of her reporters, "Why haven't we been out on this gas-price thing?" I'm still waiting for her apology.

A co-worker related my favorite tale of the day. His dad is a big-wig in the state car dealer's associaion. He was scheduled to be on Capitol Hill that morning, and when hell broke loose, he intelligently decided to high-tail it out of there. Last his family heard, he was having trouble finding transportation. He called home from North Carolina. His wife asked him how the hell he had gotten there. He said: "I bought a car."

I kept all the newspapers from the first two weeks. At some point, it'll be interesting to go back and see how much we had wrong.