"What's the worst story you've ever had to cover?"
Journalists hear that question often, and some of us have a great deal to choose from.
In 2009, I was on the scene soon after a man murdered 13 people in 90 seconds just 12 blocks from my house. I interviewed the deputy who arrived after a drunken driving crash snuffed out the lives of three teens and their driver's ed teacher. I've listened as the hopeful voices turn to sobs as people learned the disappearance of a loved one had ended in suicide.
But for those of us who were journalists 19 years ago, working three hours from Manhattan, nothing approaches 9/11.
The day began with a mad dash to the regional airport to interview passengers of airplanes that were ordered out of the sky.
Inside the airport sandwich shop, I held the hand of a sobbing TV reporter as she watched broadcast images of buildings burning in the city where she had gone to college. The airport commissioner — the first person I interviewed — ended our conversation with a chilling "... and we might not be done yet."
He knew about Flight 93. I, until then, had not.
Then came a race back to the office to file a story for an extra edition, one for which people would line up in our lobby. I moved to the editors' desk to weave together dispatches from my colleagues reporting on sudden school closings and building evacuations and the cancellations of that day's elections.
A pause, just for a minute, to watch as the small black-and-white television showed the first tower crumble to dust.
Furiously returning to writing, stopping for a quick call to my parents outside Chicago. Putting the phone down and it immediately ringing, my college roommate's number on the caller ID.
Me: "What are you doing?" Bill: "We're sitting on the roof of our building, (pause) watching the Pentagon burn."
The ensuing few days blurred.
A mayor spitting curse words because his police chief's office was filling with containers of "suspicious substances" that a state lab was too swamped to analyze.
A mall the size of Bay Park Square evacuated because someone found "explosives" — which turned out to be food — in a stairwell. A call from a reader: "A few days before this happened, I went through security with a folding knife in my backpack and nobody noticed."
It was two or three days, I think, before I shed tears, having collapsed in an exhausted heap on my girlfriend's couch. I had not cried because of a news story before that night. I don't believe I have since.
The next day seemed to bring the beginning of a return to normalcy. We wrapped up work after maybe 10 hours, instead of 12 or 14. Then an editor called out. The names of some of the victims were being released.
Atop the first list: Navy Lt. Cmdr. Rob Elseth, who had grown up in the largest of the suburbs we covered, dead at the Pentagon at age 37. He had, we would learn later, called his sister an hour before his death to warn her not to go to work at her job at the World Trade Center.
On another list, Steve Lauria, 39, who'd worked in the nearby village of Owego for a number of years. Steve, a guy I remembered as one of the goofy kids in a first-floor suite in our dorm at Syracuse, was last seen headed up the elevator to his job on the 97th floor of Tower One.
And ... other names. Nine in all, with ties to the our community, one smaller than Brown County.
Little had to be said. We took a breath, and went back to work.
Contact Doug Schneider at (920) 431-8333, or dschneid@greenbaypressgazette.com and follow him on Twitter @PGDougSchneider.
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What is the worst story you've ever had to report on? For this journalist, it was 9/11 - Green Bay Press Gazette
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