THE NARRATIVE ARC
It Was a Beautiful Tuesday Morning in the American Midwest
Do you remember where you were on September 11, 2001?
I was a professor in this college classroom.
Where were you?
And what did that day mean to you?
Decorah, Iowa (All times are Central Standard)
I got to my office about 6 a.m. to prepare for an 8 a.m. class. I was teaching a new course, Struggle for Freedom, that compared freedom struggles in three countries: Northern Ireland, South Africa, and America.
I completed my work in Koren Hall at about 7:30 AM and strolled the 200 yards to Main and my classroom. The sun was on my back on a clear day in the American Midwest.
Always restless before class, I wanted to check whether there were enough whiteboard markers for student reports and enough chairs for the 16 of us.
Also on my mind was where to put the portable lectern to signal students where I would be sitting. I put it at the end of the table facing the door. I did not check whether the TV would work because I did not plan to use it.
Tuesday, September 11, would be our 5th class meeting. We started with Northern Ireland, and that day’s topic was the role of terrorism in the conflict between Protestant and Catholic Communities.
It was an ordinary Tuesday morning on the Luther College campus in Decorah, Iowa.
Boston & New York
At 6:59 AM, American Airlines Flight 11, which carried 92 people, took off from Boston International Airport and bound for Los Angeles.
Around the time I got to my office:
Captain John Ogonowski and First Officer Thomas McGuiness Jr. were going through their pre-flight routines.
Chief Flight Attendant Karen Martin and Flight Attendants Barbara Arestegui, Jeffrey Collman, Sara Low, Kathleen Nicosia, Betty Ann Ong, Jean Roger, Dianne Snyder, and Amy Sweeney were overseeing the boarding of passengers.
Mohamed Atta, Abdulaziz al-Omari, Wail al-Shehri, Waleed al-Sheri, and Stam al-Sugami were among the 81 passengers who found seats.
At 7:19 AM, Flight Attendant Betty Ann Ong notified the American Airlines ground crew that Flight 11 had been hijacked. Ong provided information for 25 minutes.
Two minutes after Ong’s last transmission, at 7:46 AM, Mohamed Atta guided American Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
Decorah (8 AM)
As the 15 students traipsed into Main 211, one mentioned he had heard on the news that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.
And then, just after we started class, at 8:03 AM, Marwan al-Shehhi steered United Flight 75 into the South Tower. In 2001, no one in the class had a laptop or handheld device to see news as it was happening.
Just as Hani Hanjour maneuvered American Airlines 175 into the Pentagon at 8:37 AM, a student poked her head into our classroom and told us another plane had hit the World Trade Center.
I went to the TV in the classroom and discovered it was not working. But the world had impinged upon our orderly classroom, and we needed to see what was happening. I remembered a TV in my department’s administrative assistant’s office and told the class to follow me.
It was about 8:50 AM.
We hurried across campus into Chelle Meyer’s third-floor office just in time to see the south tower collapse at 8:59.
Seven minutes later, the passengers of Flight 93 forced Ziad to fly the plane into a Pennsylvania field instead of the US Capitol or White House.
At 9:28 AM, two minutes before my class on Northern Ireland terrorism would have ended, the North Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed.
Nineteen terrorists, four planes, 265 passengers and crew, 2712 killed, and 6000 injured on that beautiful Tuesday morning.
What did that day mean to me?
On November 22, 1963, I was in a freshman high school English class when President John Kennedy was assassinated. I remember an announcement over the intercom and a classmate joking about “who Jackie would sleep with that night.” Nothing else until the following day when I went to pay my paper route bill at the newspaper office. Everything seemed normal. No one was talking about Kennedy’s murder.
Why not?, I thought. Don’t they know something terrible has happened? And then the next day, a Sunday, when we came home after mass, my dad told us Jack Ruby had shot Lee Harvey Oswald.
How does a 14-year-old process these events?
Five years later, in the summer of 1968, after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, my dad came home from his work as an engineer and asked, “What was happening in our country?”
I started my sophomore year in college the following fall, and college helped me filter, distill, extract, and clarify what was happening in the world.
I was no longer that paperboy overwhelmed. I didn’t know it then, but a college professor was born from the crucible of the 1960s.
College, through its courses, professors, speakers, and midnight dorm sessions, provides context for events. Knowing something is always so much better than knowing nothing.
It’s always made me less anxious.
In the spring of 2000, I took students to Northern Ireland to study the conflict between the Catholic and Protestant communities. That pricked my interest in terrorism, a topic I never explored in graduate school.
When politics, religion, and terrorism all came together on that terrible, beautiful Tuesday, I needed to know more about what was going on in the world that would produce these horrors.
So, in the summer of 2002, I developed a new course, Terrorism and Democracy.
It will be a one-off.
I taught Terrorism and Democracy every year until I retired in 2018. It became one of Luther College's most popular courses.
What about you? What did America’s 9/11 mean to you?
