tiger times
special edition Sept. 9 2016
texas high school • 4001 Summerhill Road, Texarkana, Texas 75503
15 YEARS WHICH ONE OF US CAN SAY we still feel it resonate within us? Which one of us can say we remember with a steely, chilling clarity? Which one of us can say we feel the weight of nearly 3,000 lives pressing heavily into our chest? Which one of us can say with utter, painful finality–my life changed that day?
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
2
special edition
15 YEARS of MEMORIES
submitted photo
Where were you?
Tina VealGooch
Public Relations “I was watching the ‘Today Show’ when they cut in to say that a plane had just hit the first tower, and At that time, I worked for the McDonald’s corporation here in Texarkana. And then I got in my car, was driving to work and then heard about the plane hitting the second tower. At that point, it was scary, you know. Was this going to be all about the two towers, was there more to come? If there were more to come was this the start of a war that none of us were expecting? We were all just glued to our television the rest of the day, just to find out what was going on, what media knew at that point. It just kind of unnerved you. You were unnerved, you were saddened by the number they estimated had been killed, and then thinking–what was going to happen afterwards? I remember going home and sitting down to watch television. I remember being worried about the future of our country, what this was going to entail from our end, were we going to retaliate, and if we did how much deeper how it would get? And now you’re seeing every day, I think, repercussions of what 9/11 did to our country.“
sept. 9, 2016 • tigertimesonline.com
The aggregate number of those who walk these halls number 1,900; 1,000 lives less than were lost on September 11, 2001. Currently, no one with the official title of “student” has any clear memories of that day, yet it is a day so heavily imprinted upon our collective consciousness that any time we see the numbers 9 and 11 together we flash back to an event we have no tangible recollection of. We ranged from 3 years old to nothing at all, and all the phases in between. Our minds and bodies were still developing, meaning we romped in backyards and tottered around on plump, unsteady legs. We cried over stubbed toes, fell off counters, blew spit bubbles and cooed at our reflections, happily unconscious of the war raging outside our borders, drawing ever-closer. Some of us didn’t even quite exist yet, either tucked in a womb or a faint dream conjured up by a hopeful would-be mother. But exactly 15 years ago, America was changed forever. And though we didn’t know it then, we were too. STORIES BY RAGA JUSTIN DESIGN BY LAUREN POTTER & RAGA JUSTIN
4-5
page
Former Kinko’s CEO and alumnus Gary Kusin describes how he became involved in the investigation to determine what happened ON 9/11
page
6
2016 graduate Leah Crenshaw and her family try to cope with the loss of her uncle, who was killed when the first tower collapsed
page
7
Texarkana natives Dorothy Green and Genee Chase still mourn the death of their daughter and sister, who died in the first tower
ONE OF THE LAST to be removed from the World Trade Center site, this steel beam, written on by first responders, is a feature in the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. The museum opened Sept. 11, 2011, to commemorate the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. photo by C. Smith
3
special edition
sept. 9, 2016 • tigertimesonline.com
the day that
e strides forward determinedly, purposefully, but not so fast as to arouse suspicion, toward the man in the chair. Then he leans over and whispers two sentences. A mere two sentences, comprised of 11 words that are so momentous, he enunciates each one with razor-sharp precision, feeling their weight like stones in his mouth. “A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.” Andrew Card was White House Chief of Staff under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2006, a key part of the Bush administration at an unusual time for America: the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on U.S. soil. His memories of that day are clear: waking up early to read over reports; sending the president off to go running with a reporter on a golf course; traveling to Emma E. Booker Elementary, where the president was to read to a roomful of second graders and then deliver a speech over his policies of educational reform to a packed gymnasium. “As we were piling into limousines, I remember two people asking a question. One was [Counselor to the President] Dan Bartlett and the other was [Deputy Chief of Staff] Karl Rove, and they both kind of asked the same question, ‘Anybody hear about a plane crash in New York City?’”
DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS Dan Bartlett points to news footage of the World Trade Center Towers burning, September 11, 2001, as President George W. Bush gathers information about the attack from Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida. Also pictured are Director of White House Situation Room Deborah Loewer, directly behind the President, and Senior Adviser Karl Rove, far right. photo by Eric Draper [public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
He hadn’t, but once they got to the school, more information was forthcoming. “I was standing next to the principal when the director of the White House situation room and the Navy captain at that time came up to the president and said, ‘Sir it appears a small twin engine plane crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center in New York City’,” Card said. “We all had the same reaction, as in ‘Oh, what a horrible accident, the pilot must have had a heart attack’.” The school had a created a holding room to serve as a White House Command center, and it was in there that Card learned the true nature of the incident. “The captain came to me again and said, ‘Sir it appears it was a commercial jetliner’,” Card said. “Then I
thought about the fear the passengers must have had on that plane. But that thought didn’t last very long in my mind because the captain came right back up to me and said another plane hit the other tower. My mind flashed to the initials UBL- that’s what we called Osama Bin Laden. I knew about the attacks orchestrated by al-Qaida in 1992, so I presumed that. Then I performed the test that the chief of staff performs all the time: does the president need to know? And this was an easy test to pass: yes.” So Card determined what he was going to say and walked into the room, knowing full well the impact his words would soon have. “I didn’t take very long to think, and I opened the door to the classroom and stepped in,” Card said. “When
the teacher finished the dialogue she’d been conducting with the president and students, I walked up from behind and leaned over and whispered into his right ear.” To his credit, the president took the news with a straight face and gave the media no inkling that something was wrong, even as both he and Card absorbed the full meaning behind the attack. “I knew that I was delivering an unbelievably rare and important message, and that I was doing it in an unusual forum, a classroom filled with second graders in front of a press pool,” Card said. “I knew it was a message he did not want to have to hear. It was a message I did not want to have to deliver. I knew it would change the nature of what he expected to do as president.”
After he was finished reading, the president stood and walked back to the holding room, where chaos erupted. “I was impressed with how the president reacted that day,” Card said. “He did nothing to take away from the responsibility he had under his oath of office. I think that was the day he realized that the job of the president isn’t just what you campaign on and what you promise to do; it’s what you’re obligated to do because of the oath that you took. The oath comes right from the constitution and it says that the president’s responsibility is to preserve, protect and defend the United States.” The world is an altered place now, says Card. New agencies such as Homeland Security and the Travel Security Agency were created primarily for one purpose: to prevent another such attack from ever happening again. Traffic throughout the U.S., be it emails, people or goods, is heavily scrutinized. “Sept. 11 changed the world, and it changed the nature of how we conduct our business and our economy,” Card said. “So a lot of things changed in our daily lives and it ended up creating burdens and invited a little more paranoia- we see things more skeptically. [But] it gave us more resolve; in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 America came together, and there was a great source of pride. It left us as a different world and certainly a different United States.”
submitted photo
H
DEFINED A PRESIDENCY
Where were you?
Bob Bruggeman Mayor
“I have a friend who was a rep for a pharmaceutical company and that day I was with him making various stops in Northeast Texas. We were about to leave Texarkana when the first plane flew into the tower. Our first thought was, ‘Is this a joke or real or what?’ And then the second plane crashed. We were in the vehicle, listening to the radio, and we would get updates in between the offices we visited. It was very tragic and it was hard to comprehend what was taking place. Our prayers were with those there. It changed our nation. The first thing running through my mind was confusion. When it first happened, I was wondering if it was a pilot error or a mechanical error or something. And when I heard about the second plane, it was more realistic. It struck me that we were being attacked in a very unconventional way. Usually you think troops, or artillery, but this was something different. I spent the day in shock and disbelief.”
4
sept. 9, 2016 • tigertimesonline.com
Angela Spence Teacher
It was a usual day, and I had gone down to the library to make some copies. And while I was at the copier, the librarian said, ‘Spence look at the TV, look here.’ So I went up and looked and the plane had hit the first tower. And we’re going, ‘Oh my goodness, what happened?’ I went back to my room and said to my students, ‘Guys, guess what?’ And while I was telling them [the librarian] came to my door and said, ‘Spence, come here for a minute and look at this.’ The second plane had hit. We looked at each other, we went ‘Oh my God. This is not an accident.’ And I said, ‘America is being attacked.’ And all day we watched the news. The thing that had me up in a roar the most was my daughter, who had just left home on Sept. 4. She had just gone into the Air Force. I called her recruiter. I said, ‘What have you got my daughter into?’ He said, ‘Mrs. Spence, it’s gonna be okay, it’s gonna be okay,’ but I said, ‘No, it’s not. I want to talk to my daughter. I’m going to San Antonio.’ But he told me, ‘Mrs. Spence, you can’t. They’re not gonna let you on that base.’ Because now all the military bases in America had gone on lockdown. So it was just a harrowing experience. It’s something we will never forget.
W
UNCOVERED
hat did those three men who sauntered into a Kinko’s on a muggy Florida day three weeks before 9/11 think? Were they nervous? Apprehensive, in any way? Did they perhaps think of the people whose lives would be forever affected by what they were about to do? Did they think of their mothers, of innocence, of the kindness of complete strangers? Or did they think of their ability to change the course of a country simply by walking outside, breathing in the hot air, and throwing away the CD’s they held in their hands? Inconspicuous. That was Kinko’s. It gave off the impression of being a mom-and-pop, corner-of-thestreet copy shop. And when Texas High School alumnus Gary Kusin, the CEO of Kinko’s from August 2001 to January 2006, took the helm, it was floundering. “At the time, there were 1,200 locations in the U.S., Korea, Japan, Australia, England and the Netherlands,” Kusin said. “And it was a struggling company. In fact, my charge when I got there was to take six months to figure out whether it could be saved or not.” In order to determine if Kinko’s was to stay afloat, Kusin decided to travel all over the United States to visit those on the front lines– the sales representatives and the day-to-day workers. “I spent six weeks in every one of 43 regions of the U.S., holding town hall meetings and asking people what was wrong with
Kinko’s,” Kusin said. “And so I had a very good idea of what I wanted to do, and called a meeting of all senior officers in Kinko’s in Denver, Colorado, on Sept. 11. That was going to be the first time I’d actually met a bunch of them, it would be the first time I’d tell them: here’s what I’ve learned in my travels and here’s what we’re going to be doing differently in order to become successful.” And that’s what he was doing when the news came to him, over a phone call with his son. “I thought ‘Gee, I can’t believe that happened’, but I didn’t think much about it,” Kusin said. “And within 15 minutes, there was a gasp in the restaurant and someone yelled out ‘Oh my God, another building has been hit by a plane!’ and at that moment, I knew that there was a problem.” Kusin couldn’t have known about the phone call he was to receive an hour later, one that would mobilize his company and give him a purpose he had never dreamed of. “Around 10 a.m. that morning, our head of Human Resources at Kinko’s came in and said, ‘We have a store manager in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, who needs to speak to you urgently’,” Kusin said. “‘He won’t speak to anyone else, he won’t tell me what it’s about, but he said that you need to speak with him.’” Kusin was familiar with the store manager, whom he had visited a few weeks prior on one of his stops at Kinko’s locations across
Weeks after 3 men walked into a Florida Kinko’s, Texas High alumnus Gary Kusin was catapulted into government efforts to determine just what happened on September 11
the country. The manager recounted an incident that had happened around three weeks before. “He said, ‘It was about the time that you were here, I was working the late shift, it was about 10 p.m., and three guys came in, clearly Middle Eastern guys’,” Kusin said. “‘And they wanted to make a copy of a CD. Our CD burner in the store was broken, and I told them I was sorry but it was broken, but it occurred to me that I could burn their CD on my computer at my house. I asked, ‘Would you like me to do that?’ and they said, ‘That would be great’. And so I told them they could pick it up the next morning.” The store manager burned the CDs at home. What he found struck him as slightly odd, but he brushed it off. The contents? Complete schematics for American Airline 757 planes including seat assignments and diagrams of the wiring. “He said, ‘I thought maybe they worked for American Airlines. I didn’t know, didn’t think about it. The next morning I gave them their copies and they were on their way, and now today I see 757 American Airlines planes flying into the Pentagon and World Trade Center, and I’m really worried there’s a connection.’” At this point, Kusin grasped the full implications of what the store manager had told him. Turning, he saw his Human Resources head, who had overheard the conversation and offered up an important authority figure to talk to: his cousin George Tenet, who so happened to be the director of the CIA.
sept. 9, 2016 • tigertimesonline.com
5
Where were you?
“I said, ‘You need to call him right now and tell him what I just told you,’” Kusin said. “He agreed and sure enough, 10 minutes later we had George Tenet, head of the CIA, on the phone. So within minutes, the FBI were in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, at the store manager’s house taking his computer.” From there, events unfolded rapidly. In less than three hours, the CIA had contacted Kusin again to ask about security footage in the stores. The average Kinko’s has about a dozen video cameras that run for 30 days straight, meaning this particular one in Florida had a month’s worth of footage. FBI agents then sat in the store combing over footage, eventually finding the suspects and noting their use of rental computers. With Kinko’s network of 12,000 computers, they were able to find out what websites the hijackers had been visiting. From there, they began to search for other rental computers in the network that had been hitting those same websites. They found several, in Minneapolis and Boston. “We ended up going through the video footage over and over all the next day–it is the video footage from Kinko’s that showed the faces of all the hijackers,” Kusin said. “All of them bought their tickets from the computers at Kinko’s. Every one of them was on footage.” Over the next two months, there were as many as 50 FBI agents working undercover at Kinko’s stores, monitoring activity. Agents also worked in the network operations center, because they now knew exactly what websites the hijackers’
cohorts were going to, and every time anyone from any Kinko’s location accessed those websites and triggered activity on them–anywhere from purchasing airline tickets to receiving wired money–agents were flagged. As an aside, Kusin says, the FBI caught four of their most wanted people over the next five years simply through using that same network, and monitoring illegal Internet activity. But their greatest contribution? Directly assisting government efforts during those first few frenzied weeks after 9/11. “So we had incredible access,” Kusin said, “And as a result of that, as long as we were fully enmeshed with the FBI and all that, we set up a free-standing copy center at Ground Zero in a park, in order to help the FBI make copies of floor plans of the buildings that were damaged, as well as other things.” Kusin’s focus for the next few weeks, then, was to maximize Kinko’s ability to aid government officials. “It’s one of those things where you slow down and get really serious really quickly,” Kusin said. “What can I do to help, how can I be the most helpful I can possibly be and throw the most resources at this?” It’s a significant role to play, especially in a time when chaos reigned and seemingly paltry details like copy machines tended to get overlooked. But Kusin downplays Kinko’s part, describing them simply as a ‘cog in the wheel’. “We bought the government time,” Kusin said. “We were told that it was incredible that we were able to have all that information and help the entire investigation leapfrog
dramatically so that they knew how it happened in hours. But if you think of everything that was going on–they had buildings falling down, people dead and missing–we were in the background.” For the countless articles, documentaries, conspiracy theories and everything else centered on 9/11, Kusin’s story remains largely unknown, another tiny piece of the tapestry woven around that day and its aftermath. “For a long time we were told not to discuss it,” Kusin said. “Then it came out in the 9/11 official report. Somewhere deep in there it says Kinko’s did this and that. After the 9/11 report came out was when I felt comfortable talking about it and people go ‘Are you kidding me?’” It was a surreal experience, made all the more so by the very nature of Kinko’s, far removed from undercover operatives and matters of life-and-death. “It’s one thing if you worked for the government and you’re signing up for these things, but I worked for Kinko’s,” Kusin said. “I wasn’t expecting to deal with global terrorism. But we were in an interesting position to actually be able to be truly helpful. We didn’t do anything differently than anyone else would have done if they’d discovered they were sitting on a trove of information the government needed. Though this was a small part, a part we didn’t ask for, the ability to be helpful was huge. It made us all proud.”
submitted photo
photo by P. Spaulding
Where were you?
special edition
Paul Norton
Superintendent I was an associate principal at Texas High School. I remember walking down the first hallway and Mrs. Ryan Murry was in her classroom, and she stepped out and said, ‘Mr. Norton, come look at this,’ and they turned on the TV. We immediately got with the police department and saw if there was any precaution we needed to take. With Red River Army Depot close by, you just never know what triggers people. And so we came up with a real quick plan of what we’d do in case something came up and then just tried to make the day as normal as possible. Almost every class in Texas High, that’s what they did that day–they watched and they talked. Why was this happening, what were the ramifications of this happening–a lot of those conversations were going on. It was a sad day, just that fear, sadness, anxiety, that onedge feeling of okay, now what? It’s kinda the rule of I can talk about my family but don’t you dare. I can talk bad about the country or the state, and that’s my right as a citizen, but don’t come in from the outside and do something to us, cause in a good southern term it’s on, then. You just felt that patriotism and pride for your country; even though we were hundreds of miles away, you were still a part of that.
6
sept. 9, 2016 • tigertimesonline.com
a VACANT spot
file photo
Where were you?
special edition
photo by p. spaulding
Alumni hopes to honor uncle who died in terrorist attacks
Amy BakerKireev Teacher
When the first plane hit, it was in the morning. I hadn’t gotten to school yet, and I didn’t know what had happened, but as soon as I got to school, my friends were talking about it, but no one really knew. About 15 minutes into first period, they had heard that something was really seriously wrong but they weren’t sure exactly what, so the teachers started turning all of the TVs in the classrooms on, and all that day, we watched the news. I don’t think shock is the right word– nobody knew the significance of it. It was a really unusual day. After school there was some level of panic locally because people still didn’t understand what had caused any of this. There was a run on the gas stations. There was a gas station not far from the school, and right after school, there was an enormous line out that gas station, just unreal. People were panicked, thinking this was some sort of major attack on the U.S.
L
eah Crenshaw is thirsty. So she groggily gets herself out of bed and shakes the sleep from her eyes. She makes her way to the stairs and inches down them slowly, carefully, trying not to wake anybody up. Except her mother is already up, sitting on the couch in front of the TV. Ghostly blue light plays over her curled body, illuminating the blanket she is clenching tight, the tears slipping from her eyes. Silently, Leah joins her mother and they watch-as they’ve watched many times beforethe Twin Towers collapse to the ground in painfully, heartbreakingly slow motion. When Crenshaw, who graduated last year, was 4 years old, her uncle, Michael Morgan Taylor, died in the September 11, 2001 attack. Taylor was a stock trader for Cantor Fitzgerald, a financial services firm that was headquartered in the World Trade Center, occupying floors 105-109 in the North Tower. “I never was super close with my uncle,” Crenshaw said. “He lived super far away and I was really young. So I have only really vague memories of him, stuff like riding around in his car and spilling ice cream in his Porsche, but I don’t have like a detailed memory of him.” Taylor lived and worked in New York City, but maintained close familial ties with his sister, Crenshaw’s mother. “What I do remember very very well was growing up in a family where there was very clearly a vacancy, where there was supposed to be a person, but that person wasn’t there,” Crenshaw said. “And even though I wasn’t alive long enough to have known the person that was supposed to be there, growing up I became very familiar with this invisible ghost of a person.” The events of that day are
foggy to her, but Crenshaw can remember vaguely what happened. “[My mom] pulled me out of school and we were at home watching the news,” Crenshaw said. “I wound up with a set of grandparents while my mom, dad, uncle and aunt all went to New York. They got into his apartment and were going around with posters with his photographs, trying to find him and eventually his remains were found and identified. They didn’t want to make my grandparents handle all that. So it fell on my parents to handle the funeral and everything.” Sadly, Taylor’s body was not recovered in full immediately. “Falling a 104 floors is a ridiculous amount of feet,” Crenshaw said. “And also between the fire and the destruction, he wasn’t in one piece, so at first we kept getting letters from people saying they had found and identified partial remains. To quote my mom, opening those was kind of like experiencing his death over and over again, so eventually they just stopped contacting us.” Throughout childhood, her uncle was never a taboo subject. He was brought up frequently, enough for her to create a clear picture of what he was like. “Growing up, it came up a lot,” Crenshaw said. “We’d talk about him like he was still alive, not in a creepy way, but as in something comes up and it was like, ‘Mike loved that’, or ‘Oh, Mike told me that joke one time’.” What affects her the most is the thought of her family- her mother, in particular- suffering. “I’m so upset over the fact that it happened to my family, the people that I love, the man I would’ve loved,” Crenshaw said. “The first thing I thought about was what it must’ve felt like for my mom and dad, whom I love more than anybody in this
“A lot of the times over the past 15 years, I’ve walked downstairs in the middle of the night and I’ve found my mom there, watching 9/11 footage. And sometimes I’ll stay and sometimes I won’t but in the course of my lifetime, I feel like it’s my duty to honor him by understanding what happened that day.” -Leah Crenshaw world, wandering around in that giant city trying to figure out if their brother was dead, trying to figure out what happened to him, trying to figure out if he was in pain.” In part because of the prolific nature of Taylor’s death, Crenshaw has never been able to shy away from the loss. “It’s such a giant piece of American history that it’s hard not to hear about it in people’s day to day lives,” Crenshaw said. “For most people, when someone near them dies, they are not going to be scrolling through TV one day and see a four hour documentary on exactly how it happened. But I think part of the reason why I’m comfortable talking about it is because every time 9/11 comes up in school we watch a documentary in school or
LEFT WITH A VOID after the death of her uncle in the 9/11 attacks, alumna Leah Crenshaw, along with her mother and grandmother, try to keep the memory of him alive.
something. It’s so prominent, it’s just everywhere, you know?” She also seeks to learn more about both his death and his life, seeing it as the best way to remember him. “A lot of the times over the past 15 years I’ve walked downstairs in the middle of the night and I’ve found my mom there, watching 9/11 footage,” Crenshaw said. ”And sometimes I’ll stay and sometimes I won’t but in the course of my lifetime, I feel like it’s my duty to honor him by understanding what happened that day.” Crenshaw has struggled with the guilt that comes over grieving for someone she sometimes felt like she had no right to mourn. “It’s been frustrating to have such strong emotions over someone I feel like I don’t have the right to grieve,” Crenshaw said. “Yes, he died, but other people lost spouses, parents, and I barely knew him.” But Crenshaw doesn’t apologize, for she has to live with the missed opportunity of knowing a significant member of her family–a man she would’ve loved fiercely. “I never really did know him but regardless of whether or not I could tell you his favorite color, the feelings I have are still there,” Crenshaw said. “Grief doesn’t work like ‘Oh it’s weird for you to be feeling like this right now, it works like ‘you feel terrible’. I didn’t lose him, but I lost the opportunity to know him, and I’ve been really resentful about that.”
7
special edition
sept. 9, 2016 • tigertimesonline.com
photo by E. Meinzer
Faith helps family find forgiveness, cope with loss of loved one “Just think of a world, a world without tears, where man can live for a million years, with never a grief, an ache or a pain, and never a thought of dying again. Think of a world without bloodshed and strife where no man shall dare take another man’s life. Where man until man will unite in peace, and malice and hatred forevermore cease.” enee Chase’s voice falters and she puts down the poem she has been reading, inhales slowly and dabs carefully at her eyes. “I don’t know if I can read the rest,” she says. Chase and her mother, Dorothy Green, have spent the last 15 years living with the loss of their sister and daughter Beverly Curry, who worked as an operations manager at Cantor Fitzgerald and who died on September 11, 2001. Green, a Jehovah’s Witness, was out making calls with a friend when the initial news came on the radio. Green immediately thought of her daughter, and ran home. As she sat staring at the television, frantic telephone calls pouring in, she watched as everything collapsed in front of her. “I just couldn’t believe it,” Green said. “When I saw it I was in total disbelief and anger. Just all the emotions you go through when you know your child is dead. I saw it when it caved. I just was totally broken.” Chase was in California, where she was living, when
G
submitted photo
I’LL SEE YOU AGAIN
Where were you?
Shawn Vaughn
Police Department
REUNITED SOMEDAY Genee Chase and Dorothy Green long for the day when they can see Beverly Curry again.
she heard from the friends she was staying with that day. She sunk onto a bed and was also watching in disbelief as the first tower collapsed. “It was surreal; it was like this cannot be happening, things like this do not happen in the U.S.,” Chase said. “It just didn’t register. I kept thinking she was going to call me back on her cell phone and say everything is okay, or someone was going to call and say that she was okay. But as I watched that tower crumble, I thought, she’s gone.” Chase recalls the whirlwind of emotions that came as they tried desperately to contact Curry: blinding terror, pain and the faintest spark of hope. “We got on our cell phones, and we’re trying to call her, trying to reach her, and we got her voicemail over and over,” Chase said. “We left messages in hopes that she would call. Everything was just really crazy and a blur, and I just could not believe what was happening.” Curry was 41 years old and married at the time of the attack. She had been the fourth of five sisters, and in high school was actively involved in band and other clubs, as well as excelling in her classes. When she died, she was attending college classes, and had been just about to graduate. She was awarded a diploma posthumously, and, in addition to several plaques and memorials, was honored by a street in New York City, called Beverly Curry Way.
“It’s just amazing, the outpour, and we knew her best, so we knew the type of person she was,” Chase said. “She was like a tall gazelle, a beautiful, tall, lanky gazelle. She was a very, very personable person. Very confident. And she grew up to be such a beautiful individual, and her whole goal was to move and live in New York. And she made it. She made it to New York.”
“She was most passionate about people. She was a leader, she was a take-charge person. And she did not surround herself with negativity. She did not want to be with those that were negative–the Debbie Downers. So people would just gravitate toward her. They loved her, they really did.”
-Genee Chase
Initially, all that was found of her was her clavicle and other miniscule parts; they later decided to refuse the pieces remains that surfaced in the following months. Green now keeps her ashes in an urn.
After her death, her family traveled to the city to finalize funeral and memorial arrangements. “She lived in Staten Island, where she could overlook the skylight of the Twin Towers,” Chase said. “And so while we were there, what we saw was the smoke–the smoldering smoke of where the Twin Towers stood. That was really those days after that. Just like a slow motion type of feeling, like ‘Is this really happening?’ I can’t imagine anyone having so much hatred in their hearts to want to do something this horrible.” They lived with that anger for years, acknowledged Chase. But they found peace through their faith and in the forgiveness of those men who flew the planes into the towers. “I had to mentally forgive those people who were so messed up in this world that they would do that, they would kill that many people,” Chase said. “They had a sick hatred. So I had to forgive them. And once I had prayed and let forgiveness come I have been able to cope with it.” Green agrees, composedly stating her belief that she will see her daughter again. “Every now and then I get emotional but we are not going allow it to consume us,” Green said. “We go on with our lives. We do what we need to do. It’s still painful. But that’s the hope that we have, that we’ll see her again in the resurrection. That’s all we can hope for.”
“I had just dropped my children off at St. James. I heard it on the way back to the house. The rest of the day, I was at work at the police department. We had a bomb threat at Bi-State, as well. I didn’t hear anything about it until the second tower was hit, so it was obvious at that point that it wasn’t an accident. There was a feeling of hopelessness and concern about what happened next. I felt that connection to those police officers [in New York], very much so. You easily put yourself in that same situation. If something happened here, policemen and firemen would be doing the same thing, and you look at the loss of lives and know that it was just catastrophic. And we really didn’t know, when that bomb threat came in, if there was anything to it or not. Given the circumstances, there was a heightened sense of concern. There were just so many unknowns. That was the scary part, because nobody really knew how far this went and what all was involved.”
8
photo by P. Spaulding
Where were you?
Jessica Sharp Teacher
I was active duty, stationed in Oklahoma City. So we watched it on CNN as it was happening. It was one of those moments where you knew what was going on, but there was so much lack of information. You only had what was being reported at the time, and we were getting nothing from official channels because nobody had taken responsibility for it. And the first plane, when it hit, they thought it was an accident, and they were recording as the second plane hit, on television. They shut every military installation down, and we weren’t allowed to leave for 24 hours. My husband was at Peterson, Colorado, near the Air Force Academy for temporary duty, and they locked it down. Because he wasn’t stationed there, they had to escort him at gunpoint. It’s a bit excessive, but until they knew what was going on, they had to have 100 percent accountability. It was a huge active aggression to Americans, and to our culture and our way of life. This was like a slap in the face. We are so geographically removed from most of our enemies that we were living in a bubble. We were like, ‘Oh, well they can’t touch us because they have to fly across the ocean.’ And then they flew across the ocean and killed 3,000 people. It was a wake-up call.
special edition
sept. 9, 2016 • tigertimesonline.com
a fading memory I
dly, he turns on the television. His backpack is slung over a chair, his jacket heaped on the floor. With great energy, he kicks off his shoes, and then keeps his ears perked for the back door opening. He’s in third grade, but already he knows how to stay alert for the sounds of Mom coming home from work. Any minute now, she’ll enter that door, and he’ll have to hurriedly cover all signs of flouting the most important of the house rules–no TV before dinner. But a great commotion rises from the screen, and he turns toward it curiously, watching with detached interest a giant plane hitting the side of a great steel tower, erupting in a flurry of fire and smoke. Then he watches it again, only to another identical tower, while the muffled screams of passerby fill the living room. It is in this way that he learns what really happened on 9/11. This year’s freshman class is the first to be made up mostly by students who were born after September of 2001. By the time they were old enough to comprehend tragedy, 9/11 was already a day found mainly in history books, an event that ranked right up along there with Pearl Harbor or Lincoln’s
As the years roll by, memories of a day etched into the American spirit forever seem to grow dim– and it’s starting with children death. “It’s hard with these kids now, you know,” said Erin Davis, who teaches fourth grade at Morriss Elementary. “They weren’t even born, so that’s the hard thing, that they don’t really see the significance. You can watch it on TV–it’s kinda like the J.F.K. assassination for us–you see it and you know it’s horrific, but you didn’t see it live, so you can’t really relate.” Understandably, those who missed experiencing it during their lifetimes find it difficult to see it as more than words in a book, or an annual moment of silence that is then forgotten until next September. “I guess I do feel a connection, because I felt like I knew what happened, but I wasn’t like born yet–it was just something that I knew of,” freshman Georgina Estrada said. “Whenever people talk
THE NORTH TOWER is shown in its final moments. The structure will collapse at 10:28 a.m., 102 minutes after being struck. NIST/SIPA/CC by 1.0
about their experiences [with 9/11], how they would get emotional was something I felt that I lacked.” As the 15-year anniversary approaches, younger students try to recall exactly what they know about 9/11. “[I know] that bad people were sent to destroy us and it was a mass destruction,” said Braylon Holyfield, a fifth grader at Spring Lake Park Elementary. “One day there was a TV show and I watched it and it showed that. No, my parents don’t talk about it in my house. I think they forgot. [But] I think it’s a big deal because a lot of people lost their jobs.” Teachers find it difficult to impart the full meaning behind 9/11 when September rolls around each year, and consequently find that classroom coverage has dwindled. “In recent years we’ve just talked about having that remembrance,” Davis said. “The kids do it but it’s not real to them. As far as spending a whole day, we don’t spend a whole day on that. We just talk about it a little. Before, the kids would converse about it, because even though they were
little, they had experienced it. Now, they’re going to have a misconstrued idea of it, because they’re looking at, you know, the fire and the flames, not really how it brought America together. Kids aren’t getting the full impact of that.” Teachers are also faced with lesson plans that doesn’t explicitly include 9/11 commemoration. “It’s not a part of our curriculum, it’s just something extra that we do,” said Meredith Gross, fourth-grade teacher at Morriss Elementary. “We discuss what happened and I tell them where I was and how I felt, and try to explain to them so maybe they can understand how they would feel if they had been there.” And while it could very well be just younger children who are growing up without really understanding that day and its full meaning for Americans, maybe the disconnection began years ago, regardless of if you were alive during it or not. “As time rolls on, people don’t remember it as much,” science teacher Jessica Sharp said. “It has been 15 years, so it’s not fresh on people’s minds. It’s sad but it’s just the cycle; it’s human nature to forget.”
A FIREBALL ERUPTS from the south tower of the World Trade Center as the second of two hijacked airlplanes crash into the building on the morning of September 11, 2001. The buildings later collapsed. photo by Dan Doane Jr./SIPA Press/CC by 1.0