Decorah, Iowa
On Tuesday, September 11, 2001 I got to my Luther College office in Koren Hall around 6:00 am. I’ve been a morning person for decades and so had been up since 4 am preparing for a new course I was teaching titled “Struggle for Freedom.” The course compared and contrasted freedom struggles in three countries: Northern Ireland, South Africa, and the United States. The class met two days a week, Tuesday and Thursday, from 8 to 9:30 am.
I completed my work in Koren about 7:30 and walked the 100 yards to Main and my classroom. I strode west with the sun to my back on a clear day in the American midwest. Aways restless before class, I wanted to check whether there was enough chalk for student reports and chairs around the seminar table for the 16 of us. Also on my mind was where to put the portable lectern to signal to students where I would be sitting. I decided to put it at the end of the table facing the door. Because I had not planned to use the classroom TV that day, I did not check whether it was working.
Tuesday, September 11 would be our 5th class meeting. We started with the Northern Ireland case study and that day’s topic was the role of terrorism in the conflict between Northern Ireland’s Protestant and Catholic communities.
It was a normal Tuesday morning on the Luther College campus in Decorah, Iowa.
Boston & New York
At 6:59 am American Airlines Flight 11 with 92 people on board took off from Boston International Airport destined for Los Angeles. I imagine that around the time I got the campus:
Captain John Ogonowski and First Officer Thomas McGuinnness Jr. were going through their pre-flight routines. Chief Flight Attendant Karen Martin was overseeing the boarding of the passengers along with Flight Attendents Barbara Arestegui, Jeffrey Collman, Sara Low, Kathleen Nicosia, Betty One, Jean Roger, Dianne Snyder, and Amy Sweeney. Among the 81 passengers finding their seats were Mohamed Atta, Abdulaziz al-Omari, Wail al-Shehri, Waleed al-Shehri, and Satam al-Sugami.
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
As the 15 students filed into the classroom one mentioned he had heard on the news that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Just after we started class, at 8:03 am, Marwan al-Shehhi steered another plane, United Flight 175, into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. As it turned out, around the time Hani Hanjour maneuvered American Airlines 175 into the Pentagon, at 8:37am, a student poked her head into our classroom and told us another plane had hit the World Trade Center. Of course, none of us had smart phones and so we were dependent on radios and TV’s. When we heard about the second plane, I went to the TV in the classroom and discovered it was not working.
The students and I looked at each other and I said “we’ve got to find out what is going on” and so dismissed the class so they could find TV’s. It was about 8:45 am. A few of us chatted for a bit and then walked over to Koren where I knew there was a TV in the administrative assistant’s office. We climbed the three flights of stairs and walked into Chelle Meyer’s office to see the south tower of WTC collapse, at 8:59 am. Seven minutes later Ziad Jarrah flew United Flight 93 into a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania.
At 9:28 am, two minutes before my class would have ended, the North Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed.
19 terrorists, four planes, 265 passengers, and 2712 killed and 6000 injured.
All on a normal Tuesday morning, 20 years ago.
