COMM 150, 337: How an online class at SCI [and a reporter in New York City] reacted to 9/11

Everybody has his own memories of Sept. 11, 2001, as that day's terrorist attacks became the defining event of our new century, and this week's 10-year anniversary coverage can't help but trigger them. At Springfield College in Illinois, the predecessor school to Benedictine University at Springfield, the students in one of my classes used the then-new medium of an online message board to vent our feelings about it. And at the end of that school year, in May 2002, I collected some of the messages in a story about 9/11 in The Sleepy Weasel, SCI's campus literary magazine that I edited at the time.

What I remember most vividly 10 years later was the radio that Scott McCullar, now marketing director for BenU-Springfield, set up on a stool in the middle of the Presidents Room so everybody could hear it. The local station in Springfield had switched it over to a network feed from its affiliate in New York City, and it was broadcasting local news advisories ... which public schools were evacuating, which subway stations were closed. It had an immediacy that the television news lacked, the day-to-day reality of a city under attack.

But, of course, the TV news had pictures. So after a few minutes, we all watched the pictures.

Another thing I remember was the poor squirrel.

About mid-morning, some of the students who lived in housing across the 6th Street parking lot from Dawson Hall, came running into Dawson scared half to death because the power had just gone off in their apartments. The morning of Sept. 11, none of us knew the dimensions of what was happening. We were hearing the Illinois Capitol and the public buildings downtown were to be evacuated. And we didn't know why the power went off, although the lights - and, importantly, the TV - were still on in Dawson.

But it turned out the outage was caused by a squirrel. It didn't turn out very well for the squirrel - he was electrocuted - but I remember having a good laugh, and then being embarrassed because I was so relieved.

* * *

Student comments to the message board were pretty perceptive. I thought they reflected credit on our students at SCI, and that's why I collected them in the article. They speak for themselves, as you'll see if you read them.

* * *

My piece in The Sleepy Weasel also contains the most complete version of the news story on 9/11 that I liked the best, by Jimmy Breslin who was a columnist for Newsday at the time. I described him as "one of the last of the old-school, streetwise big city reporters." He was 71 at the time, and he'd been covering New York City for 40 years. His report wasn't elegant, but it was written fast. On deadline. By a guy who knew and loved the city. It's no longer available. I didn't save the complete version, and it was deadline writing, not the kind that wins you awards and gets you into anthologies. Just a newsman doing his job. Which is what I liked so much about it. But I can reconstruct parts of it from what I quoted in The Weasel. Here they are:

MANHATTAN SCENE
The War Comes Home
Jimmy Breslin

September 11, 2001

Always, all our wars were somewhere else. The one this time is here.

Suddenly Tuesday morning, in the smoke that covered the sun, and in the flames coming in red-orange tongues between the silvery panels of the high floors of the building, that is over a street of people who are looking up at the smoke and fire and sound a loud moan. They look at the building top as they start running away.

The windows of the building do not open and the stairwells inside the building have no effect on smoke except to let it rise at an extraordinary speed.

There is a rumble that shakes the sky and the street. Now there is screaming. Suddenly, the top of the World Trade Center south tower blows up. Twenty stories, thirty stories. The top of the tower blows up in fire and thick smoke. The top of the tower collapses into the smoke.

Debris comes out of the black smoke and is hanging in the air for an instant. Silvery pieces of the side of the building. Glass in shards. Then everything comes down and hits the street and starts flying like bullets you can see.

The World Trade Center Tower Two is no more. The cops and firefighters who are closest to the building are running. The people on the street are running. …

I wrote, "An old-fashioned newsman, Breslin left the commentary to others. He wrote of the fires engulfing the World Trade Center towers, of a man he saw 'dropping, dropping, dropping until he is no more,' of the blast, the debris and choking dust as the towers collapsed, of people running through the streets, ducking into buildings, running, running again. On the scene with a folded sheet of paper and a soft pencil, he caught details a TV anchor can't. And he wrote of a new spirit of resolve that began to emerge even as police were still directing survivors out of lower Manhattan." Then I quoted:

They walk to the shriek of sirens and with water bottles in their hands. They walk out of the last smoke and into hot sunlight. The streets are becoming more crowded as buildings empty and the war refugees of New York march to the north. The crowds were thick in front of St. Vincent's Hospital and Medical Center at 12th Street, where the sidewalk in front of the emergency room entrance is lined with gurneys and nurses and doctors and attendants and with screams the first ambulances are coming around the corner and cops rush and hands reach and ambulance doors fly open and the workers struggle to get the first injured onto the gurneys on the sidewalk.

"We're nurses who want to volunteer," a woman calls out from the crowd.

"You got ID?" a cop says.

Two nurses hand him paper.

He waves them on and they run to where the wounded are being unloaded.

In COMM 337, we've been reading about how reporting is the soul of journalistic writing. And Breslin, who is retired now, was a reporter's reporter.