Where were you September 11?

Jim Fall

It is human nature to remember where you were, what you were doing, when significant events in history took place.

I remember, as if it were yesterday, playing catch with my dad in the back yard when my mom came out on the back steps to announce, “President Roosevelt is dead.”

I was driving between Rock Port and Fairfax when the announcement came that JFK had been shot in Dallas.

I was taking picture of two young boys watching on TV when Neil Armstrong took his historic “giant step for mankind” onto the surface of the moon.

And I was startled awake by the early morning ringing of the telephone in a Milwaukee hotel room soon after the first airliner slammed into New York City’s World Trade Center trademark.

Our daughter sobbed into the phone that her husband, in New York on business, was safe, but she didn’t know when he could get home.

We were innocently ignorant — in Milwaukee for the National Newspaper Association convention scheduled to start that evening.

Needless to say, it didn’t.

Everything came to a screetching halt as the country, the world, tried to focus.

My first step was to notify the rental agency I would return the Daewoo Leganza it had provided for us to drive to Madiaon over the weekend, sometime later — and in Helena, Montana.

We were about to embark on a road trip halfway across the country — at a time when the country was reeling — figuaratively, if not literally.

At a time when we saw, firsthand, America at its best —American flags flying from the antennae of most every car on the road and at fuel stops, and at its worst — where clerks inside those stations were boasting about how much they had been able to inflate prices overnight.

Sept. 11, 2001, was not all that long ago, in the grand scheme of things, but it marked a major turning point in our history, and in the way we conduct ourselves, personally, and in our relationships with most everyone else.

Where were you the day our world changed?

And where are you since that world changed?