Patriot Ledger
By Alexandra Wellever
If you’re old enough, you probably remember where you were the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.
Twenty years after terrorists hijacked four airliners and killed almost 3,000 people in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania, those memories are still vivid for local officials and residents looking back on a day that changed America.
Quincy Mayor Thomas Koch was 38 and the city’s park commissioner on Sept. 11, 2001.
“I was visiting a park on Pond Street and a foreman who was there said, ‘I just heard on the radio that one of the towers in New York was hit by a plane,’ ” Koch said.
Koch said he went back to his office, flipped on the TV and watched live as the second plane hit the other tower.
“It was just this strange, eerie feeling that comes over you,” he said. “You’re trying to figure out, ‘OK, what’s going on, what’s next.’ “
What really struck Koch, though, was the absence of planes in the sky in the aftermath of the attacks.
“We didn’t see planes for days,” he said. “That was really bizarre.”
Sept. 11 was a primary election day in Quincy. It was a Tuesday, and city councilors and the mayor were on the ballot. He said officials discussed whether the election should be shut down.
Quincy police Sgt. Daniel Flaherty, then 30, said he was working the election at Beechwood Knoll Elementary School.
You didn’t know what it was at first,” Flaherty said. “Maybe it was just a plane accident. And then as news came in, it kind of became surreal.”
The election went on.
“Normally, election day is the most orchestrated and choreographed day a candidate will have in their lifetime,” U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch said. “My staff had a schedule for me that started at 6 a.m. and was supposed to go until 8 p.m., but as we were going to one of our first stops in Milton, we heard on the radio reports that an aircraft had hit the World Trade Center. It was a perfectly cloudless sky.
“At that point, we just canceled what we were doing.”
Lynch said most people assumed the election would be canceled as more and more reports poured in, but federal officials said it would be a mistake to cancel a democratic election in the face of a terrorist attack. Once the decision was made to continue, he said, the voter turnout was 34 percent, double what was expected and unheard of for a special election primary.
“It was a big day for me personally, but obviously that just paled in comparison to what was happening to us as a nation,” he said. “There were so many questions.”
It was that “eerie, shocking experience” that led to Lynch’s interest in the Middle East and commitment to seeking peace in the region. Lynch said in the almost 30 debates that led to the 2001 democratic primary, “never once did issues in the Middle East or concerns about terrorism come up in that campaign.”
“It was life-changing for all of us. It certainly changed the direction of my life, and it gave me the opportunity to see the very best of America in terms of our response,” Lynch said. “I’ve spent a lot of time in Afghanistan and Iraq with our sons and daughters in uniform, and I truly cherish the time I got to spend with them. They give me hope.”
For former Cape Cod resident Pat O’Brien, part of the day’s stress came from not being able to speak with her son, who was then at the Naval Academy in Annapolis.
O’Brien, then 51, said she learned about the attacks when she was listening to the radio, and then she turned on the TV. Like Koch and many others who heard about the first plane attack, she turned on the news just in time to watch the second plane crash into the World Trade Center.
She didn’t hear from her oldest son for a few days.
“I just wanted to be able to talk to him,” O’Brien said.
Later, her family got a message from him.
“‘We’re OK,'” it read. “‘And may God have mercy on their souls, because the United States Navy will not.’ “
For others, 9/11 signaled the beginning of a workweek like no other.
The Rev. Lee Boddie, of Milton, then 35, was on his way to work at Channel 7 Boston when he heard the news.
He was walking down the sidewalk past the station’s glass windows. Inside, monitors displayed the day’s news. Boddie saw smoke rising from the first tower that was hit.
“So I rushed into work, of course, because I knew it was going to be a very busy month,” Boddie said.
The newsroom was scrambling to figure out what had happened. Boddie said it was chaotic as everyone leaped into action.
While some people were at work during the attacks, others still were still in school.
State Sen. Patrick O’Connor, a Weymouth Republican, was a junior in high school at the time of the attacks. He said at first there were rumblings around the school about a plane striking the North Tower of the World Trade Center. After a plane struck the South Tower, O’Connor said the principal came over the intercom to announce what happened.
“It was apparent that America was under attack, and it was a feeling I never had before then and a feeling I haven’t had since then,” he said. “It was a feeling of deep uncertainty of what was going to happen next.”
O’Connor said the thing that sticks out most in his mind is how Americans came together, despite political and ideological differences. He recalled then-President George W. Bush throwing the ceremonial first pitch before a World Series game at Yankee Stadium, and how Americans were connected in their determination to protect our way of life.
“It was such an impactful time,” he said. “I wish we could go back to the unity we had. It wasn’t blind patriotism, and we may have seemed our most vulnerable, but in the days that passed, you saw firefighters go to New York City and try to find any sign of life. You saw people lining up at military recruiting stations and a shift in what it meant to be an American.”
O’Connor said many of his classmates decided to join the military following the terrorist attacks, and many went on to serve in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“It’s a constant reminder,” he said, “that freedom isn’t free.
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