About 25 years ago on this date, tragedy hit the United States, the mainland soil, like we have never seen it before.
3,000 Americans perished in the 9-11 attacks.
So where were you?
Well, Tom Carco was our news director at the time.
He was here and I was here on our FM station at the time, 92.1 FM.
What did you tell us when you first, Tom's with me by the way, what did you tell us the first time you heard about the attacks?
It was probably we did have a TV on in the newsroom and you know you occasionally when you're doing your normal work You're looking up at the TV seeing if you know anything's going on But it didn't happen very often and at one point I looked up and I'm seeing The world trade center and there's smoke coming from it and you start paying a little more attention to it and As the morning went on
It got way more intense, and that drew our full attention to what was taking place over in New York, and it was a beautiful day in
and there.
Right, and you know, you hear initially about a plane hit the World Trade Center.
Well, your first thought is, yeah, it's an accident.
You don't know.
And then the word came out that another plane hit the other tower.
Now you know you got a problem.
Metro traffic was our traffic source at the time.
And Mike Kristof was with me.
And in the middle of his traffic report, he stopped.
And I said, hey, Mike, you're there.
He said, wait a second.
And he had a TV monitor on and he saw the plane go into the World Trade Center.
And he said, I got to call you back.
We just had an accident at the World Trade Center.
Then he was doing another report, and the second one hit.
And then we knew it wasn't an accident.
And then came the one in Washington, DC, and the one in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where the people took over the plane.
The interesting thing is that day, we would go to, at the time, ABC News for live coverage.
But because of a little lawnmower incident in the backyard and we were there was a cable that was not buried At that time we had access through a cable it We couldn't get ABC's live feed on as I remember this so Ron Richards our operations manager at the time Jerry rigged a cable from the back of the TV In our newsroom ran it down the hallway and into the control room
hooked it into the board, and that's how we got ABC News coverage.
You know, and I, people, everybody knows someone who was affected by the actual collapse of the towers.
When I went to high school, two of my friends were the Guja twins, Gary and Jeff Guja.
Well, unbeknownst to me, at the time, Jeff Guja became a lieutenant in the New York City Fire Department.
And he died in the collapse of the towers.
And I had since spoken to his brother.
And he said, you know, when you lose a twin brother, it's, you know, really, he gets on you, but he said he died a hero.
And I said, you know, he did, he did.
And I remember the last time I saw the Guja twins, was that one of our class reunions?
We always call them the Guja twins.
I mean, there's no single identity for one of these guys.
It was the Guja twins are here.
And I saw the picture of him in his uniform, a lieutenant in the New York City Fire Department.
And I was so proud of this guy.
I mean, they said everybody was running away from the towers.
First responders were running into the towers.
That took a lot of guts, you know.
That's their training.
That's what they do.
It was a horrible, long agonizing day in so many different ways for people.
Jan Hoff, whom, the story's out now.
Well, we've been married since 1984.
She's home watching
married?
right.
And so, at a point later in the morning, she comes in and then we gotta decide how we're gonna do this.
So, at the station, I'm there making phone calls to local officials.
Jen is out talking to people and we're getting things on the air.
But a long, long day and then she's got to come in and do the afternoon shift after I'm done in the early afternoon.
And the one thing that, first of all, I was concerned about how our son, Andrew, was going to take this because this is major.
So we were concerned for that.
And then I get
home and then the one thing that just sticks out in my mind to this day.
Because all the airlines had been told, bring the planes down, land them.
So there was no air traffic.
And it was eerie, just silence.
I will never forget that.
And that is the moment that the
World Trade Center collapsed.
And I was like, oh, because as a kid, you know, growing up in the air, I remember them building that thing.
And, you know, to watch them build it from the ground up.
And I remember, too, when they actually filmed the movie King Kong in 1976, they had they filmed it at the base of the World Trade Center, because King Kong was going to fall off the World Trade Center.
And we were one of the sponsoring radio stations in New York.
And we had these rock and roll parties in the middle of the night to keep get you know We need thousands of people there for the final scene And I'm thinking about all this I'm watching the World Trade Center go down.
I'm saying how can this be?
how can this happen and then of course we beefed up security at the airports and Luckily, we've never had it again, but You know, you never sure can't happen again.
So you got to be vigilant
I
seem to remember going to a city meeting.
It might have been the council meeting that night, and afterward, starting to go back home, and I'm passing by a gas station, and there are long lines at the gas station.
People were so afraid that they're loading up on gas in their vehicles and probably whatever else.
That was eerie as
You know I'm watching all the reports on TV listening on radio to people talk about where they were and Yeah, and they added an extra moment of silence this year during the ceremony at the World Trade Center and the moment of silence is for the people who died From all the after the asbestos and everything all those toxins that fell on them when they escaped a lot of first responders a lot of people the dust lady They call her she was covered in dust.
I mean all these people who died
From the after effects.
They're now being remembered starting this year at the World Bank Center base.
Yeah,
a horrendous day and I can remember 10 years later on it was May 1st 2011 it was a Sunday and They're on the TV.
They're kept promoting the fact that the president was going to speak that night.
That's president Obama and He's great some major thing and they kept promoting this hot and heavy and Jan and I are home here thinking
Well, what's this going to be about?
And at some point toward the evening, it clicked in my head.
They got bin Laden.
And sure enough, so I went into the station and we interrupted programming and put the president on.
He made the announcement and they got bin Laden.
And then we went back to regular programming.
I was on a during the morning show with Dan and Jane in Milwaukee at WMYX, and we saw the first plane go in and we thought it was a Cessna.
And then we, you know, even though we were kind of a music station, we went on news.
I later had a friend that said, you know, I was down at a courthouse and they had you guys on.
And that's how we found out.
So I felt pretty good about our coverage.
But we opened up the phone lines, and we got tremendous phone calls.
It was kind of a shared experience on the air.
And then one of our listeners called us and said, I'm a caddy at this golf course in Brookfield.
I've got President Bush and Barbara Bush here.
The father of the new president.
Bush 41.
He happened to have a speaking engagement the night before.
Yeah, they're right here.
We had to take him off the golf course.
And they're sitting here waiting in the country club until they get further instructions.
We've got a little bit of security detail here.
Just incredible stories like that.
John Ashcroft, the attorney general, was on his way to Milwaukee to read the school children, like President Bush was down in Florida when the plane
had to come back, and he had to come back.
And my general manager came in and said, you guys are doing a great job of covering this.
Is there anything I can do for you?
I said, yeah.
You know anybody in New York City?
As a matter of fact, they do it.
One of our sales reps, our national sales reps.
He goes to his old roller deck, gives me the card.
I call this guy.
He six blocks away from the towers.
So he's on his patio, doing play-by-play for me from what he sees with the fires and everything, the chaos going to the towers.
And then all of a sudden he says, you hear a knock at the door, he says, all right, we're being evacuated.
He drops the phone and he walks out.
and then the first tower collapses.
America gathered itself to assess what happened in New York, Pentagon, et cetera.
New York City became a ghost town.
Shows were canceled, games were canceled, et cetera.
And we got the idea like, you know,
Maybe we should go to New York City and see how things are.
About a month after 9-11, we did a week's worth of shows, and the well-off for Soria put us up for free.
We went to the Four Seasons in Central Park for dinner.
The theme of the week's worth of shows was, come back to New York.
This is what New York needs now, is you to come back, and when the shows start opening up, and for the Christmas season and all, because it was, you know,
island of Manhattan.
People found out that we were going to do this, and we started getting a bunch of attention.
The week we were there was when Tom Brokaw was secretary, opened up an envelope with anthrax in it.
You know, that craziness was going on.
And we're there in New York City, and we found out that the military, the Marines that were in charge of guarding the border around Ground Zero were from Milwaukee, and listen to our show, they took us down to Ground Zero.
Thanks, guys.
Have a good