Doesn’t my brother Ted work near there?
That was the first question I asked myself after witnessing, live on the air, the second plane crash into what was once the World Trade Center. I later heard Dan Rather report that 50,000 people work in those towers, the population of a small city.
But, no, Ted doesn’t work there any more. A moment of relief. Then the phone calls began. First my wife from the hospital where she works, “Are you watching this?” Then from my daughter Emily from her cell phone driving to work, “What’s going on?” Then my daughter Alison from work in Atlanta, her voice shaking. And then finally from my mother on Long Island, “Theresa works on the 57th Floor.”
All this happened within 10 minutes. A news report of a plane crash into one of the towers. The horrifying image — as live as Lee Harvey Oswald’s execution by Jack Ruby — of a second airplane crashing into the second tower. Then the terrible realization that this unimaginable event had affected someone I love.
Theresa Marino Leone is my cousin, part of the Italian side of my family that has lived and worked on the Lower East Side of New York since my grandfather, Pellegrino Marino, arrived at Ellis Island in 1901. No one, in the century since, had seen such a horror within eyewitness view of the Statue of Liberty.
And though the elements of news are wide and catastrophic: the Twin Towers, destroyed; four planes hijacked and used in suicide crashes; the suspicion of large-scale international terrorism; the Pentagon attacked; the houses of our government, abandoned; financial markets closed; air travel everywhere suspended — in spite of those earthshaking developments, let’s try, as journalists to keep in mind the thousands of personal stories that will emerge in the days, months, and years ahead.
When I got to my office, a note was taped to my computer. It was from my mother: “Theresa is safe. She walked to her father’s apartment.” I called my daughter in Atlanta, who was so distraught she had left work for home. “Thank God, thank God,” she cried. There will be many more cries of joy and pain in the days ahead.
