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By TOM RUE
The earliest family photo that we have in our home taken at the World Trade Center is of Janesa, then about five years old, sitting on the edge of a water fountain in the plaza, wearing a tiny summer dress and a pink ribbon in her hair. Looking at the innocent scene in this photo, who would imagine that this would one day be the site of an horrendous attack upon the United States resulting in the loss of thousands of hard-working civilians whose only crime was to show up for work in the morning. These people were guiltless. Their deaths could easily have been ours. In this sense, they died in our place. Anyone who has ever been to the towers, whether they worked there or merely visited, has personal memories of the place. This page is intended to share a few of ours.
Though I myself grew up in New Jersey close enough to catch glimpses of the Manhattan skyline from across the Hudson River, and spent a fair amount of time in the city as an adolescent, the World Trade Center was not a place that I frequented as a child. Its construction was noted in the media, but I did not pay the construction of the Twin Towers nearly as much attention as I did accounts of Americans landing on the moon during the same era. My earliest awareness of the towers was various announcements of the progress of their construction, said to be the world's tallest buildings. I have memories of the towers' progress; how for a long time one was taller than the other, but eventually they stood as identical twin giants, head and shoulders above the rest of the skyline. One had large antennae visible at the top, which I understood was the source of the signal for several metropolitan TV stations. Over the years, I would pass through the underground tunnels beneath the WTC on numerous occasions, often changing from the PATH train there to city subways. The times that I ventured upstairs into the towers themselves could be counted on one hand.
My first experience with the World Trade Center, up close and personal, was a month after graduating from high school. On July 1, 1976, my old friend Steve Krum and I hopped on a Short Line bus to Manhattan from our homes in Trenton, New Jersey. We had both recently graduated high school, and would later be room-mates at college. About to go away Utah to attend school, we wanted to check out some tourist sights near our home that we had missed while growing up. In addition to the trade center, we checked out Ellis Island, where our immigrant ancestors had passed through the golden door to America; and took in a live performance of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir at Carnegie Hall.
College, military service, and other duties kept me in the western U.S. for a number of years, where the World Trade Center didn't enter my consciousness too often.
Eleven years later, on October 1, 1989, my daughter Carolina, then nine, chose a trip to the Statue of Liberty as a reward for an excellent report card. At left is a shot taken by a tourist of us standing on the shore of Liberty Island, with the Manhattan skyline visible in the background. Carolina did not choose to go to the top of the towers this day trip, selecting other destinations instead. We went to the Statue of Liberty, U.N., and Empire State Building. As we walked by the towers on our way to the ferry our way to the island in the harbor, I knelt by Carolina's feet to take a photo of her standing at the foot of the famous monolithic structures.
The image at right, of Carolina with curly hair blowing in the wind and a large grin on her face, illustrates the towering structures hovering above the streets of New York. One can guess at the work that thousands of people who were inside doing their jobs, just as they were on any other day, while we stood outside just admiring the buildings.
A few weeks later, on a similar trip to the city, my son Eduardo, also nine (Carolina's twin), expressed an interest in riding the elevators up to the top in order to look out at the view. Perhaps the difference in interest was a guy thing. The idea of standing astride what, if it wasn't any longer the world's tallest building, was at least the tallest building in New York, was macho. In the souvenir store at the top of one of the towers, Eddie bought himself a plastic license plate which he first mounted on his bicycle, and later hung for years on the wall of his bedroom.
On October 23, 1993, my wife Carmen, along with Ed and Carolina, went to the city for a day. The purpose of the visit to the city was a professional licensing exam, but we used the opportunity to see some tourist sites in Manhattan, including - of course, the twin towers. The pair of photos appearing immediately below were taken in the court yard of the World Trade Center, in the spot known since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks as "ground zero".
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The events of September 11, 2001 took the lives of thousands of Americans, and two landmarks of New York City. On that autumn Tuesday morning, I was at work in Middletown, New York, about an hour upstate from the city. I learned of the first plane-crash when Carmen called me and told me what she had been seeing on television. At my workplace, staff did their best to go about the daily routine. But nothing seemed routine that day. Everyone, it seemed, knew someone, or knew someone who knew someone, who was among the missing. On the evening of the 11th, we attended a public prayer service at Temple Shalom in our community of Monticello. Expressed in many different ways, the prayer of everyone we talked with and heard from, regardless of their faith, was simple and essentially the same:
For God to bless America.
