Twenty years ago, kids my age were in first grade. For many of them, Sept. 11 is one of their first significant memories, or at least one of the easiest to recall to this day.
I was in Mrs. Joan Dalton’s class at Hillcrest Baptist Church School in South Augusta. The first inclination I had that something was out of the ordinary was when Mrs. Dalton’s daughter, Amy, who was captain of the cheerleading squad, came in abruptly and asked if there still would be cheerleading practice. I listened up because my sister, Megan, four years my senior, was on the squad, and I was keenly interested to know if I’d get to go home early instead of staying at school during her practice.
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“No,” Mrs. Dalton said. “Not after what happened.”
A somber mood crept into what was a generally upbeat and positive atmosphere, and I wasn’t the only student to notice. Bryce Adair, also in my grade at the time, recalled something similar.
“It felt like life stopping,” he said. “My teacher was real distraught.”
Bryce said his mother came and picked him up from school early, an experience I’m sure many schoolchildren shared that day. Then, he and his mother started watching the TV.
The TV.
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This was certainly my first memory of ever seeing something on TV that wasn’t Scooby-Doo or Clifford the Big Red Dog. I don’t remember the car ride home, but I remember climbing the steps into my house and seeing my mom sit motionless in front of the tiny TV in our living room. I can still see images of dust-covered buildings. Abandoned streets. Rubble. Destruction everywhere.
If I asked what happened, I don’t remember the answer. As a parent, what do you say? A disaster? An accident? An attack? There’s a hard line to toe there, wanting to educate your child while also protecting them from a world that just changed forever, whether you knew it or not.
Eva Claire Schwartz, a first grader at EDS at the time, shared her perspective as someone whose parents wanted her to understand what had happened.
“I know everyone’s experience is different, but my parents wanted me to know what was happening in the world. My mother was a journalist and usually included me in current events.
“‘You will always remember this,’ I remember her saying as we sat on the sofa and watched the towers burning.
“And she was right. That’s my most prevalent memory of that day. I can feel the sofa fabric, dark green and soft, under our huddled figures. It’s one of my last memories of the two of us before my sister was born a little over a month later.”
Ashlie Fortson was teaching at Evans High School. She said it was a day she will never forget.
“One of my students had gone to the restroom and cut back through the media center where the television was on. When he came back in my room, he had a terrified look on his face,” Fortson said.
“He asked to use my cell phone so that he could call his sister, who was supposed to be working in the World Trade Center. A great sense of relief came over us all when he got her on the phone and we found out that she had not gone to work that day because she had a headache. Everything stopped for the rest of the day.”
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Gary McClune was 13 at the time, living in Rochester, New York. He was a few hours from “the city,” but close enough to still be terrified about what could happen next.
“I was in art class with Mrs. Morsheimer. I had a crush on her,” McClune said. “We were sent home. Teachers were crying. I didn’t have any idea what the World Trade Center was. They just kept showing the planes hit over and over.”
McClune said he walked to school every day with his friend, Codie. On this day, the kids in his area were sent home early and the two boys turned on the TV while waiting for McClune’s mother to come home.
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“I remember there was a mad scramble to get the bus riders onto the bus and into the bus loop,” McClune said. “It was like panic mode. Once we got home, we really had no idea what we were watching but we knew it was bad and unforgettable.”
McClune said not long after this day, the children in the schools started practicing “what were essentially terrorism drills,” according to him. It was when the kids practiced how fast the buses could get loaded up and off into their typical routes.
“We would sit on the bus for what felt like an hour after we got on and they would take attendance and relay the info to the school district.
“I don’t remember hardly anything, but I remember 9/11.”
Tyler Strong is the Business Editor for The Augusta Press. Reach him at tyler@theaugustapress.com.
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