PARKLAND LIFE- “THE BELLS”

   It was just another mundane Monday.

   The day began with a 4AM wakeup. An hour later, I was casually chatting with Susan Wise, the morning “diva” at 101.5 LITE FM. As usual, we exchanged weekend adventures and discussed potential topics for the morning’s chit-chat breaks.

   I wrote and produced 7 newscasts every morning during her show, and was somewhat annoyed over the slim pickings awaiting me that day. There were no juicy headlines, remarkably (for South Florida) no scandals, and the kicker material was threadbare.

  No one had tried to hold up a 7-11 with a banana, so coming up with amusing stories and punch-lines would be quite the challenge.

  The show came off without a hitch, as did the rest of the day. I enjoyed a late afternoon nap and awoke around 6PM. I went rollerblading before the sun set, and decided to cap off a pleasant evening with a visit to my daughter’s house. Eleven years old, and two weeks into 5^th grade, Janelle has been feeling punky for a couple days.

  Her Mom said she ate little for dinner and was running a low fever, so we agreed Janelle should stay home from school Tuesday. My little girl also asked if I could bring her lunch after the next day’s morning show. As we stood at the front door figuring out time and details, a familiar sound interrupted the conversation. Group smile! Broadway Joe’s ice cream truck was making the neighborhood rounds.

  The ice cream man was a favorite among Janelle’s childhood rituals. Joe’s truck played a redundant theme, the chimes audible from inside the house. Few children missed the alert, and Joe was no dummy.  He knew when most families had finished dinner and his white truck always drew a crowd as he orbited the area.

   Janelle’s facial expression was asking for a treat before she needed to verbalize it. I offered, figuring a temporary cure for her illness was somewhere in Joe’s  freezer, and her mother also wore the look of a  willing accomplice. I handed Janelle a few bucks and she skipped off to the truck, returning with a pair of ice cream sandwiches. She rewarded me with a kiss on the nose, and walked back into the house, as always with the change in her pocket.

  Michele and I exchanged “goodnights” and I returned home, feeling more than a bit sentimental.

  I arrived early for Tuesday’s morning show to allow extra time for completion of my lunch mission. I scanned the day’s headlines and rolled my eyes. It was even worse than Monday- one of the lamest news mornings in memory!

  The lead story on every service was Michel Jordan’s “un-retirement”. I found that to be pathetic at best, since every story indicated he was 10 days from making the announcement “official”.

  It was weak-sauce news from every angle. An aging sports icon can’t ‘let go’. Worse, what did it say about America and the media? Priorities seemed somewhat askew at the least.

  I did 5 stories in every newscast and my last summary was at 8:25. I couldn’t resist turning my annoyance into on-air sarcasm. I wrote Jordan’s pending un-retirement into every story. “An accident on 1-95 this morning involving a limousine … fortunately, it did not involve the limo scheduled to drive Michael Jordan to his un-retirement press conference in 10 days”.

  I made my point.

  At 8:40, Susan led us through her daily “Susan’s Survey”, a LITE-hearted take on something involving life which allowed listeners to cast their opinion on the station website. I can’t remember the question Susan asked that morning, but I’ll never forget what happened after the mikes were turned off.

  The 8:40 break was normally my final appearance on the show. As per usual, I began cleaning up the considerable debris field I created through the show. Newscasts, notes, and sections of newspaper were there for the scooping. I gathered up a stack and spun around to return to my work station.

   I never made it to my chair.

  All three of my newsroom TV monitors were showing the same shot. The north tower of the Word Trade Center had a large horizontal scar, with black smoke billowing out. I turned up the volume on my NBC monitor to hear Katie Couric state that a plane, “some type of jet”, had struck the building.

  I jumped back into my broadcast chair and hit the monitor button which allowed me to communicate room-to-room with Susan. I told her the WTC had been hit by an aircraft. “People had to be killed”, I said.  I insisted she put me on the air immediately following the commercial break, and she quickly agreed to do so..

  The tone of the show, the morning and the day turned in an instant.

I described the smoking tower as best I could, stating that “while there’s nothing official, a large number of casualties are likely”

   As a history buff, I offered a top-of-the-head precedent- recalling a July, 1945 collision between a WWII B-25 bomber and the Empire State Building. It happened on a foggy Saturday morning, killing 13. I’d read a book called “The Sky Is Falling”, an account of that crash and offered as many details as I could.

  While wrapping up, I realized something. The NBC camera, now fixed on the North Tower, revealed a clear blue sky over Manhattan. How did an aircraft wander off course and hit the building?

  The thought of terrorism was nowhere in my thinking. When the bulletin break concluded, I phoned Rob Sidney, LITE FM’s program director. Ironically, when he hired me to do the news he asked me just one question. “Will you be OK if the sky falls some morning?”

  On September 11, 2001, the sky was falling in a worst-case scenario.

  When I rejoined Susan at 9AM precisely, Michael Jordan’s plans were an afterthought. The story of the century was now unfolding.

  Susan did the usual top of the hour station identification at 9AM and launched the first song of the hour. I shut my newsroom mike off, and spun around in my chair to watch what remains the most numbing sight I’ve ever seen- the second plane plowing into the south tower, on live TV.

  Absorbing the moment was impossible. The enormity of the second plane’s explosion surely took a serious number of lives. What was causing this? I knew the north tower was loaded with an incredible number of electronics. Were they somehow guiding planes into a deathtrap?

  My complete misconception was instantly altered when the NBC newsman blurted “This is terrorism!”. I jumped on the intercom and told Susan, who immediately began to fade out of the song we were playing. She looked every bit as dumbstruck as I felt when I told her the country was under attack.

  When Susan nodded, indicating my mike was live, I spoke words I never dreamed I’d be saying, and in a voice that left no doubt as to the seriousness of the situation. “Brace yourself friends. There is very bad news from New York City this morning. Incredible as it sounds, America is experiencing its second day of infamy- September 11, 2001 will be remembered as the date that two commercial aircraft were deliberately crashed into both towers of the World Trade Center. The damage to both is enormous, and the south tower seems to have been hit harder.”

 We never played another song that day. Our “listen-while-you-work” format was now in an all-news mode, and data was coming at a furious pace. There were few hard facts beyond the mind boggling improbability of the event, and that many people in those towers were not going to escape with their lives.

  The burgeoning sense of gravity shifted to overdrive with the bulletin  on the Pentagon attack. The Pentagon? How could such a benign day turn so totally inside out? What was next?

  By then, rumors were running with realities. No one, at 9:20AM, knew how many planes had been hijacked or what the next target might be. I wired a second mike so I could stay in front of the TV monitors and pass along everything I could gather from the screens in front of me.

  It hadn’t yet occurred to me that I was telling thousands of people such a horrendous story- that America had been the victim of another dastardly sneak attack.

.

  The news of  Flight 93’s crash in a Pennsylvania farm field soon followed. Was South Florida in the bullseye? We soon learned the FAA had ordered all aircraft down, and the military was ready scrambling to shoot down any planes not responding to the mandate to land.

  At 10AM, Rob decided LITE FM should carry NBC’s feed from New York. They had the resources. He and I walked to his office, where we stood gaping at the unfolding nightmare. As we stared at the screen and began discussing ongoing coverage, I remembered my promise to bring Janelle lunch after the show, and mentioned it to Rob. On one hand, it seemed trivial but now there was more than food involved. I did not know what she knew about this and assumed she’d be terrified.

  Rob never hesitated. “Go”.

    At that point, I had to call Janelle. She was certainly old enough to be just as unnerved as I was. She answered on the first ring, and my first question was “Hi honey, how are you feeling?”.

   “OK”, she said matter-of-factly. The tone of her voice told me she was unaware of the day’s events, but to be sure, I asked if she was watching TV.

  “Yup”, she said.

   “What channel?”.

   “Nick”, she replied.

   I was relieved. Now I hoped to make my sandwich run and get to her house before she knew what was going on. I’d have a little time to figure out a way to explain this insanity to her.

  Rob suggested I bring Janelle back to the station. I was gratified by his concern for her as this was rapidly becoming a day nobody wanted to experience alone. Alone was scary.

  I stopped at the Subway sandwich stop near Janelle’s house and picked up her food, then drove straight there.

  As I knocked on the door, I hoped like hell she was unaware of the attack, but I was a few minutes too late.

  The front door opened to reveal my doe-eyed little girl with tears streaming down her face. She hugged me ferociously and dragged me through the door. “Dad, are they going to attack us here? Are they going to bomb Davie?”

  This was a benchmark moment in fatherhood. I assured her that the last plane had landed and that we were safe. Over the next half hour, I assured and reassured her that while it was a terrible event, the danger from the sky was over for us. Eventually, she took a reluctant bite of her sandwich.

  “I want you to come to the radio station with me. My boss invited me to bring you and I don’t want you alone.” At that point I had no idea where her mother was, or what she knew. In the background, I heard something on the TV about parents showing up in droves at local schools to pick up their children. Everyone wanted to make sure their families were safe.

   Janelle insisted on staying home once she felt certain there were no planes still flying. Her fear was understandable, as her Davie home is under the Ft. Lauderdale airoport landing path. I double and triple checked with her, then returned to LITE FM’ studios.

  The day had turned definitively surreal. It felt like an awful, hallucinogenic drug was in my system, making everything- the sun, the sky, the clouds- seem strange. Again, there were squad cars everywhere. I remember thinking that a nuclear flash would not have come as a surprise at that point on September 11^th.

  I was incredibly proud to be a part of LITE FM that day.

  We could do little more than urge listeners to call the Red Cross, or donate blood. Everyone wanted to do something. The nightmare was indeed galvanizing America. The “me first” attitude so prevalent in South Florida had given way to a reassuring, bonding mindset.

  At 7PM, the full-time air staff left to rest and prepare for Wednesday. The crew left behind for the overnight shift had instructions to make phone calls if any type of new terror related effort developed. No one could be sure about anything as the sun set on the day.

  I tucked my stuff under my arm to push open the exit door with my free hand. Once outside, I set my stuff down and paused. The air was exceptionally still. An eerie silence enveloped the parking lot and surrounding neighborhood. It was quieter just after 7PM than it was that morning at 4.

  The solitary sound was that of my shoes crossing the asphalt. As I reached my car, I set my gear down to unlock the door. Then, the eerie calm was broken by a second and most welcome noise.

  Music.

  When I first heard it, it was as unexpected as that morning’s events. It got louder, eminating from west of the lot, somewhere within the adjacent neighborhood.

  As the music’s volume increased, I smiled for the first time in hours. The tune was reassuring, and the perfect balm for an exhausted, middle-aged newsman and Dad.

  It was an ice cream truck. It wasn’t playing Broadway Joe’s song but it didn’t matter. The bells were ringing out a childlike melody, echoing from a world that seemed to end forever hours before.

  The person driving the truck will never know how his song helped me in the gloom of the night’s thick silence. With the simple chime of his truck, he was selling a lot more hope than he could ever hope to sell ice cream.

   The chime of the ice cream man momentarily took my thoughts off murderous jets, the satanic image of Mohammed Atta, and people choosing to leap from the top of monuments to commerce, rather than burn within them.

   The bells tolled a message of renewal. We were still America, awakened again. Our country would regroup and stand up. The government and military would plan a response. Meanwhile, the grandkids of the Greatest Generation would still want ice cream and their Dad’s would still want to indulge them- and probably nevermore than after dinner on September 11, 2001.

   The simple song of the bells became a mission statement. Somehow, life would go on.

   My numbness subsided somewhat as I settled into the car, and placed my gear on the passenger seat. I backed out of the space, then shifted both my vehicle and my thoughts into “forward”.

   Just like everyone else was trying to do.