I scratched and puttered around, turning on the TV as usual, while I waited for the coffee to brew. I slowly realized it was "special programming" on the Today Show. Matt and Katie were wide eyed, solemnly repeating what they knew, as wide shots of the Manhattan skyline with smoke billowing were being broadcast live.
I instantly tried calling John at the office but kept getting his voice mail. They were repeating the taped footage of planes crashing into the towers. Then 10 minutes later standing right in front of the kitchen TV with the phone in my hand the 1st tower went down.
I spent the next 2 hours fielding phone calls from the networks and packing furiously for a trip I could not anticipate the details of. I prepared a pack for anything I could think of then cut it in half.
Ned, a buddy who was out of work and I had trained as a driver for the sat truck, called and volunteered his services if I needed a second driver to travel with me. I told Ned to pack his bags and meet me at the garage where the sat truck was kept. Barb did not go into work and kindly went and got food and water and other supplies for us and then met us at the truck to see us off. By then I was booked by NBC awaiting orders.
I had finally found John who I forgot had been on an early camera shoot that morning and who had his phone turned off till 11am. I brought him up to speed and we discussed long range plans.
Ned and I left mid day for Omaha because Air Force One was circling the skies and they started to think that the President would go to a safe underground bunker at the air base in Omaha, Nebraska. We were turned around mid afternoon and asked to reverse our course and start heading for Chicago with the details of our assignment to follow.
Late that first day, when passing back through St Louis I was shocked at the lines of cars all the way out onto the interstate at exit ramps waiting to get fuel at gas stations. Local folks were all panicked, thinking the oil was going to get shut off with a war starting and no one would be able to get gas, at least not at the low prices currently enjoyed. As we approached Chicago and stopped for fuel in northern Illinois late that evening, folks talked about the outrageous gas price gouging that occurred during the day at some stations. Weird panic was in the air and some folks were profiting from it already.
We spent the next day on the tarmac at O'Hare Airport with Chicago NBC correspondent Kevin Tibbles. We were standing by all day looking at an empty sky because all domestic flights were grounded across the country. O'Hare, the nation’s busiest airport, being shut down became our story. I remember as we watched the air traffic control maps showing air traffic over the entire country, which would typically show thousands of little blips representing planes in flight, the maps slowly went dark.
Late that day, Thursday Sept. 13th, they opened up O'Hare to limited air travel and we transmitted pictures of the first flights taking off and then interviewed folks live from inside a terminal about fear of traveling by air again. Then around 5:30pm the NBC News Desk called me and asked me to head straight for Manhattan after the evening news hour was over.
We traveled all night long and made the drive in about twelve or thirteen hours,
with me trying to get some rest during the drive, before arriving in Manhattan, because I knew I would have to hit the ground running. We arrived in Manhattan shortly after dawn the next day which would have been Friday the 14th, the 3rd day after the terrorist strike. Funerals services had begun in Manhattan.
They had us go directly to the small St Francis of Assisi Church in Manhattan on 31st Street near 7th Ave., for the intimate funeral of Father Mychal Judge, a Roman Catholic priest and beloved chaplain of the Fire Departments of NewYork. He was very well known and loved by firefighters in lower Manhattan. Many considered Judge to be a living saint for his many good deeds ministering to those in need. Pres. Bill Clinton spoke at his funeral.
Father Judge had jumped onto a fire truck that responded to the alarms from the World Trade Center, he was in the lobby of the North tower giving last rites for the dead and prayers for the firefighters and he died when the South Tower collapsed. You may remember reading profiles about him, he was the first recorded victim of the Sept. 11 attacks – Victim # 0001. After his death it was revealed by friends and Fire Dept. supervisors that he was gay (in orientation not practice because he was celibate), which generated some controversy. He and NYC Fire Commissioner used to laugh about it because they knew how difficult it would be for many of the firefighters to deal with it.
It was obvious he had touched many lives and was much loved.
I remember entering the church before it was open to the public to meet with officials about our TV coverage. I had an eerie moment when I was alone in the church at the open casket of the fire fighters chaplain. I knelt and paid respects for a few moments, then went back to work.
There was a firehouse with large flags draped over its bay doors located directly across the street from the church where the funeral service was held. The firehouse had lost many firefighters at ground zero and makeshift memorials with flowers to the fallen were all over the outside walls.
We spent the morning at the funeral service for Father Judge and then we did some live reports on the corner of 31st & 7th Avenue till lunch. That afternoon we covered a funeral procession on Park Avenue for fallen firefighters with bagpipes and full dress uniforms. That was stunning - watching Park Avenue come to a standstill with just the wail of those bagpipes calling out. We did some evening reports then we checked into our hotel in midtown and got some sleep.
You can see my truck across the street on 7th Ave. near 31st in this photo with some of the parade participants
We rose early on Saturday and went to St Bartholemew’s Church at Park Ave & 50th for a memorial service that would be held later that morning around 11am.
Mayor Giuliani, Bill and Hilary Clinton, Ted Kennedy and others would be there. We worked hard running cables into the balcony and getting ready for a multi-camera live shoot on the fly. I was feeling pretty fatigued and remember and that I just kept working on anything I could get my hands on to stay focused. All went well and when we were done we got the rest of the day off.
St Bartholemew’s Church , our white satellite truck can be seen lower left
Sunday September 16th was a down day. We walked around Central Park and mid town. Still did not want to sleep much. Still too wired to sleep, though I wish I could have.
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I remember seeing all over town that first week so many hand-made posters, taped on walls of buildings, hung on construction fencing, taped on the sides of parked trucks and on passing buses, the posters were hastily made with Xeroxed photos of missing persons and contact information for all the worried families or friends. Photos with phone numbers pleading if anybody knew where the missing person was would they please call their home. So many people were desperate, not hearing from family members for days. A lot of the cell service and radio and TV signals were down in southern Manhattan because so many transmission towers were on the World Trade Center roof tops, so normal communications were impaired and for some that was very difficult.
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Later on Sunday we got our orders to start heading for Boston, so we grabbed our bags and drove all evening up north to the Boston suburb of Brookline and got there late Sunday night around midnight.
After a couple hours sleep we got up at 3am in Brookline MA and went to a very nice suburban residence where our guests lived, who were scheduled to be on the NBC morning news program “The Today Show”. Painfully, our assignment was to interview a family who had lost a son and daughter-in-law and 2 grandchildren on the two separate planes that both crashed into the towers of the World Trade Center on Sept 11th. The victims were split up and on different flights due to scheduling conflicts, with the father on one plane and the Mother and two girls on the second plane, both planes leaving Boston’s Logan airport and heading for Los Angeles. The kids were looking forward to their first trip to Disneyland and to also visit other family who lived out there.
The Boston family was in shock and deep grief. I so did not want to be in that house intruding on their privacy. The parents and about 7 kids plus spouses crowded onto a couch and side chairs and did a live interview for the Today Show. They sat close to be on camera together, but the Father/Grandfather as head of the family spoke.
They were amazingly gracious, opening up their home and family to share the experience of their grief and loss with the rest of the country. They somehow realized the whole nation also had a need to grieve together and they opened their doors to the camera and its audience. We quietly left them as soon as we were done.
After getting some breakfast and decompressing, we hopped back into the truck and drove back to Manhattan, arriving later that afternoon.
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Another surprising thing that really stood out in Manhattan those first few days was how little traffic there was. You could still see smoke in the air as ground zero smoldered. At night you could easily hail a cab down in the Villlage (they were desperate for business), and drive right up Avenue of the Americas with 6 empty lanes like it was almost a ghost town. We always found great parking right outside our Hilton Hotel which was in midtown on 6th Avenue at 51st Street, right across from Radio City Music Hall and a few blocks away from Rockefeller Center. Go figure ! We got spoiled and it did not really hit us till the following week when the streets returned to their usual chaos and the many open parking spaces disappeared.
All the hotels had rooms available because everyone had left or cancelled trips to Manhattan not knowing when it would be safe again.
No one wanted to be in a city that was still a potential target.
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The next day Tuesday September 18th, seven days after the attack, we did live reports from the center of Times Square all day, as the city slowly came back to life we did man on the street interviews and other reports about life just starting to return to normal in the city. We were located on the island in the center of Times Square where you buy discounted tickets to Broadway shows from a well known kiosk which was right next to our truck.
Here is a group photo of the Biscuit Boys near my truck on the island in the center of Times Square.
-in back Chris, Marty, Steve, Bill
-kneeling Ned and John
While I was working in Times Square I was approached mid day by a young intern with a clip board from CBS Television who was handing out free tickets to the David Letterman Show for that evening. By then we had our 2nd satellite truck working in Manhattan with Marty Manny running it and his driver/assistant Steve helping out. So I thought, what the heck, lets take the tickets and if we get really lucky they will release us for the day early enough to see the show.
Well we all were very lucky and the 4 of us Marty, Steve, Ned and myself just walked the 7 blocks up the street and went to the Letterman Show at 5:30pm. We were so lucky we sat in the 2nd row. I was struck by how small Dave’s theatre was - as they say, everything looks bigger on TV.
That evening’s first guest was the actor Matthew Broderick, who lived in Manhattan and was fresh into the smash Broadway hit "The Producers". He talked about Broadway taking a major hit at the box office. People weren't coming to the city and the city depends on tourism. He and Dave talked about wanting to help during the crisis but there were so many volunteers they were not needed at the moment. They talked about the need for volunteers after the cameras were turned off.
The next guest was John Miller, an ABC News correspondent who had done the last major interview with Osama Bin Laden back in 1998. Fascinating interview for that moment in Manhattan, you could hear a pin drop in the studio. In that interview from 1998 Bin Laden declared Holy War on America. Miller described Bin Laden as very smart, very media savvy, very intense.
That evening’s musical guest was legendary folk singer Odetta, with the Boys Choir of Harlem. They started their performance with a stirring rendition of "We Shall Overcome" which then led into the old gospel tune “This Little Heart of Mine". During the commercial break Odetta blessed us with "Amazing Grace" which gets me every time. As Odetta sang I had tears streaming down my cheeks. A very emotional performance for everyone in attendance.
We filed out with the crowd and walked till we found a great little Italian restaurant where we could sit outside and had a good dinner.
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Side story: that week our other truck being run by Marty Manny, was also in Manhattan working for NBC News. One night they were doing live reports from a street in mid town when an emergency call came from the network. Earlier that summer NBC had installed a brand new transmission control room down on the 2nd floor of the Rockefeller Center. Well, they had a complete power failure on the 2nd floor that night and could not transmit the network’s signal out of Manhattan. They wanted us to transmit the main network signal out of New York City with our little Biscuit truck.
I kid you not.
When Marty got the call he was about 10 blocks away from NBC/Rockeffeller Center. Marty had camera cables flown in the air tied to lamp posts at his location on the busy streets of Manhattan. When the network called him in a panic he literally cut his cables and left them hanging from the light posts.
At 10 blocks away our Broadcast Biscuit truck was the closest satellite uplink in Manhattan to NBC Studios. They pulled his truck right up onto the plaza outside the studio windows where they tape the Today Show. He was instantly swarmed by about 20 NBC engineers as they furiously commandeered the truck and started running waveguide and barking questions wanting to transmit immediately.
John received a phone call a short time later from a friend who is a boss in the news division. He calls John "Stinky", for reasons I will leave unsaid. He said " Stinky, right now - You Are The NBC NEWS NETWORK !!" Needless to say we were all tickled. They were back on line a couple hours later and the little Biscuit truck was driven off the plaza. True story!!
photo shows Biscuit outside NBC Today Show studios where we pulled up to park to transmit for the network .
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The next day we returned to Times Square for another day of live shots. It was starting to get busy again in mid town. Later that night I could not park anywhere near the hotel. There was a television taping of a Friars Roast of Hugh Hefner at our hotel. I spotted Jim Carrey, Drew Carrey (not related) and Donald Trump in the lobby. I heard later how all the comedians were unsteady about how far to push the humor so close to the tragedy of 9/11. This is the show where Gilbert Gottfried finally broke through the ice by deciding to tell "The Aristocrats " joke.
The next morning, Thursday the 20th, we had no orders so Ned and I had breakfast at a sidewalk café, then we went over to visit John who was doing live shots on the rooftop of Rockefeller Center with Al Roker and other NBC anchors.
We took some photos of the skyline looking over Central Park to the north and the dramatic skyline to the south with the still smoldering WTC at the south end of the island. .
photo looking west on roof of Rockefeller Center showing John’s live location which had
Ground Zero to the south as a background.
Chris & John on roof of Rockefeller Center
Chris overlooking Central Park
We had press credentials so we rode the elevators and visited other NBC studios. We walked around the studio where they air Saturday Night Live - again, very small in real life .
We kept on thinking we were going to get kicked out any minute because we were alone and just waking into studios. John used to work there so he knew where to go. Amazing what a neck full of credentials can do.
We walked right into the “NBC Nightly News” set where Tom Brokaw did his newscast to the nation every evening. It was empty when we walked in. Again I was surprised at what a small space it actually was.
I could not resist - I walked behind the desk and sat down in Tom Brokaw’s chair and looked into the cameras, shuffling papers like I was going to do the network’s evening news, saying aloud over and over " Good evening ladies and Gentlemen. Here I am. Here I am in the big man’s seat. Oh Yeah. Sitting in the Brokaw chair, talking to America. Oh yeah".
John took some pictures of me. I took some pictures of John. Then Ned went behind the desk. More pictures. I suddenly noticed an NBC engineer in the corner working and watching the whole time who I had not seen at all up to that point. He had been observing us and he just smiled and said "everybody does it".
Chris in anchor’s chair of NBC Nightly News set.
Later that afternoon John went with Ned and I down to Ground Zero as it was now called. The subways were all damaged and completely shut down at the end of the island because a the main intersection had been under the World Trade Center. We took a cab as far as Houston Street and then walked in past the traffic barricades. Everything was limited to foot traffic south of Houston Street. No cars were allowed except emergency, rescue, and clean up workers vehicles.
It was a strange people show. We only got within 3 blocks or so. Everybody shuffling along and gawking at the disaster site. Everyone was streaming past a chain link fence barricade gazing at the smoke and debris a few blocks away. You had to keep moving because of the steady flow of people behind you. Many people were taking pictures and videos. We were too far away to see much. Hustlers were hawking merchandise like t-shirts, posters & prints, souvenirs. Artists with easels were set up painting the whole circus parade scene.
The fencing down here was totally covered with missing person posters.
Oh yeah, life goes on.
Here is a photo where you can see smoke from Ground Zero a few blocks away.
We walked around Wall Street and saw the NY Stock Exchange. The streets were barren and empty on a Thursday afternoon. We walked down the middle of streets with no traffic. Just that weird green light from street lights that come on in the day because the buildings are so tall the sun is blocked and only shadows cover the canyons of power. The emptiness made it all feel like you were walking in a Gallery of Architecture, very spooky feeling.
Here I am in front of the NY Stock Exchange building that had been draped with a huge American Flag. Open to pedestrian traffic only.
This photo shows Ned standing on one of the streets that was shut down near Ground Zero. Gives you an idea of what an eerie feeling there was, with all of these streets empty for blocks and blocks.
Then the next day, Friday September 21st, they gave us a cool assignment. We went to Shea Stadium in Queens for their first baseball game since the attacks. It was a big deal. Everybody was finally taking a breath, and playing some baseball was a reassuring activity.
We stood on the infield and took pictures before the game. A semblance of normalcy was hesitantly returning to New York City, and the country as a whole, with the resumption of our national past time.
The next afternoon we were finally released by NBC and told we could head home. We decided to head out first thing in the morning after we slept in. We met Marty and Steve and John and Bill down in Little Italy for a big dinner. Took a limo back to the hotel. I still had trouble sleeping any length of time even though I felt exhausted. Still too wired.
Ned and I got up and finally started to head for home around 12 noon on Sunday 9/22 after a late check out. Instead of staying in the city another night to rest or wait for more work we decided to head for home. The city was starting to get busy again and driving a big satellite truck around Manhattan was no fun any more, especially the parking. We were now hunting for a somewhat iffy legal parking spot 10-15 blocks from the hotel late at night and always worrying about the truck being towed away in the middle of the night. We often parked west of the old Ed Sullivan Theatre where David Letterman does his show and then walked the distance straight up 53rd Street to and from the hotel.
We left New York City and drove west into the Pennsylvania mountains through an unbelievably heavy rainstorm. It was a pounding, massive downpour of rain. Being pretty exhausted I was trying to sleep, bouncing around on the hard floor back in the work area of the truck.
The cell phone reception was horrible in the mountains of eastern Pennsylvania but I noticed mine started showing several missed calls and voice mails – it was NBC again, they wanted to know if I would turn around and head back to Manhattan. They were asking if I would be interested in being the first satellite truck at Ground Zero. If I said yes they warned me it may end being a long-term commitment where I might just end up being there for months.
I seriously wrestled with those implications.
I was exhausted and we did not have a second uplink operator to help me cover the long schedule that could be ahead of us. Marty had to go home for at least a few days to take care of some business, and after calling around we found any and all other freelance operators were unavailable or already working.
So we knew I would have to run the truck myself for a few days before relief would arrive. We worked out a deal with NBC where they would provide one of their network engineers as a relief operator to run our truck till Marty had returned home for a few days to deal with some personal issues and could then come back and help me cover in split shifts. But for the first several days I was to be on my own. The broadcast days would be long and would start around 4:30am and then go straight through till around midnight, so I knew it was going to be tough.
We got back into Manhattan around 11pm and I had to meet the producer and crew in front of FOX News headquarters on 6th Avenue a few blocks from our hotel at 1am. We were lucky enough to still get rooms at the Hilton on 6th Avenue. So I laid down for an hour or so then showered and went off to find my producer and crew who should be waiting for me a few blocks away at the Manhattan FOX News headquarters.
I was going to be what’s called a “Network Pool Truck”. In situations like this where access is restricted it was typical for the news networks to “pool” their resources and share the costs. Being the only truck allowed in at the time I would be used like a 24 hour marathon dancer by any of the major networks who wanted to use my services. The first day a FOX News crew drew the short straw to be assigned to my truck.
So in the early hours of Monday September 24th I found myself driving the sat truck behind another car with the FOX producers and camera crew inside. We were escorted down to Ground Zero by an impressive NY Police motorcade. I had to pull over and stop the motorcade twice because the height of my truck would not clear low bridges on the route the police were taking us on. After a couple detours I finally got into position with the truck and was eventually parked one block from Ground Zero at the southeast corner of the disaster site.
In the predawn hours I could see that the actual ground zero site was still smoldering and glowing from torches and work lights. The smoke never stopped rising from the site the entire time I was there. . They said it was fires underground, different materials and fuel smoldering. The scale of the wreckage was bigger than I could have imagined. In daylight you could see all the surrounding buildings were still coated in ash and debris. Thick layers of powdery debris were visible on window ledges on floor after floor.
Absolutely exhausted cops and emergency workers everywhere. Bulldozers and cranes working non stop under huge floodlights. Torches and saws were flaring in the night, cutting steel and concrete. This went on nonstop - around the clock.
It was readily apparent the smell and fumes that permeated the air were mildly toxic, you could tell by the way they irritated your throat. Imagine all the worst rubber, plastic, spent fuel smells in your life combined together in one place. We were issued boxes of masks to cover our face whenever we were outside working.
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Onlookers came down everyday. I remember standing near a security fence next to the site and a deathly tired and spaced out NY Cop wearing a full length rain coat walked up to me wordlessly and took a pencil out of my hand, looked me in the eye silently, stirred his coffee with my pencil, handed it back to me, and walked away without a word. I was inside the fence now.
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We were issued masks to wear whenever we were outside the truck. After a day or so everyone who spent the day down there developed a slight cough . The air was visibly pretty clear but still had elements in the air we could not see. At first I did not wear the masks, like I should have. After the second day I did.
Here is my truck at the southeast corner of the ground zero site.
You can see the cranes and some debris in the background.
We had flown Ned back home leaving me there by myself. I had him buy me a bunch of underwear and socks and some shirts and do some laundry before he left because I did not know when I would ever get to do laundry again.
I typically got back to the hotel around 1am. My days started at 3am standing in a shower for half an hour trying to wake up. I would walk across to an all night deli and get a large coffee and an egg bagel sandwich or two and some fruit. I then walked several blocks to a subway station and rode down to Houston Street - the last working subway stop. The main southern Manhattan subway intersections had been located in the basement of the WTC so service was seriously disrupted. I would start, walking from the last subway stop and after passing through several security barricades, flashing my neck full of credentials, I would arrive at the truck at Ground Zero around 5am.
My on site producers were always waiting anxiously for me, having been very worried I would not have woken up. One morning they had been calling me feverishly while I was on the subway so they could not reach my cell phone in the tunnel – as soon as I reached street level I saw 10 missed calls. I called them immediately reassuring them I was heading their way and we would make air on time. Luckily I never missed a job or a scheduled transmission the entire time I was there.
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We would work from 5am till after midnight. I would get back to the hotel by 1am. I would watch a little TV to make sure nothing had happened since I left the site, then read briefly, then lay down for 90 minutes or a couple hours rest at best. Then I got up at 3:00 to do it all again.
The 2nd night of this I got back to the hotel and sat on the end of the bed watching an overnight news show that was airing raw unedited footage of video that everyday citizens took the day of the terrorist attacks.
Most of the footage was wild handheld as people kept recording while panic surrounded them. They would show video from several different persons home movie cameras showing the World trade Center buildings collapsing from the street view.
Then footage of the massive tidal wave cloud of toxic dust from the collapsing buildings that swept up the corridors and spread throughout the streets and into the buildings like a voracious fog and blocking out the sun to a dim glow.
Then footage from people videotaping inside their apartments or out their windows as the cloud rolled up to them and crept into the room through the cracks.
Then footage that showed their panic and reflexive reactions, like grabbing children and helping the elderly, along with spouses and partners, grabbing personal items, trying to escape out and up stairwells with others from their building, searching for an exit. To the roof or they did not know where, only to be turned back when coming to a locked door at the top, then feeling trapped and wondering where to go and what to do. These people did not know if this was the end days or not.
Then footage from the streets again showing shell shocked individuals walking along completely covered with the dust and some with bloody injuries shining through.
I sat on the end of the bed with my jacket and all my clothes still on, and I stared at the TV in a numb daze for nearly half an hour, then wept like a lost child. I was so exhausted and this was the first time I had taken for myself to really witness the disaster that was so close to me by now, and it just overcame me.
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I was the one and only satellite truck at ground zero for that week. I was shared by the major news networks ABC, NBC, and FOX. CBS opted not to use us.
A lot of raw footage would be fed from my truck that would be shared by all the networks and the world. I had the one live location where a reporter could do a standup with Ground Zero in the background. Everyone from Tom Brokaw to Stone Philips to Geraldo Rivera to Ted Koppel came by to use our live shot location.
Here is a shot from outside the truck at the camera location with Ground Zero still smoldering in the background.
One afternoon I accompanied a pool camera crew who went onto a rooftop looking down on the site. It was a massive clean up /work site now. There were still dogs and search crews looking for survivors.. While looking at the massive scale of the disaster and trying to get perspective on it, I was struck by how the rescue workers looked as tiny as ants moving around on the huge areas of the destroyed buildings debris.
WTC overview west1
WTC east hell
WTC smoking
WTC northwest hell
WTC north tower
WTC overview
WTC overview west2
Our daytime reporter Chip Reid (who now is the CBS White House correspondent) kept disappearing between live shots. My producer could never find him when she needed him on short notice. We finally found out he was walking as far as he could away from the site to a McDonalds to wait for his next live shot. I kind of figured that he did not want to be breathing the air down there any longer than he had to. He was being pretty smart actually. He was replaced the next day.
I was okay overall because I did not stay that long at Ground Zero, but I knew several folks who I worked with who, when speaking to them the following year, told me about serious chest and lung problems they experienced for a few months after leaving Ground Zero.
I finally got an NBC tech to relieve me on Thursday evening after working on an hour or two of sleep a night since Sunday.
Here I am a little worse for wear standing at the camera location with Ground Zero in background.
I came back Friday for the early morning shift. It turned out the pool truck arrangement was not working out and more trucks would now be brought in to replace me. These would be trucks the networks owned themselves which made much more sense because they would end up being stationed down there till January. Late on Friday night September 28th I pulled my truck away from Ground Zero.
Our friend Kevin Parrish, who worked for NBC as an engineer and brought the network truck down to relieve me, convinced me to drive with him over the Queens Bridge to the NBC warehouse in Long Island City where I could really clean up the truck before I headed home. Kevin drove with me, guiding me to the NBC warehouse where they kept all their live trucks and miles and miles of equipment stored on shelves, that they shipped out to as needed, to cover news stories around the world. I left the truck at the NBC garage in Long Island City Friday night and they called an NBC limo driver who drove me back to my hotel by midnight. I was almost done and heading home soon.
After I had slept in as much as I could and had a nice outdoor cafe breakfast NBC dispatched another driver to the hotel on Saturday morning and he took me back to my truck around 1pm,. After cleaning the truck all afternoon and loading up on some goodies from the NBC warehouse I started the drive back to Manhattan by myself around 5:30pm.
I thought I would be back in time for an early room service dinner at the hotel by 7pm and then sleep.
I now entered into one of the most hellish driving nights of my life. The Queens Bridge which I had crossed over with Kevin Friday night was closed to traffic for vehicles my height going to Manhattan at that hour on Saturday. I did not know what to do. . The truck was 13 feet high and the boroughs are full of bridges that are 10-11 feet high at best. I ran into one dead end after the other where my truck could not pass under upcoming low bridges. I had to take last second detour after detour after detour every time I saw a low bridge approaching. I would have to back up really narrow one way streets and turn around in the middle of intersections in this big TV truck. I could not imagine anything more stressful to do when alone in a strange city like New York that one should not drive in at all if they can help it.
I was so exhausted. I was cursing Kevin for talking me into taking the truck over the bridge to the NBC warehouse to begin with. I was near my wits end.
It was dark and Saturday night in Queens and I got so lost and desperate and felt so alone not knowing when I would drive down the wrong street and not be able to turn around and escape with this big TV truck. This went on for a couple of hours.
I had nothing but a big road atlas next to me, this was before the days of GPS on the truck.
I ended up driving all the way east through Queens till I found a big interstate bridge across Long Island Sound that would take me to the Bronx. By then it was close to 8:30pm and I had been driving for a few hours. Then traffic stopped dead on the bridge for 45 minutes. I just sat there trapped, feeling my life slip away. I called John who was back in St Louis, seriously planning on a threat to get out and walk away, leaving the truck abandonded on the bridge in traffic. Lucky for him I had to leave a voice mail!!
A couple hours later I finally got back to my hotel, after searching for a parking spot for 45 minutes in the now busy mid-town Manhattan on a Saturday night.
I got something to eat and went to bed and dreamed about low bridges.
I woke up on Sunday morning September 30th and went on a shopping spree. I think I wanted to come back with something positive from the trip after so much grief and mourning and misery. I loaded up on impulsive gifts for Barb and our home.
Then I finally left town. I got home on Tuesday Oct 2nd mid-day and started to recuperate and rest up not knowing when the phone would ring again for work.
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P.S.
For the 1 year anniversary after 9/112001 NBC called us up wanting me to come back and participate in their coverage one year later. They were calling certain trucks who they remember being there for them the year before.
It ended up both of our trucks returned to NY City for the anniversary. My truck was down at Battery Park for NBC at a ceremony which dignitaries from all over the world were attending in remembrance. They unveiled a new sculpture in Battery Park consisting of the remains of a large bell that had been recovered from the World Trade Center disaster site.
Our other truck worked for CBS Network News up at the actual Ground Zero location for 1 year anniversary ceremonies there. Marty Manny returned as well to operate that truck.
Things were pretty much back to normal in New York City on that return visit one year later. There were many emotional scars for so many folks but the city itself was up and running just fine.
We left for home immediately on the morning after the anniversary because we could not afford to park the satellite truck in Manhattan. The best quote we got was an indoor garage that could fit the truck but they wanted $500 per night, just to park my truck over night.
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