9/11 was a significant turning point in the nation’s history. It changed countless American’s lives and pushed the United Stated into a war that didn’t end until twenty years later. To commemorate such an important day, the following interviews are from twenty members of the Apache family whom touch on their memories of 9/11.
George Jackson – Electrician
I spent the day delivering pizzas on 9/11. I lived in Dallas at the time and was on my way to work. I pulled onto the President George Bush turnpike, and when you are at the peak, you overlook the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. Normally, I would look over the horizon and see dozens of aircrafts in flight. I was also listening to sports radio, and they were discussing anything but sports. I had just gotten out of bed and was trying to figure out what was going on, and I finally put it all together. I looked across DFW, and there wasn’t a plane in the sky because they had all been grounded. Everyone stayed home on that day, I think, and I spent the whole day almost watching the goings-on through people’s doorways as I delivered.
Janet Bennis – Cashier at TJC
We were working, making payments, when one of the ladies from upstairs said that a plane went into the building in New York, one of the trade centers. They think that something happened to the pilot; of course, they thought it was an accident. Then we heard about the Pentagon, and we were working basically on a mainframe. So, we had a computer in the corner that was connected to the internet, so a coworker and I ran over and saw the pictures live. Then, while we were watching it, we saw the second plane hit. We both looked at each other and said, “We’re at war.” We then heard about the one at the Pentagon and the one that was grounded headed toward the White House.
Chris Holmquist – Adjunct Professor of Chemistry
I was pretty young, think I was about 11 or so. I was in elementary school, and I remember that the day had gone perfectly fine. I hadn’t known anything was up until about 2 or 3 in the afternoon. We were scheduled to go to an ice-skating rink, and I remember we got pulled into a room all together. The teachers gave us video game consoles, which they never did during the school day. We got to play games instead of going on the field trip, and I remember the adults were very concerned and worried. When I got home, my parents sat me down on the couch and explained how this changed America forever. We were concerned about making sure our family was OK because we didn’t know any other information. I was in a state of oblivion the first half of the day, and when I got home, I was really nervous. It was one of the first times in my life I was truly scared.
Lauren Tyler – Director of Student Life
I was in Algebra class, and I was a sophomore in high school. The teacher got the notification. I don’t know how because it wouldn’t have been on her cell phone at the time. She told us that the world was ending and then she left the class. We had no idea what happened until we went to our next period and watched it on TV for the rest of the day. We didn’t realize that the second tower had been hit because we had no teacher there; we just assumed that we were watching a replay of the first crash. Our next teacher explained the whole situation, and we did nothing but watch for the rest of the day.
Hayley McClenny – English Professor
I was actually at home sick with strep throat. The day before, I started getting sick, but the school nurse didn’t believe me, so she just sent me back to class with a peppermint. But, by the time my mom got home from work, I was running a fever. She took me to the doctor, and they told me I have strep throat. The next morning, my mom called into work to say she wouldn’t be there. The receptionist told her she needed to turn on the news because something bad was happening in New York. I was only about ten when it happened. A lot of people my age were stuck in a classroom and couldn’t see what happened, but since I was sick at home, I got to see all of the stuff as it actually happened, which is horrible and shocking when you are a 10 year-old witnessing these things.
Hazel Mendez – Staff Technician
I would’ve either been in Jenkins Hall, in the Dean’s office, or driving to work when I got a call from my husband. He asked me, “Do you know?” and I replied, “Know what?” to which he responds with, “Someone just crashed a plane into the towers.” I then asked, “What towers?” and then he tells me the Twin Towers. I remember thinking who would do such a thing before running into the Jenkins Hall lounge, and there were faculty members all surrounding the TV, watching in shock.
Timothy Seiden – Public Safety Officer
I was a student at TJC on 9/11, and my first class was band. I was in the band hall, and no one in there knew what was happening because it was a closed-off setting with no access to the outside world. Next, I had chemistry. I was on my way to chemistry class when I realized something strange was going on. TVs were lining the hallways, and I slowly realized what was happening. I got to class, and my teacher immediately canceled class because there would be no way he could teach us the qualities of water with all that going on, so we all went home and watched the footage.
Karl Zuehlke – English Professor/Coordinator
I was on the campus of Florida State University. I remember driving in, and I was on my way to a 1301 English class. There was a guy standing in the middle of an intersection and tearing the pages out of a book. I didn’t know what to make of it at the time until I got to campus and found it was empty. I called my father on a pay phone and asked what was going on, and he said, “Somebody lost control of a plane and flew into a building in New York.” I was still living in my hometown, and my folks were home. So, he told me to come on over. My father was watching the news, and then the second plane hit the tower. He looked at me and said, “That was not an accident.” At that point, it had dawned on us what was going on.
Christopher Davis – English Professor
I was a sophomore in high school. I remember hearing about it on the radio when my mom was taking me to school. When I got to class, it was chemistry or something like that, and the teacher had no lesson for today. We were all just sitting there with the news on the TV. He told us that he didn’t know what to do right now. He then told us if we wanted to leave or go home, we could do that. I remember sitting in class when I watched the second tower fall on TV.
Nathan Knapp – English Professor
I was in my senior year of high school, in a world issues class. We talked about terrorism that day, which was interesting, when the department head came into our classroom and mentioned some planes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. We discussed what that could possibly mean until we went to lunch. I lived in Toronto at the time, and after school that day, I went in for my shift at Chuck E. Cheese. It was a surprising and eerie feeling. There were a lot of families there, because what else do you do with your children. There were adults who didn’t want to think about it, and children who didn’t really know what was going on.
Kelsi Weeks – Assistant Athletic Director
9/11, I was in the fourth grade. It 9 a.m., and I was at school. I went to a private school that went to church on Tuesdays, so we were in church at the time. Then we went back to our classrooms. Our teachers were crying and upset but still trying to keep us from knowing what was going on. My mother came to pick up my sister and I. My sister was in the fifth grade at the time. When we got back home, we turned on the TV, and that was when I really learned what was going on.
Jennifer Parsons – Physics and Engineering Professor
I was in high school in my biology class when I first found out. It was 8 a.m. when whispers started spreading about something big was happening at the World Trade Center. It wasn’t until a couple of hours later when I had a class in the library. They suspended class, and we just watched the live footage. It’s a bit of a blur, but I am pretty sure I watched the second plane hit live.
Cheryl Lewis – TJC Cashier
I worked at a bank in North Texas. We were actually balancing some things that were getting ready to go to the vault. It was a big building, so the first I heard of it was when someone came in from the break room and telling people what was going on. We still had work to do, so everyone took turns going into the break room to watch the footage.
Holly Wills – Bookstore Cashier
I was teaching second grade in a town outside of Lufkin, Texas. We were having an assembly with a guest author. Then we all got called out of the room, and someone explained what was going on in New York.
Tina Beaton – Interpreter and Captionist
That morning I was at home getting ready to come to work when the first plane hit, and I was working in a classroom when the second plane hit.
Robert Root – Chemistry Professor
I was teaching chemistry at West Point, and I was actually in class when the first plane hit. When the second plane hit, I was standing in the break room watching the news report on the first one. West Point is only 65 miles north of New York City. We did some math and figured out that at least one of the planes probably flew directly over West Point en route to the World Trade Center, so that was kind of scary. And the whole thing was very hard to believe, you know, you’re sitting there watching the towers collapse and is like, completely dumbfounded. I mean, you couldn’t believe that this really was happening. You know, you see so many movies in which all kinds of CGI, fantastic explosions and things are happening, and this was real. And it was like, “Oh, my goodness. This is really happening.” And my first thought was, “Oh, where did they get the planes.” Then it dawned on me that “oh, they must have hijacked and then were people on the planes as well as people in the buildings.” So that was all very, very scary.
Rodney Whetzel – Head of Chemistry Department
So that was a Tuesday. I was actually teaching a class when they started to break the news. And since people didn’t have cell phones, nobody in the class knew what was going on outside. I learned when a former teacher here had a TV in his office. He had it tuned to one of the news stations, and it was showing the first plane hitting. A few of us instructors who were in classes were watching now. And at first, people weren’t sure what was going on. Was it an accident? Or not? And, frankly, I couldn’t believe it. My first thought was that it definitely had to have been an accident. Nobody had a conception that there would be this form of a targeted attack. And then, not long after that, the second one happened. And then we said, “OK, something’s going on here.” I remember I had a lab later on that morning, and one student saw me and told me something about how this was big enough. He said he just couldn’t come to class right now. I was kind of surprised that there were a few guys who made a decision pretty soon after that to join the military.
Levi Herrera – English Professor
It was a pretty formative memory. I was in elementary school in East Texas, so I remember the first thing we walked into school with our little backpacks on and went into my homeroom class. The teacher was listening to the radio, which was an odd thing to see. She was actually glued to the radio, and we all sat down chitter chattering. I don’t have the experience many people my generation have where the teacher was overwhelmed with emotions and passed that on to the students. I’ve heard from many people my age, where they were crying at school, and they were overwhelmed they felt a lot of fear. My teacher explained what was happening, but without the visual, we didn’t really grasp the situation. I was old enough to remember it, but too young to take it seriously in school that day. It wasn’t until I got home from school and my parents had one of the news stations on just watching that nonstop that I realized this was pretty serious. My only context as a little kid was to make the connection that it was a lot like Pearl Harbor. We were all kind of laughing and joking as kids do which sounds terrible, I know, but we hadn’t been communicated the gravity of the situation. So I remember thinking that, like 911 like Pearl Harbor, it might have a connection to World War II and not have been something happening right now. And that was my only connotation for it. So it wasn’t until later, when I actually got to watch the TV, that I realized the gravity of what happened, and I still don’t think that I was old enough to really understand.
Daniel Allen – Adjunct Learning Framework Instructor
I remember everything about 9/11. Where I was, people’s reactions to it, the nation’s reaction to it. I was in my AP English class in high school. I was walking to my next class period, and in the office, I saw the TV was on, and it was never on during a regular school day. I asked one of the secretaries why the TV was on, and she told me, “There was a terrible accident. A plane flew into the Twin Towers.” A few minutes later, the second plane hit, and from that point on, the world changed.
Keith Eppich – History Professor
I was a graduate assistant at Southern Methodist University. I had just moved to Texas about 9 months ago. I was living in an apartment just off-campus. I remember hearing crazy stuff on the radio and thinking to myself, “this can’t be right.” I went to my computer and tried to check a news site, but none of them were loading because everyone was trying to get information at the time. So, I walk to campus and go to my class where I was a teacher assistant. It’s like a funeral with everyone trying to just get through the day, and no news was coming from New York. Eventually, my professor just stops his lesson and remarks, “No one here cares, none of you are going to remember anything I am going to say. Just go home, figure things out, and call your families.” I walked down the hallway, and every class was like his. All except for Garth Sampson, the world’s leading authority on early stone-age Africa, he never broke a stride through the whole day. He had 3 90 minute lectures and was utterly unflappable. He was South African and had this very thick accent. We were all in the lobby of Leroy Hall, watching the newscast of the events taking place. I remember Professor Sampson walking by, pausing to look at the screens and remarking, “Oh, well that’s not good.” before walking back into his office to finish his article.
The rest of us were very flappable at this point. I called my parents, and I didn’t know anyone in New York. It was weird though, both towers were down at this point, and it was eerily silent. I would usually look up and see some sort of aircraft in the sky, be it a traffic helicopter or a passenger plane. The sky was completely empty except for these two fighter pilots circling the Dallas skyline. For an example of how discombobulated I was, I wanted to get a copy of the New York Times from this afternoon because it was such a historical event. When I got to the newsstand, the clerk looked at me and said, “Dude, they fly those in.” Then I was like, “Oh yea, what was I thinking?” It was just so surreal and confusing.