Shared experience: Four Scott County educators recall 9/11

Many Americans and people across the world can still tell you where they were, what they were doing and how they learned of the four terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Four Scott County educators shared their recollections from a quarter-century ago. Annie Ford, librarian at Gate City High School Ford had been teaching for six years and was a second-grade teacher at Duffield Primary School on a sunny, warm Tuesday morning. "It's very hard to believe it's been 25 years," said Ford. "I wasn't teaching at the moment because we had people from the William King Art Center who were working with kids on art projects. My principal, Gilbert Smith, came knocking on the door and said, 'I need to speak to you in the hallway.'" Ford followed Smith to a group of other teachers standing in the hall. "(Smith) had also been my government teacher in high school at Gate City," Ford said. "His exact words were, 'America is under attack.' In my mind, I still didn't know what was going on and I imagined from that that planes were flying over us dropping bombs or something. He explained that the World Trade Center towers had the planes fly into them and told us about the Pentagon." Around the time she learned of the attacks, Ford was scheduled to take her class to the school library. "I didn't say anything to them, but I did tell the lady from the William King Art Center," said Ford. "I walked my kids to the library and came back to my classroom. We actually had cable TV at Duffield in the classrooms, so I turned my TV on, and she and I watched what was happening." "I never did tell my students," said Ford. "I was going to let their parents explain it to them. I didn't want to scare them, and we did have parents coming and getting their kids that day." "Had some kids that stayed all day, but they were constantly calling kids over the intercom. I remember it was a beautiful morning, and the sky was a beautiful crisp blue. I remembered having a plaid dress on, it's crazy how you can remember that. I actually spilled something on my dress. It wasn't coffee, because I didn't drink coffee then." "I went home that afternoon scared because you didn't know what else was going to happen. I had never seen anything like that. I remember my parents calling, telling me I needed to go fill up with gas. It was a scary time. I didn't want to scare my kids, so I didn't turn the TV back on in class when they came back from the library, but when I got home, I was glued to the TV all evening." Ford transferred to Shoemaker Elementary School in Gate City the following year and was at Rye Cove High School as the librarian five years later. "I had those same students when they were incoming eighth graders," Ford added. "I was the librarian then and interacted with them, but we didn't talk a lot about 9/11." Lorie Keene, nurse at Gate City Middle School Keene was doing missionary work in Poland on Sept. 11, 2001, when she learned of the attacks. "I'd been there for about a year and was living in Czestochowa," Keene recalled. "Poland's an absolutely beautiful country; the people are beautiful and the country is beautiful." It was after 5 p.m. local time when Keene received a phone call from a Polish friend. "I didn't believe it was happening," said Keene. "We didn't have internet at the house. We had a TV that was connected to a VCR and a DVD player. I was actually watching an Inspector Gadget movie and the phone rang. There were two of us, I had a roommate, and one of my Polish friends called and said, 'Lorie, are you watching the news? America is under attack.' I said, 'You must be watching a movie. No, we're not.' She said, 'Yes. Some plane just flew into the Twin Towers.'" She called her missionary field supervisor, who told her he was watching the news on BBC and needed all the missionaries in the region to come together. Keene arrived with others at the field supervisor's home and began watching the coverage. "My father was retired Air Force and I called him," said Keene. "He said, 'Lorie, this is for real and all the airspace is now being shut down.' I'd always been a very extroverted, outgoing, travel-the-world-alone person. I'd called home once and said, 'Hey, there's men outside with AK-47s and I'm on the train going between Kosovo and Slovenia,' and I never thought anything about it because I knew I'd always go home if I needed to." "That moment when he said, 'All the airspace is shut down and there's no planes going in or out and, honey, I don't know when it's going to open,' suddenly that wasn't an available option for me," Keene said. "I didn't want to choose it, but I wanted to know it was there. My bravado and courage changed, and I wanted to be home really bad." "You felt a different level of homesickness when you were outside of the country because other Americans aren't around you everywhere," Keene said of 9/11 and the following days. "I will say the Polish people were extraordinary. A couple of days later, in Krakow and Warsaw outside the consulates' offices, there was an outpouring of flowers and cards and stuff to Americans." Kerns said a call went out for Poles to put candles in their windows as a show of support for the U.S. "I remember walking out that evening and just seeing the whole city lit up with candles," said Keene. "It was breathtaking but also so inspiring because, as a country, Poland definitely understands what it's like to be attacked. That's not a foreign concept to them, unfortunately, so they were very supportive and loving." Keene's landlord, who spoke little English and was usually reserved, changed. "He came out and was bringing me meals. It sparked the humanity between us." Keene returned to the U.S. in December that year. "I do remember the difference between flying to Poland and returning," Keene said. "I lived in Alabama at the time and used the Montgomery airport. My family came with me and walked me out to the tarmac and said goodbye. Coming back, it was a whole new experience because they had all the systems in place and you had to check everything. The America that I left was not the America I returned to as far as air travel, and I don't think it's ever been the same since." Heather Hurd, reading specialist at Duffield Primary School Hurd was teaching fifth grade language arts at Rye Cove Intermediate School, homeroom 5B on Sept. 11, 2001, and had three years of experience. "Two of my students came back from working with another teacher and they said to me, 'Miss Hurd, there's been a tragedy. There're planes crashed, lots of people dead,'" Hurd recalled. "'We're under attack.'" "We didn't have the internet or TVs in all the classrooms at the time," said Hurd, "and when I was able to get to the library and watch the coverage, I saw exactly what events were unfolding, but I found out first from students who came back and told me. I'll never forget that feeling." "When I first saw the news coverage, my first thought was how was our country going to react, how many people have we lost in this, what is going to change, are people okay?" Hurd continued. "There were so many things happening in the nation at that time." "It took a little bit longer for the news to spread at Rye Cove, but the parents did bring people around," said Hurd. "We started to get information, and they started to make counselors were available, especially in the days after for children who wanted to talk about what happened. Mostly, the children, if they dealt with it or had emotions, most of them didn't express them. Most of them were just in shock and didn't understand the ramifications. They would ask questions and we would answer them as best we could." The school, community and country began pulling together more than in much of the country's history, Hurd said. Hurd said being in front of her students on 9/11 was a conflicting experience. "It was hard to process," said Hurd, "and you had to filter your emotions because you were in front of three classes of young people. You didn't know what you needed to communicate to them and what needed to be said because you were still trying to process it yourself." Hurd said the typical county schoolteacher's convocations involved a speaker, and she remembered one speaker at one of those events a few years after 9/11. "He was in the Twin Towers when it happened," said Hurd, "and he said those of us on the outside were getting more news coverage and knew more of what was going on than those in the Twin Towers and in the middle of it. He said what felt like minutes on the outside world felt like hours and hours. They were just going in mass groups trying to get outside, and he said some people turned around and went back to get friends, loved ones and coworkers, people they knew. Some made it and some didn't." "The important part was, he was talking about how America reacted and how they felt when it was happening," Hurd added. Joy Davidson – English teacher at Rye Cove High School Davidson had been a teacher seven years when she was an English teacher at Rye Cove High School. "I was teaching Rye Cove's senior cadet course and had 12 students at the elementary school learning about how to be a teacher," said Davidson. "I had gone to Duffield that morning to check on my students. I was going back to my car, and a former student whose mother taught kindergarten at Duffield walked up to me and said, 'Have you heard?'" "'Heard what?' and she told me," Davidson continued. "I got immediate cold chills all over and I drove back to Rye Cove. I think I called my husband, and I know I called my mother. She was on a bus trip and, two days before 9/11, the bus trip stopped underneath the World Trade Center. They were in Vermont on 9/11. I just wanted her to come on home." "I came back to school, and the TVs were on all day long," said Davidson. "You tried to explain to the kids and help them understand. I just remember how silent that day was and how quiet they were with the magnitude of it. We watched the towers fall in real time, all the things. Even the kids you considered rowdy, it was so quiet." "Some of those seniors I had are teaching at Duffield now," Davidson added. "I do remember a conversation with my aunt," Davidson added. "I had just found out I was expecting my second son, and she said, 'Oh Joy, it's such a terrible time to bring a child into this world.'" "It's something that's there," said Davidson. "I kept the Time and Newsweek magazines from that time. These kids weren't even alive at that time, and I just want them to understand the magnitude of it. I don't want them to feel like we felt, but I want them to understand. Those pictures that were captured kind of help them." Davidson pointed in her classroom to a picture of George W. Bush when he was sitting and reading to a kindergarten class as an aide whispered to him about the 9/11 attacks. "The kids ask, 'Who is that?' and I tell them that was when he learned about the first plane crash and how confused he was. The way he handled himself in front of those kindergarteners still brings cold chills. He didn't have any other choice but to be strong." "I like to have the 9/11 timeline posted so students can see the first plane and all the things," Davidson said of teaching about 9/11. "The phone calls home from the people on the plane. You want them to understand and feel the magnitude of it." 25 years later "COVID, maybe," Ford said when asked if she had experienced anything similar to 9/11 before or since. "Both of our (Gate City) girls and boys basketball teams were playing in state at the time COVID struck, pretty much the day things started shutting down." Returning from the 2020 state championships, Ford came to school the next day to the announcement that classes were cancelled for two weeks and then longer. "In my lifetime, that's two of the oddest things I've lived through," Ford said of 9/11 and COVID. "Just something that never happened before. Two times in my life when you're questioning what's going on, what's going to happen next." "For a while, we'd say, 'Before 9/11,' and now we say, 'Before COVID,'" Ford added. "I think of two things," said Keene. "Having a patriotic heart and spirit, it's something that's so needed back in America again. I think it unified us for a brief period there. Americans put down the sword of difference and rallied around one another. The bottom line was, no matter what your political or religious beliefs are, you have the freedom to hold those. I wish we could go back to that feeling. I don't want it to be cause by a traumatic event again, but I wish we could have a resurgence of that feeling." "For me, also when I was in Poland, I remember Celine Dion singing our national anthem, and she was Canadian," she said. "I was sitting on the couch with Polish friends, and they were crying with me while I was crying. Even though they weren't Americans, they just had the humanity to grieve with one another when one person is attacked. If you're feeling and caring people you have concern for others. Those two things were positives that came out of it, seeing the global humanity that crosses boundaries between countries and cultures and also the unification of Americans at that time." Hurd said she remembered events like Princess Diana's death and watching the Challenger space shuttle explosion when she was in second grade. "We watched it live. I can show you the room up the hall where I was in Miss Carter's class. There're certain events in your life you remember, and this was one of them." "I think our school does a good job of trying to remember 9/11," said Hurd. "We have a schoolwide theme this year where we're focusing on things about America and out 250th anniversary. That's very important to our school – our veterans, our first responders and our community - how they work together to ensure we have the freedoms and the things we enjoy every day because there's so many people that it takes to make America what it is." "I think it brought us together, but some of that's lost recently," said Davidson. "You don't want something like that to happen to bring us together, but you wish that it could have stayed that way. Here we are."