(Photo: Computer keyboard recovered from Ground Zero by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner's Office (OCME), NYC. On Loan from the National September 11 Memorial Museum. Photo: Penn Museum.)

A place for reflection

Today of course archeology can help us understand not just monuments not just artworks , we can study how people lived and in this case perished . So archeology allows us to reconstruct life-ways of ordinary people then and now. So this exhibit allows us to reflect as an individual. There's nothing like that incinerated computer keyboard ( an artifact rescued from the Ground Zero rubble. See photo) to make us reflect in many different personal ways and that reflection is very important. We hope that Americans will think very hard about the event of 11 September reflecting on the last 10 years and what it meant. So as an archeology museum and actually as an archeologist, these objects make us think about what we call the Pompeian premise (in essence, the study of human behavior behind the artifacts, not just the artifacts New Archeology ) , what happens after a catastrophe, what happened to these people, of whom we know very little. But in this case we know a great deal as many of these tragic stories describe; And then to see the connections between these people and their lives, the connection with objects.

I hope this will inform people about the other gallery, not least the Egyptian gallery where we have mummies or the galleries where you can see the life-ways of people in distant past or more recent past. That's the intention of the exhibit.

Witnessing a millennial change

Continuity is how we see the world for the most part and text always emphasizes essentially continuity. Objects, monuments, emphasize discontinuity.

In this case, I suppose you chose yourself what you think.

I tend to think personally that it was a moment of great change. It was a point when the United States, was , unhappily, so to speak, brought into something it has created , through circumstances it could never had envisioned, through globalization of a very particular kind. But in the same way you could say, if you look at our Roman galleries, and look at the houses from the Bay of Naples, you know 79 A.D. with the explosion of Vesuvius (volcano) burying Pompeii, it actually sealed a style of painting. and then the world changed after than in terms of how it represented itself.

I think the 11th of September was a moment of enormous change. It was a real millennial change because it's a moment when globalization really became apparent to everyone on the globe. It had existed before but this was the first instance and indeed I saw what happened that day in New York, over a computer rather than on a television screen and I'd never watched any live images over a computer screen before . Yes it was a moment when, to use a contemporary word, essentially the world went viral.

The story behind the symbols

The intentions of the terrorists was to attack American symbols, particularly it's finance, it's military machine, its government. and so it attacked a series of very distinguished building, but if I may say, as an archeologist, besides the rhetoric of those buildings, which of course are important to this story, it isn't the point of this exhibit.

The point of this exhibit is very much to reflect on the individuals, those individuals whom for the most part, in our archeological career we never get to engage with; the individuals that actually filled those symbolic buildings and to show through the almost trite elements, but important elements -which is the very stuff of archeology- those elements that show us how these individuals lived and in this case die. Yes obviously it was about symbols to a terrorist, from a political point of view but from the point of view of the archeologist it's also about ordinary people and their lives.

An eerie quietness

Commissioner Ramsey remembered the day hours after Washington DC and Arlington Va. were shaken by the attack on the Pentagon.  He was on a surveillance tour after the city had calmed down, most people had gone home and Washington was empty of traffic and pedestrians.

I remember Gainer ( Terry Gainer , was Executive Assistant Police Chief, second in command of the Metropolitan Police Department. of the District of Columbia)  and myself, the head of the secret service in D.C. and the head of the FBI,  got in a car and we drove around and the streets were literally deserted, not a soul, not a car, nothing. But the visible presence of law enforcement I'd never seen before.

Normally when you go by the White House,  you know the security's there but it's not real visible, but there were uniform secret service in plain clothes, you could see the plain clothes on the roof of the White House, you could see them all around the interior and standing right on 15th Street. you could not make a right turn onto 15th St. that was totally shut down. And 17th St. was also shut down.  The two  are by the old executive office building and also the east part of the White House, the treasury and the White House right next to it , and visibly with the MP5 sub machine guns.. When you went by the Capitol right around the rotunda of the Capitol there's a little walkway that goes around and you saw cops out there, you saw cops out on the west front, east front, all over, again with automatic weapons visible. And it was kind of an eerie feeling.  That's when we realized that our sense of normal was redefined in one short period of time, that it would never ever be the same again and it was very apparent that that was the way it was going to be for a while, that things had changed dramatically.

Interviewer: Did you really have a sense that things would never be the same?

Oh yeah , that's what struck me, I didn't initially. Because my initially reaction,  when I saw the second plane hit the tower, was why would anybody fly an empty plane into a building. I couldn't get my head around the fact that someone would be vicious enough to take a plane loaded with people and crash it into a building full of people. Obviously I know better know, but at the time that came as a surprise to me I just couldn't get my head around anybody doing anything like that. But towards the end of the evening is when that struck me is when we took that ride around town and we saw the visible security, that was the wake up call, that this is different, it's not ever going to be the same, certainly not in Washington.

The first impact

Well I hear 911 I think about the terrorist attacks, I think about that particular day, what went on in Washington D.C . Of course the Pentagon was struck which is right across the river in Arlington county, not actually in the District but directly across the 14th street bridge. In fact you could see the columns of smoke coming up from my office on that particular day. So that's what comes to my mind whenever someone says 911.

We had just finished up a meeting when my chief of staff came in and told me I needed to go into his office and take a look at what was going on in New York. He had the Today Show on and he was looking at images of the first tower burning, the second tower had not yet been hit.  I asked what happened and he said nobody seems to know. A small plane is the way it was described must have flown into the building. Everybody was still kind of not sure if it was an accident, on purpose or whatever and as we were standing there looking we actually saw the second plane strike the second tower,  so we immediately knew that that was certainly no accident.

So we immediately activated our command center in Washington. The way it works in Washington the Metropolitan Police Department is the largest agency and whenever there's a big event, a protest or whatever, other agencies tend to come into our building and participate in our command center and we had just built a brand new one in fact it hadn't even been officially opened yet. The first day of its operation was on 911,  2001, out of necessity. They had just put in the TV monitors and all that sort of thing but we didn't have phone lines yet because it had not yet been done. So everyone began to show up so you had not only surrounding jurisdictions, you had Park Police, Capitol Police, they sent a representative from the FBI, secret service, the FAA military district of Washington. All these different entities came to the headquarters. So we got it up and running, we started a recall of personnel just in case, and that's about the time that we heard the Pentagon had just been struck.

Organizing security

Interviewer : How about your own security?

Well I wasn't too concerned about that, I mean that's part of my job is to do whatever so I wasn't worried about that. You don't even think about that, you think about what your responsibilities are in a time like that;  I mean you can't stop and think about yourself.

You know,  I was concerned about my son,  I mean that was my biggest concern and once I got my hands on him and I said you just sit put and he just stayed in my office on the computer and so forth,  but at least I knew where he was and I knew he was safe and that's what mattered most. And my wife and I were able to make contact I just told her to stay out of the city until she heard back from me.

We also had to work because a lot of our guys wanted to go up to New York to help and we said no you have to  stay here and once we explained it to them,  we have  to protect the nation's Capital,  you can't go to New York, we need to stay here and make sure we don't have another attack.  It's easy to look back 10 years from now and nothing happened. When this stuff is going down,  I don't think there's anybody who could honestly say they thought that would be it for 10 years, everybody was waiting for the second shoe to drop, whether it was an airplane, car bomb, captive shooter. I mean, everybody thought something else was going to happen and to be honest with you I'm surprised it didn't.

WHYY media  producer and writer Michael O'Reilly gathered members of the team for an informal conversation. He captured it on tape and created this audio essay.

The producer would like to thank these individuals for their participation in this project:

Larry Dodds, Vice President of Product Line Management
Rob Anderson, Executive Vice President and CTO
Ted Boinske, Principal Software Architect
Bill Townsend, Senior Director of Embedded Hardware and Software Development
Rash Mia, Vice President and Chief Scientist
John Jarvis, Manager

Read the transcript:

I am sitting a boardroom with a bunch of guys looking at pictures from 10 years ago. The pictures are personal snaphots from when these guys were working at ground zero. Looking at the pictures is disconcerting because I’ve seen all these views before from the news, but without familiar people in them. It’s almost like recognizing your family and friends in pictures of the Titanic – two familiar things from wholly different worlds. Or like running into your grade school teacher on vacation.

ROB: The thing that these pictures don’t do is they just don’t to me, get the scale

BILL: That’s what’s kind of weird…

LARRY: They don’t; the smell, the sounds, the whole thing is missing from these, right? I mean, they just look like a mob.

ROB: This is some of our catwalk stuff that we were on

TED: Do we have a picture of the building we were in? That I think is the Verizon post office (Group Agreement – Verizon Building)

These guys were not first responders. They worked for a company, TruePosition,  outside of Philadelphia that locates mobile devices – not by GPS tracking but by using old-fashioned trigonometry and math. And they discovered that there were cell phones – over 1600 of them in the pit, the main wreckage area – in the hours after the September 11 attacks.

I hadn’t really heard anything about this operation in the 10 years since September 11. In fact TruePosition is pretty mum about it too – though proud. A plexiglass case in the lobby holds a piece of TruePosition equipment that they used that day.

I heard about it through Ted Boinkse. I’ve known Ted for over 25 years and the operation just came up in conversation. 10 years ago there was no Facebook status update to say “I was participating in a search and rescue effort at the site of the worst terrorist attack on American soil”. Ted would never do that. He doesn’t even have a facebook presence now.

So these guys were called in – this is how it worked:

All cell phones check in with the network every minute or so via a cell tower. Those cell towers can be all over the place, so by comparing the difference in the time it takes the cell phone signal to reach each tower, simple trigonometry makes it easy to determine an area of overlap. The more cell towers, the smaller the area of overlap and the better the accuracy. While movies show us tracking devices and GPS enabled technology, even 10 years ago, in real life it doesn’t always work like it does in the movies. You don’t see this kind of tech in the movies because, after all, trigonometry is not usually regarded as sexy.

LARRY: Right – TruePosition is a wireless locations company, we locate mobile devices. In the US we locate 5 million 911 calls a month. And we do that by detecting when that mobile device is transmitted at, and we receive it at multiple antennas. So what we decided it would be possible to do was locate phones in the pit, by taking antennas, and surrounding the pit with antennas, and dragging the communications equipment that would have to go from those antennas back to a central place, and from there, we can locate those devices, that are transmitting in the pit.

PRODUCER: It’s the basic idea of triangulation.

LARRY: It’s the basic idea of triangulation so a phone transmits in the pit, and as that transmission happens, we detect it at multiple antennas that are surrounding the pit. We pull that information back to a central place, and then we can calculate the location of that device. And we were able to detect the location of I think approximately 1600 phones that were uniquely being transmitted in the pit.  If you can make a phone call, we can detect you, because we are at the same towers that the cell tower is at, our antennas. So if we can, if you can actually make a phone call, we can locate that phone.

PRODUCER: I asked them what they had seen that surprised them, and they told me at least one thing that I had never heard before:

ROB: After going upstairs, we noticed large amounts of broken glass… tons of dust and other debris, pieces of what looked like heat exchange or air conditioning systems, and a lot of uh… everywhere you looked you’d see these same kinds of things, and also often would include a lot of paper, some of which would be pages or pieces of paper from pornographic magazines.

PRODUCER: That’s surprising. Have you ever seen that before ?

ROB: You know it’s not something I’ve ever seen myself, you know, in the work place, but there seemed to be quite a bit around the scene of the incident.

PRODUCER: I completely understand why I have never heard that before, since just to mention it would distract from the immeasurable loss that occurred there and by implication sully the memory of those that died there. But I can’t get beyond the incongruity of picturing it there – in the workplace before or after the disaster.

BILL: I do remember one thing, you know, we’re on one side of the pit, and you can see across the way, to buildings on the other side of the pit, at least one or two that I can recall, these buildings were on fire. You could see the fire blowing out the windows… and there wasn’t fire crews there trying to fight these fires that I can recall, I didn’t see any water on these fires, it’s just, these buildings were burning, and they’re likely going to burn to the ground because there was nothing that could be done you know…

TED: What I kept on thinking of was sort of apocalyptic science fiction movies, that’s what captures is for me the best. This general feeling that it was the end of civilization as we know it, and these are the sort of remains.

LARRY: The amount of support that was there to support the rescue workers was just amazing. People were driving around in golf carts, making sure you were hydrated by just handing out water, handing out Gatorade. There were food station that were set up, that must have been set up by all the restaurants in New York. They weren’t box lunches, this was good food that was set up all over the place: fruit, snacks, hot meals. There were generators, just lines and lines of generators that were set up for anyone’s need.

If you needed a generator to go get, to set up a piece of equipment, there were depots in fact were you could grab a generator and set it up.  There were shoes, there were masks, there were boots, there were jackets, anything that you could imagine that you really needed was just available to you, and you would just ask someone for it, and you would be pointed to some supply place, where you could have something you needed, no matter what it was. The support there was just unbelievable.

BILL: It had to have been a boardroom, similar to the type of room we’re sitting in now.  With what looked to be a nice table, all kinds of chairs, but the thing that was remarkable to be was that there were plates, with food, bagels… one bite out of a bagel, multiple bites out of things… it was all covered with dust, and it seemed like fake food because it was all covered with dust,  but you knew that people were sitting in that room right before the disaster happened, right before… it occurred, and then they were out of there.

TED: It had to have been a boardroom, similar to the type of room we’re sitting in now.  With what looked to be a nice table, all kinds of chairs, but the thing that was remarkable to be was that there were plates, with food, bagels… one bite out of a bagel, multiple bites out of things… it was all covered with dust, and it seemed like fake food because it was all covered with dust,  but you knew that people were sitting in that room right before the disaster happened, right before… it occurred, and then they were out of there.

I remember once hearing about something that happened in WWII – I don’t know if it was from a movie or if someone told me about this. Troops had come upon a house that had the entire side blown away to reveal a family, all seated around the table, dead. The way the bomb had exploded had literally sucked the oxygen from the area suffocating them, still seated before their now dust-covered and rotting food. I think back to the Titanic reference I had made earlier.

Years ago, about the time the movie TITANIC came out, I did an art installation at Eastern State Penitentiary – an abandoned but stabilized ruin of a prison in Philadelphia. They let me go through their archives where I found a log book that spanned the 20 years between 1895-1915. I looked up the date April 14, 1912 in the log book thinking that I’d find a mention of the Titanic. Nothing. But a week later, while looking through the same section of the log book, on Sunday April 19, 1912, I stumbled on this mention. There, in a beautiful fountain-penned script were the words –

OVERSEER O’NEILL – Funeral Services sacred to memory of those lost in the wreck of the titanic on the night of April 14th, 1912. The prisoners took part by marching around the center. Music by the Penitentiary Choir. Accompanied by ESP orchestra 2pm. All well in gallery.

I never really used this reference in the installation, but afterwards, I would always wonder about it. Did the prisoners know some of the passengers ? Were there so many Philadelphians on board that it resonated into every corner of the city ? Was it SO different then ?

It wasn’t until the events of September 11 that I really understood why the prisoners did what they did. By myself, just spontaneously, I wanted to pay tribute to those that had died. That feeling must have been even stronger when one was  surrounded by others, whether in a school, church or a prison. How could I expect to understand the prisoners reaction to the Titanic, when these kinds of things – pearl harbor,  the titanic, catastrophic disasters with huge loss of life – had happened so long ago in the past ? My only frame of reference were movies – but I felt way worse than what Obi Wan Kenobi feels when the whole planet of Alderaan gets blown up. I remember watching STAR WARS after September 11 and thinking that if Obi-wan really felt something, he’d just be doubled over for the whole rest of the movie retching his guts out at the atrocity of what had just happened.

Toward the end of their first and last day, they had the pit ringed with the cell phone antennas. They got everything working and over the course of the next few hours began collecting signals.

First they would get the signal that had the cell phone number embedded in it. Sometimes they had to ask the first responders to shut off their phones since those numbers would get picked up too. Then they would see if their list matched any of the 911 calls, since that would mean there was a greater probability that they could target active users for location.

But they just kept calling numbers and they would go right to voice mail, or they wouldn’t pick up at all.

LARRY: As these numbers were coming up on our screens that were telling us that these mobile numbers were still coming from the pit. We were on this telephone bridge where multiple parties can call into this one number and hear each other speak, so it’s a conference bridge with secret service and FBI and a whole bunch of federal organizations, and there was just constant chatter back and forth about what was going on and which organizations needed to do what, and we were on that bridge telling them that we were detecting phones in the pit, and as the would come up with a number of someone who dialed 911 or somebody who was reportedly in there, they would ask us if it was in our list, and we would do the same to them.

We would say ok we just received a transmission of somebody that did this, do you know anything about that phone number? They were all just reading off numbers to us, and we were checking them in our database, but at one point, the told us a phone number And a persons Name. Her name was Melissa Vincent. They told us on the bridge that she had recently dialed 911: they didn’t say recently within the last 5 minutes, but they had received a 911 call from Melissa Vincent on this phone number- to see if we could locate that phone, or if it was in our database. It struck me as strange because up until that moment it was just a list of phone numbers, and now there was a name associated with it, and it became horrifying on a whole other level, because there was actually a name associated with this thing.

And after we came home, like the rest of the world, we were glued to our TV’s watching the aftermath unfold, and at one point I was watching a news cast, and there was a father that came on and was talking about his missing daughter, and her name was Melissa Vincent, and it just was an incredible coincidence that just really struck home and brought the whole thing to a stark reality, when you’re in that situation to see her father, and have him say that he didn’t know anything about her, and I knew at least that she had dialed 911 at some point after the event, so it was quite a shocking turn of events.

… to a name, and then all of a sudden it goes from a number, to a name, to her father… and it just escalates the entire event

PRODUCER: I download the guide for the 9/11 memorial onto my iPhone, enter her last name in the search field and there she is – her name inscribed on the north pool panel, N-65.

It quickly became clear that they weren’t even going to be able to use their locating technology because they would only be locating cell phones buried in the pile. It had turned from a search and rescue operation into a cadaver recovery situation. On top of that, there was an urgent need to leave since another building was in danger of coming down.

ROB: I was gonna say the same thing, I think that we did go there with the hopes of helping out the rescue, and I think in leaving, when we were all evacuated, we weren’t able to go back in. We were done at that point, and I know I felt really bad that we weren’t able to go back, that we weren’t able to do more

TED: The reason we were there was to try to find people, try to find survivors in the rubble. In the end, there were no survivors found, by us or by anyone else, and that was obviously disappointing for us and everyone else who was there. So… for us there was no major climax, where we rescued, where we discovered some survivors and were able to extricate them from the rubble. It didn’t happen. We weren’t able to locate any survivors, and we went home.

PRODUCER: I remember that time, volunteering for the Red Cross, wanting to help. And I remember that night, the world eerily silent. Around 3 am, thousands of people  across this city leapt from their beds, convinced Philadelphia was now under attack  as thunderstorms rumbled like bombs being dropped up and down the east coast.  I stood there panting in the dark, ready for what would happen next.

Produced and edited by Michael O'Reilly

Here are some of his observations.

Witnessing a horrible day in Manhattan and DC

"My family was safe in Maryland. So when I finally called my wife late that night, to say that I was having a hard time getting out of the city but that I would try to take a train, she was really mad at me. From her perspective all she knew was that I got on a plane to New York that was supposed to land at the same time that these planes hit the World Trade Center and she never heard from me all day. She was right to be mad.

I'll tell you it was a very surreal day in New York and walking around in the city where, even hours after the towers fell, this ash was falling everywhere. W wherever you went, your body and your hair were covered with ash, there were all these people walking up from the disaster area that had their faces covered and were wearing these suits. It was a very Fellinesque atmosphere in Manhattan.  I finally managed to get on a train going back to D.C. and I had only just begun to relax from seeing this horror in Manhattan when from the train- actually from the car after the train- I saw the glow from the Pentagon because we lived at the time around there and I had to take the parkway up So I actually saw on that day both what happened in Manhattan and what happened at the Pentagon. It was really really a horrible day".

Fostering civic engagement among the young

I think 9/11 did change us in a lot of ways. We saw a huge coming together of America over the next several years. We saw big spikes in volunteering and civic engagement, we saw much higher levels of connectedness between family members and within communities. What's really interesting is that the older folks, over a period of years, relaxed their commitment to civic engagement and it came down to be close to normal. But there was a younger generation, the folks that were not cynical, the folks that did not have any experience before this, that became involved in civic engagement. They continued to be a generation of very civically engaged people whose first sense of civic identity was formed around the crisis of 911.

That's one of the great things that, I think, came out of this. You know the old story about the question, "how do you empty a beach of sand into the ocean?" The answer is one spoonful or shovelful at a time, and my experience at the time, and ever since, has been that when people look at the big breadth of the challenges in this world, it can often feel too big to stand up and do something. Yet, there are people all around us who are standing up and doing something every day. They're having their voices heard and they're volunteering and trying to make the world better; they're not overwhelmed, they know that they're putting one foot in front of the other".

Learn about the National Constitution Center's "Day of Remembrance on the 10th Anniversary of September 11th."

Produced and edited by Elisabeth Perez Luna

Ask any baby boomer and they'll tell you they remember exactly where they were during several tragic events in our recent history: President Kennedy's assassination, the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.  And 9/11/2001.

"I had just finished a meeting, when my chief of staff came in and asked me to go to his office to see what was going on in NY."

"My daughter was in New York and she could see the fire. The towers had fallen, and she chose not to look, because she said she was afraid  she couldn't drive home".

"I was the morning of September 11 flying into NYC. I landed at 8:30, and as we were driving in , we were looking at the window at The World Trade Center and it had a billowing cloud of smoke.

For a younger generation the memories are different.

"I guess I was really young when it happened, I was ten years old.

Amelia Possanza is a 20 year old senior at Swarthmore College.

"It was probably my second at middle school so it felt very abrupt that I didn't know what was going on, but I was also suddenly shoved into having to think about national politics and international politics all of a sudden."

That shoving into national and international politics later translated, into a spike of volunteering.    David Eisner, President of the National Constitution Center, says that involvment faded away among older people.

"There was a younger generation, that spiked continued to be a generation of very civically engaged people whose first sense of their civic identity was formed around the crisis of 9/11. "

The surge in civic responsibility is rooted in the sense of unity and a desire to rebuild a nation in shock. Something pollsters, like Frank Newport, Editor-in-Chief of the Gallup Poll, call "rallying".

"The President's job approval rating within a week went up to 90% which was the highest job approval rating in Gallup Poll history, it still is and that was symptomatic of the fact that regardless of one's political persuasion at that time, Republican, Independent, or Democrat, Americans were uniting behind their leader".

There was also another sort of rallyng going on: The need to strengthen security measures by any means necessary.  Security and surveillance systems were at first ovehauled and then refined. Part of the counter terrorism tactics, says Steven Frank, Chief Historian at the National Constitution Center, was the approval of controversial laws such as the Patriot Act.

"Our feelings about security and about personal privacy, all that has changed. The kind of national security state that we have developed and come to accept is different from the kinds of ideas and institutions we would have accepted previously. Whether we have struck the right balance only time will tell."

Portions of the Patriot Act were reauthorized lat year. Most of the changes brought about by the 9/11 attacks have become so integrated in our daily lives that we often forget when they started. Including a new terminology that was quickly incorporated in our vocabulary. New words and commonly used words were redefined–terms like homeland security, TSA, WTC, vigilance, color coded alert system, bin-Laden, al-qaeda,  PTSD, first responders and of course, ground zero.

It has also changed the way business and leadership are taught says Amanda Fefferson.  She designs leadership classes for colleges.  She notes that even today,  a post 9/11 reality is part of every discussion about modern business strategies.

'Whether it was leadership or finance. Even in strategic planning and scenario planning and what's the world going to look like in ten years, and it's just woven into the fiber of our history books in so many different ways."

So what has changed since 9/11?  Depends on whom you ask.

I'm Elisabeth Perez-Luna for WHYY News.

Produced and edited by Elisabeth Perez Luna

Below are Steve's recollections. Listen or read the audio transcripts:

And the next day I brought it back to the office and this was our first artifact and a real centerpiece for the Constitution Center. After all, it was the Constitution and that’s what we were dedicated to telling a story about and I put it on a conference table in a conference room and the staff gathered around and everybody just stood there silently looking at it. Any other day I think there would have been loud congratulations all around. But the significance of the document that day really struck us and what it represented, I think, was the true sense of that unity I felt when I had gone to pick it up, that it was the ideas embodied in that document that made us a people.

Sticking the right balance:

Certainly we live in a post 911 world. Our feelings about security and about personal privacy, all that has changed. The kind of national security state that we have developed and come to accept is different from the kinds of ideas and institutions we would have accepted previously. Whether we have struck the right balance only time will tell.

"This is a new world" :

Like most people I assume most people, those not directly impacted by it and those grieving went on with their lives but there was a very funny eerie mixture of emotions that had to do with that feeling that we had been attacked, we were vulnerable, and yet we had rallied together. I remember the flags flying on porches in my neighborhood, I remember the skies being silent because planes were grounded for a time and thinking this is different, this is a new world, and it was a mixture of sadness and solemnity and a feeling of coming together, it was a funny and unique feeling that I won’t ever forget.

The strength of the Constitution re-enforced:

I think that 911 and a lot of the events that have happened since then have raised the constitution in American consciousness. I think that people think about the Constitution consciously more than they did. Personally the more I learn about the Constitution and its history the more respect I have for the document and its durability. Also its flaws, even the framers of the Constitution didn’t believe that they had created a perfect document. That’s why they created the ability to amend it, but they did create a perfect set of ideals that have to do with individual liberty and inequality and I think that the Constitution provides a mechanism for us to achieve those ideals and that’s the kind of respect I have for its promise.

Produced and edited by Elisabeth Perez Luna

Below are Frank's recollections. Listen or read the audio transcripts:

I was actually getting ready to go live with a report on CNN. We had a studio at Gallup at that point and I did live reports on CNN and I remember standing up there in the studio and the topic of that day believe it or not if I remember correctly was that Michael Jordan, the famous basketball player was retiring. We had asked the American public what they thought about that and so forth so I was standing there and then I saw on the monitor that CNN had switched to some news reports of smoke coming out of one of the towers at the World Trade Center and so I said to my producer at the time , well we might have to wait a bit while they report on that and they come back to us , but they never came back to us. Of course that story became the dominant news story for weeks to come and so that’s where I was on that fateful morning.

The rallying  effect:

We  have something that we call in public opinion studies a rally effect and when the country is threatened or involved internationally we have found on various measures that Americans will suddenly rally behind their leaders and the country and that’s certainly what happened after 911. as an example, the President’s job approval rating within a week went up to 90% which was the highest job approval rating in Gallup Poll history, it still is after president George W. Bush and that was symptomatic of the fact that regardless of one’s political persuasion at that time, republican, independent, or democrat, Americans were uniting behind their leader. We had Congress approval which usually is fairly low also jumped up to one of its highest points in history. And other measures did the same thing.

The  first post 9/11 poll:

Well we waited a day or two of course before we actually went into the field,  but we asked normal questions at the time which was do you think this is part of a bigger conspiracy, that other things are going to happen, how worried are you that there are going to be other attacks.  And of course immediately there was worry,  but I actually found which I have found before that Americans did not panic to the degree that a lot of other people did even though we found significant worry that there would be more terrorist attacks, Americans had somewhat of a more even keel I think as they often do in the face of tragedy like this than perhaps some of the histrionic reports by news announcers and others that came out of 911.

Worrying about the economy,  not terrorism:

9/11 clearly was a major factor in many people's lives but in terms of other indicators not a lot has changed a lot has changed politically but  now ten years later other things have taken over. When we say what’s the most important problem facing the country, a very small percent of Americans say terrorism,  they don’t even think of terrorism, now the big concerns are the economy and the other things that typically occupy our attention.

Produced and edited by Elisabeth Perez Luna

Below are Amelia's recollections. Listen or read the audio transcripts:

I guess I was really young when it happened, I was ten years old. It was probably my second at middle school so it felt very abrupt that I didn't know what was going on because I was in middle school, I was in a new environment because of that but I was also suddenly shoved into having to think about national and international politics all of a sudden.  What happened is that a lot of my peers, my friends, or even people I don't know, everyone has something to say about the topic you know, I think almost every year when it's September 11th again I find myself at a meal at a college dining hall with my friends and people will start in on what were you doing this day and everyone has a story.

A different way to tell the story:
I remember one time I was at an airport in Boston and a mother was trying to explain 911 to a very very young child who might not have even been born when it happened.  I thought that was a very interesting moment to see that there was someone outside of that and to think about how do we tell that story to someone that is much younger so not only did they not live through it but they're also sort of not ready to hear the full version of the story as I understand it we need to sort of create a different story that we can tell.

How do we remember?
One of the other things that we talk about a lot is people over the years seem to be forgetting about it to  some extent or that when we were in high school we had a bell system and every year when the anniversary came up they would use the bell system to start and end a minute or two or even 5 of silence as a remembrance. Maybe that's still happening in high schools but it's not happening in our lives anymore because we're not in that highly regulated environment where people can be like okay be quiet now okay you can talk again, there's no one in our lives telling us that.

Produced and edited by Elisabeth Perez Luna

Below are Mike's recollections. Listen or read the audio transcripts:

Everything we did, everything everybody did was about 911. And so I’m standing there in my living just staring at this television and then the second tower fell and obviously it was September 11^th it was a Tuesday, I’ll always know what day it was, and nobody knew how to feel, I just staggered outside of my house and luckily September is a really good time in the garden. The air tends to be a lot cooler, the craziness of the bugs and weeds is slowed down so I just wandered from bed to bed and felt every leaf and looked at every plant and I must’ve stayed out there for 3 maybe 4 hours and finally came into the house, I had reluctantly told my wife what was going on and she was just sitting inside not even crying just blank eyed and I walked inside and I said you need to come out with me, you need to just come outside. And we walked outside I brought her out into the garden with me and there’s birds and there’s butterflies and there’s no sign of this impossible tragedy just 80 miles east of us and I looked at her and said I can’t imagine how people without a garden are going to get through this. I just felt like I couldn’t have survived if I had not had that to walk through, it was not an antidote but it prevented my tower from collapsing, it kept me going.

Horticultural therapy:

I had decided out first national show just to further confuse people who hadn’t heard me for a month and the show had been announced as coming onto these stations and of course nothing happened the way it normally it did, I decided that for the first show I gathered together I think it was 3 or 4 horticultural therapists to talk about how people could use their plants to ease these horrible feelings that they were going through and the whole way that plants bring people’s blood pressure down, reduce their depression, and that’s all we did for that first show the first hour was just horticultural therapists just trying to make people feel better.

Music as the messenger:

I don’t think there’s any sense to be made from something like that. Sometimes there is just the existence of pure, unadulterated evil in the world and it just strikes and I don’t think anybody can ever make any sense of it. The one thing that happened afterwards and it was within a few weeks and was there were a lot of musical tributes to the firefighters and the police officers and the rescue personnel who raced into the towers and you know that the firefighters knew what was going to happen. And the chorus I wish we had a copy of this song so we could get it right but the chorus of this folk song was something like "and their boots were running up the stairs as ours were running down.’ And that’s all we have , the acts of heroics that occurred on that day.

Produced and edited by Elisabeth Perez Luna

Below are Ken's recollections. Listen or read the audio transcripts:

It's interesting that this other 911 which was a long time before the one from ten years ago, it was in 1777, tends to be forgotten because of what happened then. There was a roundup in the early days of September 1777, the British were basically knocking at the door, they were about to occupy Philadelphia, the revolutionary war was on, it had begun, the Declaration of Independence was signed and war was now. There was a revolutionary government that was in place and there were rights that people had. Philadelphia was a city with a mix of people including some loyalists, loyalists to the king, there were Quakers here who were pacifists, there were people who were patriots who were working very hard fighting for the cause.

A perpetual visual reminder:
Seeing the two towers in many things, I remember, this sounds stupid but looking at a piece of cake that was tipping over, the last part of a cake and it was standing up and I thought I'm seeing in that the falling of a building . I think people  when they're traumatized they see things and play with those images in many different ways in order to kind of come to terms with them. and so there's been literature and there's been painting and sculpture and you wonder and we're maybe too close to it still to assess it and really calculate the value of this and the longer history of American art and design.