Twenty-five years later, there are things about September 11, 2001, that remain remarkably clear.
I had been the new morning show host on Hot Country B104 in Bloomington, Illinois, for less than six weeks.
I was still learning the station. Still learning the building. Still learning the people around me.
Then, on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday morning, a plane hit the World Trade Center.
At first, nobody knew what we were seeing.
Was it an accident? Some kind of catastrophic mechanical failure? A terrible navigational mistake?
Then the second plane hit.
And everything changed.
One of the things that is easy to forget now is just how different the world of information was in 2001.
There was no Twitter. No Facebook. No smartphone in everybody’s hand. Breaking-news alerts did not instantly appear in your pocket.
If you were driving to work, working in a shop, sitting at a desk without a television nearby or simply going about your morning, there was a very good chance you were learning about the biggest story of our lifetime from the radio.
That realization came quickly to all of us.
The music stopped.
The commercials stopped.
Whatever we had planned for that day suddenly did not matter.
Our job was to tell people what we knew, be honest about what we didn’t know and keep updating them as one unimaginable development followed another.
The Pentagon was hit.
Another plane went down in Pennsylvania.
The towers fell.
Airspace across the country was shut down.
And nobody knew whether it was over.
That uncertainty may be one of the hardest things to explain to someone who was too young to experience that day.
Today, September 11 is history. We know the sequence of events. We know what happened next.
We didn’t know any of that then.
For several hours, anything seemed possible.
I also remember the strange silence in the skies after commercial flights were grounded.
Then came the sight and sound of military aircraft.
It was eerie.
It felt like the entire country was holding its breath.
Inside the radio station, I watched experienced broadcasters simply go to work.
There wasn’t time to stop and fully process every horrifying image or every new bulletin.
You gathered the information.
You checked it.
You went on the air.
Then you did it again.
And again.
I learned a lot about broadcasting that day.
Not about ratings. Not about music scheduling. Not about promotions or contests.
I learned what the job is supposed to be when it really matters.
Radio is local.
Radio is immediate.
And in a frightening moment, sometimes the most important thing a broadcaster can do is simply be there — a familiar voice saying, “Here’s what we know right now.”
What happened in the days afterward has stayed with me just as strongly.
Our stations became involved in an American Red Cross fundraiser outside Schnuck’s Grocery in Bloomington.
What began as a relatively simple effort grew into four days and eventually raised more than $1 million.
Much of it came a few dollars at a time.
People brought cash.
They brought change.
They brought whatever they could spare.
And they hugged each other.
That part has never left me.
The attacks of September 11 showed humanity at its absolute worst.
The days that followed showed an extraordinary amount of humanity at its best.
For a little while, the usual dividing lines seemed less important.
Strangers treated one another like neighbors.
Flags appeared everywhere.
People thanked police officers, firefighters and service members.
Communities looked for ways to help people they had never met hundreds of miles away.
We were Americans first.
I would never romanticize September 11.
Nearly 3,000 people were murdered. Families were shattered. Lives were changed forever. The consequences of that day would stretch across decades.
There was nothing beautiful about what caused Americans to come together.
But there was something beautiful about the way they did.
Twenty-five years later, I can still picture that radio building.
I can still remember being the new morning guy, not even six weeks into the job, trying to make sense of something none of us could comprehend while also understanding that the microphone in front of us came with a responsibility.
And I can still remember a country that, for a brief time after one of its darkest days, seemed determined to hold onto one another.
I wish we could remember how to do that part again.