Today’s date, when mentioned in its numeric form, conjures up troublesome memories for all those old enough to remember the day that 19 terrorists changed our lives . The mere mention of ‘9-11’ triggers strong emotions as we remember the moment we first heard about the attacks on the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and the a failed attempt on the Capitol, or Whitehouse, that resulted in a plane crash in a rural field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
That morning I was attending meetings of the Canadian Marketing Association in St. David Quebec a quaint little town in the Laurentians just south of Tremblant. The meeting began at 9am EST and I remember about 45 minutes in a fine gentleman from Xerox had left the room and still hadn’t returned some 10 minutes later. I could see a crack through a partially opened door at the front of the room, that he was sitting in a chair watching TV – seemed very odd. Another man left and came back into the room and as I looked across at him, he seemed somewhat ‘spacey’ and a bit pale. I whispered to my friend beside me
“Something’s wrong, look at Jay, he looks like he’s in shock. I wonder if the Prime Minister or President has been assassinated”
Moments later the President of the association interrupted the meeting to announce that
“Some unusual terrorist attacks have just occurred in New York this morning- we are going to adjourn to the lobby and capture the events on the TV”
As the 40 odd people trundled to the lobby in fear, we first saw our friend in his chair, tears falling down his cheek, looking up at screen where, incredulously, one tower stood on fire and smoke billowed out where the other tower had been standing. Everyone was literally breathless, wondering if this was real – and one woman weeping as she thought about her staffer she had sent to a meeting at the World Trade complex in her stead, so she could attend our meeting in Quebec. Later we travelled together as I drove her from Montreal to Toronto – helping her get the right messages on her voicemail and she determined that her staffer’s meeting was in Tower 7 and that she was okay. I dropped her off at her home in Toronto and headed to my brother’s house in Hamilton.
As the days unfolded and the complete story was laid out we learned that an LA Kings scout, and former NHLer, Garnet ‘Ace’ Bailey, had been on one of the doomed planes that plowed into the towers. He was on his way from the NHL offices in NYC back to LA ….and just picked the wrong flight as so many did. Ace was a good friend of Wayne Gretzky and a roommate of his who had shown Wayne ‘the ropes’ of being a professional hockey player when he first joined Edmonton.
A couple of months ago there was a story of a Canadian airliner that had been in US airspace and had been escorted by some US military aircraft back to Canada after reports of an ‘onboard threat’. I remember a CNN commentator saying in all seriousness
“Hopefully there are a couple of hockey players on board who could confront and subdue this guy”
Well, there once was one in a similar situation – and I am sure he would have done just that – he just didn’t know that these people didn’t care about their own survival.
pucksense 