Keith Hagel is a 1963 graduate of Staples High School.
He lived and worked throughout Fairfield County, before retiring as a newspaper editor and moving to Maine. An earlier version of this piece appeared in the Bangor Daily News in 2023.
The morning sky on September 11, 2001 near New York City was spectacularly clear and beautiful, so different from the normal clouds and smog that even jaded, sleepy commuters like me on the train from suburban Connecticut to NYC took notice.
We were near the New York state line when the news broke. I remember one man saying, “Someone has declared war on the United States.” Another, on a cell, started yelling at his mother to turn off “The Price is Right” and watch the news.” Takes all kinds.
The train made an unscheduled stop, and a frantic young man boarded. His girlfriend worked in one of the World Trade Center buildings that had been hit, and of course he could not reach her. I hope I never again have to see such anguish on a person’s face.
I thought about a woman I had chatted with on a subway the day before. I think she had said she was on her way to start a new job at the WTC. As she said goodbye getting off, her hip brushed mine, perhaps accidentally. I noticed, but felt I’d probably never see her again. Now, I wondered if anyone else would, either.
As we neared the 125th Street station, we could see the Twin Towers afire across the river. An hour later, I would have been in the bowels of one of the other WTC buildings, connecting to my editing job at Dow Jones Newswires in Jersey City.
The unthinkable happened, on September 11, 2001.
125th Street was as far as train riders were going on September 11. If the World Trade Center had been targeted, Grand Central Station, in midtown Manhattan, certainly also might be.
To my surprise, I eventually got a dial tone on a pay phone (25 years later, extinct in New York) and called my newsroom office. No answer; the 16-floor building had been evacuated. Not that I could have have gotten there. All subway and bus service in Manhattan had been shut down.
My supervisor did eventually make it in. He had been walking to work from near the WTC when he saw the first plane hit. Any sane and/or terrified person would have run like hell in the opposite direction. He did, but a good newsperson to his core, he first called in the story.
I took a turned-around train back to Fairfield County. Little talk, no tickets collected. As I got off an hour later, grim-faced police were on the platform, probably watching for injured or traumatized people needing medical help. The next day, we would learn of the cars that sat empty in railroad parking lots, their drivers never to return.
(Photo copyright Ted Horowitz)
I drove my clunker car to my wife’s house. We recently had separated but, as parents, remained connected. Her first words to me were, “I never thought I’d be so glad to see that piece of (junk) here again.”
Her phone rang, and I answered. My college daughter in Michigan. She had been hurt by her parents’ split and was quite angry with me, with some justification.
A brief pause, then, “What are you doing here?”
I told her she should have listened to the message I had left her from the train, using a cell I had borrowed from a stranger.
There was silence, then some noises.
She was sobbing. She had thought I was dead.
Keith Hagel