“Then it came down like a kite doing a nosedive.” The plane plowed into the side of the Pentagon, producing a column of black smoke topped by brilliant orange flames. “It was flying way, way too low,” he says. The odd noise of a commercial aircraft overhead caught his attention. he found himself stalled in front of the Pentagon. Traffic was crawling, though, and at 9:40 a.m.
Still in workout clothes from an early-morning session at the gym, where he’d seen the awful images from New York on TV, Craven, 42, hopped into his car and rushed to work. In Washington, D.C., Bill Craven was about to feel trapped too. But as the air thickened and his emergency calls went unanswered, Young felt more and more trapped. He tried to calm himself by reciting a monologue from Man of La Mancha, a part he’d recently performed. He ripped off his shirt and covered his mouth so he could breathe dust was creeping into the elevator. Never imagining that they came from airplanes pounding into the buildings, he figured they must have been bombs. By this time he’d felt two violent explosions. Now stuck by himself for about an hour inside the 1 World Trade Center elevator, Chris Young started to think he wasn’t going to make it out alive. “There were no patients,” he says, “because everyone was dead.” “It was bodies.”Ĭlose by at Bellevue Hospital, “Ed,” a 23-year-old gay medical student who asked that his real name not be used, geared up to help with the anticipated deluge of casualties. “It wasn’t debris dropping from the buildings,” he says in a whisper. Van Why looked up to where the first plane had torpedoed the north tower of the World Trade Center and stared in disbelief. Insulation, plaster, soot, and paper were everywhere. When he got outside, the city was unrecognizable. I was just glad to be alive.”ĭirectly across the street, Artie Van Why felt a tremor in his 23rd-floor office and ran out of the building. Once outside, he says, “I thought about my mother and my boyfriend, John. As black smoke mushroomed through the lobby, he choked for air and then jumped through the lobby’s blown-out windows. “Next thing I knew, a fireball of debris was headed right at me” says Draigh, who dived for shelter behind a steel planter. Before he could get there, the building shook around him as American Airlines Flight 11 hammered into it. He then walked through the north tower’s revolving door and headed toward the elevators to go up to his 54th-floor office. His metered receipt recorded the time as 8:39 a.m. Thousands of feet below, 38-year-old attorney David Draigh was just getting out of a taxi. and then got back in the elevator for what would turn out to be the longest and scariest ride of his life. But on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, the 33-year-old actor was temping for the Marsh insurance firm and had volunteered to shuttle reports from the company’s midtown office to the 99th floor of 1 World Trade Center. And in the process ruined Andre's graduation, sending him off with a stinging reminder that he is neither typical nor normal, at least in the official view of the Newark Public Schools.Normally Chris Young wouldn’t have been anywhere near the World Trade Center. Garris on his Puritanical homophobia, began looking for black magic markers, and made sure there were enough in the stock room to obliterate the Love that Dare Not Show Its Face in the Newark Public Schools. Wait, wait, wait, wait, that's not what happened silly me! Instead, in a dismal display of spinelessness, Ms. Garris that Andre had abided by school rules, that he had just as much right to pay tribute to whomever he wanted to as any other student who bought a page, and said she would deal personally with that any parent who was upset if they called, before sending Mr. In an admirable display of leadership, Superintendent Bolden reminded Mr. Russell Garris, the assistant superintendent who oversees the city's high schools, brought the photograph to Bolden's attention Thursday afternoon, apparently concerned the picture would be controversial and upsetting to parents, Bolden said. But then adults got involved and the problems started (as is so often the case in schools, base don my ten years of teaching high school history). Andre's classmate Uerequenia Pereira reported in the Newark Star-Ledger that she sees same-sex couples kissing all the time at her school and it's no big deal. Ironically, students at East High don't seem to be as hung up as those "teaching" them seem to be.