Gazette readers recall how 9/11 redefined innocence

Wayne Kreutner made a chilling observation while visiting his grown children in Kansas City, Mo., the day before he tried to fly to Cedar Rapids on Sept. 11, 2001.

“I remember commenting to my son, who owned a 4-inch Buck knife, that ‘a knife this big is allowed on commercial airline flights,' ” he wrote at TheGazette.com's special 9/11: I Remember site.

Kreutner, who worked for an airline, was able to fly to Chicago before being grounded. While driving a rented car to Cedar Rapids he listened to radio coverage of the terrorist attacks.

“I realized that one of the airplanes had hit the World Trade Center about the time my flight had taken off from Kansas City,” he wrote. “The knife that I had commented about the day before was similar to the weapon used by the terrorists to take over the aircraft and kill their victims.”

Memories of that day in history 10 years ago are abundant and lasting. Sept. 11, 2001, became a powerful pivot point in U.S. history, regardless of where you lived at the time. The date needs no explanation. Use the phrase “9/11” and everyone knows about when and what you are talking.

“That was the day we lost our innocence and our country was forever changed,” wrote Heather Plate, of Tipton, who was caring for an ill granddaughter while watching events unfold on television 10 years ago.

The comments I am citing come from the 9/11: I Remember page.

Each individual recollection is a short story that fits into a mosaic that illustrates that day.

“Elementary school. Very young. I remember this day clearer than any other day from my childhood,” Kyle Cleveland of Cedar Rapids, then a third-grader at Johnson Elementary School in town, wrote in part.

Ashley Lowe was a freshman at Cedar Rapids Jefferson High School when her crying mother picked her up from school that day. “My cousin worked in the World Trade Center, and no one had been able to hear from him yet,” Lowe, who still lives in Cedar Rapids, wrote. “We went home and just stared at the TV, waiting, watching. Thankfully, he ended up being safe. He had been running late to his morning meeting. Both his boss and his boss' assistant didn't make it.”

Tamara Sigmon, as well as other writers, went back in time when she saw the first World Trade Center tower fall on Sept. 11, 2001. “This made me think about the time when I went to New York and went up in the tower with my parents as a teenager,” wrote Sigmon, who lived in Iowa City at the time but who lives in Sperry, Okla., now.

Sigmon had given birth two weeks earlier to her youngest daughter. “I looked over at my husband, and I could see anger in his eyes and mixed in with that I saw sadness, because I could see tears fill them.”

It was that kind of day

“It was such a sad day for our country, but should have been a happy one for our family as we welcomed a new granddaughter into the world that day,” wrote Linda Eichinger of Marion.

Eichinger's granddaughter was born at Mercy Medical Center. “It was very hard to watch this tragedy on TV in the morning, and then late in the afternoon we were en route to the hospital to meet our new granddaughter. We had such mixed emotions.”

Certainly the notion of innocence in which the children born from that day on differs from what existed before.

“I might have been a naive child when 9/11 occurred, but it forced us all to grow up,” wrote Allison Schueller, a seventh grade student 10 years ago at Jefferson Junior High School in Dubuque, where she still lives.

Many of us were naïve, Allison. We all had to grow that day.