Contributed by: Jeannette
Contributor's location on 9/11: Seattle, Washington
Contributed on: August 23, 2007

I was in the shower and my husband was still in bed. I heard the pounding of the running feet as our two teenage sons came, full-speed, down the hallway to our bedroom and pounded on the door yelling to us to turn the TV on. By the time I got my robe on they and my husband were all sitting on my bed watching the TV. My oldest son very excitedly told me that two planes hit the World Trade Center in New York. I automatically assumed it had been a mid-air collision.

I began to watch the news coverage immediately. We have a strong family connection to aviation that spans several generations and any kind of plane crash tends to weigh heavy on our hearts. As I continued to watch the coverage I felt very confused about what I was seeing and what they were saying. When my son told me there had also been a crash at the Pentagon my head would not let me connect them and I remarked that it was a very strange coincidence and thought to myself, what a sad day for the aviation industry.

While the news anchors were speculating that this could be a terrorist act it all started to fit together in my head. Just about the time I came to think I understood what was happening we watched live as the towers collapsed. I honestly was stunned. It seemed impossible that any of this could have actually happened and yet I was watching the buildings turn into rubble. It was about then that they announced that all flights had been grounded and that there would be no flights that day.

My mind went into work mode. I was the manager of a large Car Rental company's airport location and park & fly lot. I immediately began to think of all the people that were going to be parking their cars, thinking they were going to be headed to the terminals for flights that were not going to happen. I called my assistant manager to see if he was there yet and he had just arrived. Everyone was confused. I instructed him to make sure that no one came into park a car without being told that all flights were canceled. I knew it was going to be chaos. He said, "This is going to be a rough day." Boy, was he right.

The kids were rightfully upset. My husband seemed a little dumbfounded. None of them seemed to know what to do. I told the kids to go to school and I told them all I had to go & that I didn't know when I'd be back but I knew I had to leave NOW and get to work because we were going to have a mess on our hands. I got a call from our VP and was asked to stop by the main office on my way in. I did so hoping they could give me some guidance as to what we should do. Undoubtedly people were going to need the cars they had hoped to turn in that day before catching a flight. As I stood there in our administrative office, the reservation lines were ringing off the hook and I noted on their board that they had 20+ calls in the que waiting to be answered. I logged into their system and started taking calls myself to try to get some answers to the people who were calling in. Everyone was still confused as to what to do. We didn't have a standard plan on what to do if planes stopped flying suddenly. That plan had to be invented on the spot.

Our first reaction was to tell everyone the cars could not leave the state of Washington or it neighboring states because that was our "standard" policy. The more calls I took, the more I heard the frustrated voices of the travelers who were now stranded in Seattle. They were willing to do anything to get back to where they came from or to get to the people they cared about. No amount of money or regulation was going to stop them. Looking back, I don't blame them one bit for being angry and frustrated at being told they could not take our Seattle car to Baltimore, Dallas or Minnesota. It didn't take too long for us to just give in and allow them to take the cars wherever they needed to. We eventually figured out that every city was going to be in the same situation and our fellow agency cities were going to look out for our cars, just as we were going to look out for theirs once they undoubtedly arrive into Seattle. And arrive, they eventually did!

By the end of the day our lot was empty. It stayed that way for 3 days. The reservations didn't mean a thing to us as no one was flying in. We didn't know when cars would come back. We didn't know when planes would start flying again. It was the first time in the car rental business that every car was rented and there was no way to predict this and certainly no plan on what to. We learned allot about our industry that week. We are forever changed.

As I arrived to the airport location I found my employees bewildered and frustrated. Much of our staff of Muslim Somalis who had come to reside permanently in the US. Everyone on our staff was deeply saddened by what had happened. We did our best to keep busy, taking the opportunity of not having any more cars to do projects like cleaning the lot and offices.

That evening, after I left, I stopped into a local fabric store and purchased several spools of red, white & blue striped ribbon and a large bag of safety pins and sat down that evening at home and made up dozens of ribbons to give my employees to wear. I knew they needed something to feel like there was something they could do to show how they felt. I had done something similar back during the first Gulf War with yellow ribbons so it seemed natural for me to pick our patriotic colors for our new ribbons to signify our support for all that everyone had gone through.

The following morning I was met at my car by one of the Somali employees who had a very worried look on his face and asked if he could please speak to me. He confided that he was extremely concerned about how he was going to be received by the customers because his name was "Mohammed". He even said he didn't want to wear his name tag because he thought that some people might be frightened of him and others might even be mean to him.

I hadn't, until then, thought about the impact on the Muslim community. I had enjoyed a very good relationship with all of my muslim employees because I had the good fortune to have had several muslim friends in the past and had read the Koran. They viewed me as, if nothing else, sympathetic to their religion and as their employer had always made the necessary accomodations to their prayer time, food restrictions and their particular observances during Ramadan. I knew they trusted me and I felt it took great courage to come to me and express his concern about how uncomfortable he might make others feel simply by being muslim as well as how anxious he was about how they would treat him. I told him to proudly wear his name tag and handed him a red, white & blue ribbon to wear next to it. I explained that it would show he supported the USA and that he was sympathetic to the losses across the nation. He was so relieved. It was heartwarming that one by one all of the Somalis came to me and asked if they, too, could have a ribbon to wear on their uniforms too. By the end of the day I had given out probably more than 100 ribbons to all of my employees, to customers who happened to come along.

During those non-flying days we began to hear stories of how people got back home. Those are some interesting stories & I hope that they get shared eventually. Some strangers met in the airport and agreed to share a car to wherever they were headed. I imagine those were interesting days of traveling and getting to know someone who they might have never met before. I wonder if they became life-long friends for having gone through that together. My mother was stranded in Scottland when the flight ban was imposed. Her tale is interesting too. I also wonder how people's lives were forever changed just by virtue that this happened and affected them deeply, even if they did not personally loose someone dear to them that day. I certainly was affected and I do believe I have been permanently changed for the better because of what I went through with my family and my employees.

It made my heart stop for just a moment when I was driving to work the day the airlines started flying again. When I saw that plane in the sky I was temporarily frightened. What a sad feeling that was as I look back. Airplanes had always been a source of pleasure and a significant symbol of my family's love of the sky. That day it scared me to think that someone could use it against us as a way to try to destroy us. Those terrorists did damage and they took many lives, but they didn't destroy us, they made us look at ourselves more closely and gain strength in the power of our UNITED States of America as well as fortify the UNITED Strength of Americans.

No, I will not forget that September 11, 2001. EVER!


Cite as: Jeannette, Story #41115, The September 11 Digital Archive, 23 August 2007, <http://911digitalarchive.org/stories/details/41115>.
Archival Information: 1659 words, 8773 characters
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