According to the weather report, Tuesday, September 11, 2001, was a bright and beautiful morning in the northeast, not a cloud in the sky. In Lawrence, as in the entire Merrimack Valley we shared that beautiful morning.
As it was our daily custom, we were listening to El Gobierno de la Mañana (The Morning Government”, a popular radio program that was broadcast on 1490 AM, with J. P. Villaman and Santo Acevedo. The latter, unafraid of being wrong, possess the best quality voice heard in the Valley in the last 30+ years since residing in Lawrence.
That fateful day, Acevedo was alone in the studio and after a commercial intermission, he returned, this time with an altered voice. He describes himself as “agitated, scared, gone crazy”, from what he had seen on the station’s TV.
Acevedo did not see the planes crashing, but the burning buildings and believed that we had been bombed. When he found out that there were planes causing the fires, he came to the logical conclusion that a plane could crash into a building but not two, one right after the other. “We are being attacked,” he said and made us all run to turn on our TV sets.
It was not the first time that a plane crashed into a building in New York. Those of us with good memory may remember the accident of the Empire State Building on July 28, 1945 when a Mitchell B-25 bomber, piloted in a thick fog over New York City, crashed into the Empire State Building. The accident did not compromise the structural integrity of the building, but caused fourteen deaths and damages estimated at $1 million.
When you compare both cases we can realize how much we have advanced in 74 years. Within seconds of the attack on the towers, we were already seeing what happened. In the case of the B-25 crashing into the Empire State Building on Saturday, July 28, 1945, we had to wait until the following Sunday, August 5 to see it at the cinema, in the news segment presented between the two films.
In Lawrence, two days after paying tribute to the victims of 9/11, the life of the young Leonel Rondón, who accidentally lost his own the day of the gas explosions, was remembered. Rondón had parked his car right next to a house that exploded and the chimney fell on the car where he was parked.
We agree with the words that Lieutenant James Flynn pronounced, when he said in his opening remarks at the event where tribute was paid to the victims of 9/11 and the families of those who died of diseases and traumas related to September 11.
“In one single moment, life may never be the same. As you go about and live and enjoy every breath you take, tonight before you go to sleep, in preparation for your day and life tomorrow kiss the ones you love, snuggle them a little tighter and never for one second take any moment of life for granted.”
A notable coincidence: both the 9/11 planes of 2001 and the B-25 of 1945, departed from Massachusetts and crashed in New York.
