September 11 2011 - 10 years later

Today ten years ago a terrible attack struck the USA.

I mention the day here, because it has a special significance for Keith in several ways.

When Keith worked at CNN in 1981, the studios were located in WTC #1 and five people killed were of special importance to him.

It is also connected to his passion, baseball. He posted a new Baseball Nerd blog post today “Baseball And 9/11: Continuity, Not Healing“

I’ll just repost part of his May 12 2005 blog post on Bloggerman, an MSNBC blog of his, because no one can tell it better than Keith himself(Barbara Olson, AA77, a regular guest of his, is not mentioned here but in a Q&A on C-Span, emphasis mine):

“…My first job in television was in the lobby of WTC #1 (as they used to call it; I never heard “North Tower” or “South Tower” until the day of the attacks). That’s where CNN’s New York bureau was located until 1984 – behind a two-story thick glass wall that, when we put the studio lights on, made us look like a very cheap high school science experiment.

I hated the place. I mean, if you work in the city’s tallest building and you’re stuck in the lobby, you develop a mean streak about it. The place was comically understaffed (the first two years, we didn’t have a receptionist – whoever was closest to the front door opened it, for staffers, visitors, and bag ladies alike). The commute – from almost anywhere else in the city – was wearying. The mall beneath the towers was a desert, and the neighborhood a wasteland (the dilapidated old West Side Highway still stood – kinda – out the doors to West Street, and the only amusements were those days when big hunks of it would crash to the roadway below). Worst of all, the air conditioning used to go out on an almost regular basis. You’ve never known heat until you’ve worked in a television studio without ventilation. Suits pressed while you wear them.

As I hinted above, my father’s an architect, so I had inherited the typical aesthetic condescension of his profession. What the heck was this Trade Center design supposed to be? The world’s largest salute to Oblong, perhaps – with the faux-gothic grillwork on the outside tacked on in a fruitless attempt to class up the joint.

I went in there to clean out my desk on the afternoon of Saturday, March 31, 1984. I would not return until September 11, 2001.

Suddenly, of course, the sense of drudgery that only a disliked workplace can represent had been transformed into the terrible meaning we all now intuit. And that gaudy grillwork – the only remains standing – stuck out against the smoking pyre of the place with the starkness, and the sudden antiquity, of the Roman Colloseum. The feelings, I needn’t tell you. 40 days as a street reporter in and around the scene of the catastrophe managed to reshape even my memories of the buildings I once dismissed as merely a great deal of weight sitting on top of the place I did my sportscasts.

And as the searing pain of those first few weeks gradually gave way to sadness and thoughts of what, if anything, should be placed on this most hallowed ground, the only thing, the only thing that seemed to make sense, was the towers recreated, as originally designed, oblong boxiness and all – with that one minor caveat about the 229 feet and four inches. I wasn’t among the voices insisting that only rebuilding it as it was would show we hadn’t been “beaten” – merely that all other forms of construction there would offend the sensibility, and diminish, not enhance, the remembrance.

I hadn’t thought much of it lately. The process of healing is a regretful one in a way. We’re designed to forget – not forget the whole, but merely the sharp edges. I hadn’t forgotten the Trade Center, nor my three years in it. Nor had I forgotten the fact that some creatures had managed to use two planes that each contained a friend of mine (Ace Bailey, the former hockey player and executive, was on one, and Tom Pecorelli, who had been one of the studio cameramen for my shows at Fox Sports, was on the other), to kill so many innocents in the buildings, including two college classmates of mine (Mike Tanner and Eamon McEneaney, who happened also to have been the quarterback and the receiver for Cornell University in the first sporting event I ever actually got paid to cover).

Those things hadn’t passed, and they won’t. Nor will the simple reality that it all happened – a reality that will still of a morning unexpectedly punch me in the stomach, or make me wonder for a moment if something so horrible could’ve actually occurred, or if I must have imagined it in a consummate moment in a dream from an endless night….“

From Keith’s visit to Cornell in March this year:

“And the memorial plaque for Eamon McEneaney, hero of Cornell FB, Lacrosse, the WTC 1993, lost on 9/11, my friend”

“Ground Zero” today

“To put the anniversary to bed: this was Sat. night, with the lights from the WTC lined up perfectly with the moon“