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Sept. 11, 2001was a Tuesday like so many Tuesdays before.
Then it wasn't.
Back then, Tuesday was garbage day for me. I would take my garbage out to my parents' house. Sometimes, I would get out there early enough for a short visit with my mom, sometimes not. She had ceramics with her friends those days and left the house around 9 a.m.
On that Tuesday, I started the day a little slow because of a late night in the Alpena newsroom on Monday. I was lying in bed, taking my time to start the day, when the phone rang.
"Oh my god, turn on your television. Someone just flew a plane into the World Trade Center," my mom said.
I'm sure those are words thousands of people heard that morning around the same time I heard them.
Before I got the television to a station that would have news: "Holy **** they just hit the second tower."
My mother didn't use foul language, but the S-word was one she would say once in a while, and you knew it was serious.
Instantly, my mind hit fifth gear and I was dressed and out the door to get my garbage to my parents' house so I could get back home, shower, and head to work. During the time that I was driving to drop off my garbage, then-News Publisher Bill Speer called. We scheduled an editors meeting for as early as News Editor Rich Wertz and I could get to the office.
In the interim, Bill had called all the reporters and set up a time for the staff to meet. We set a plan in place, which anyone who has ever worked in a newsroom knows is a practice in futility, because news -- especially breaking news -- is an ever-changing beast.
We put together a list of stories for the reporters to work on, knowing the list could -- and likely would -- change. The staff wound up doing a wide range of stories, from local reaction to the attacks to detailing what the Alpena Combat Readiness Training Center did and from what was going to be affected locally to how to talk with your kids about the tragedy.
The staff plowed forward on stories, all the while sneaking a few minutes to watch the news on TV.
The entire building was glued to radios downstairs and the television upstairs, exactly as every workplace in America, I would think. The employees who worked downstairs would come upstairs to take a few minutes to watch the news, trying to put images to the words they were hearing from their radios. That was in the early days of newspapers' presence on the internet, so breaking news wasn't something we were equipped for, and there was no such thing as social media to get the word out about events other than advance notice to us or more immediately to the radio stations.
Candlelight vigils and other gatherings were called in the local media.
As the day wore on, Rich and I put together the pages that weren't going to be affected by coverage of the attack, saving as much time as possible to work on the pages that would carry that news.
As it turned out, the entire first section of the paper was attack-related.
The biggest discussions concerned how we would present the news of the day to our readers on Wednesday morning. The size of the paper grew from the usual 16 pages to 20 pages. Back then, we didn't receive as much news from the Associated Press, because we subscribed to a smaller news feed, so we were a little concerned about the amount of content we'd receive, hoping that we wouldn't receive many of the same stories. No worries there.
Bill came back to the newsroom in the evening to see what was happening and provide input. We turned our attention to the artwork we would select on Page 1A and how the page would be displayed. This was the earlier days of digital photography and video screen grabs, so there was a bit of an issue with the quality of the photos. Keep in mind that, when ink hits newsprint, the quality isn't the same as the photos you print on photo paper, and photos in 2001 had issues when grabbed from video. Many photos that were top choices also showed pixelation even at thumbnail size.
A photo was selected and a headline chosen, debated, changed, then finally settled on: "Under attack" (side note: the San Francisco Examiner had the best headline of the day in my opinion: "Bastards").
The final touches were put on the newspaper and sent to the pressroom by 1 a.m.
We can Monday Morning Quarterback all we want, but, in the moment, I was -- and 20 years later, I am -- proud of the work the entire staff did on that day.
Nine stories, plus a surprisingly full local sports day.
It's difficult to summarize the events of what turned out to be a nearly 15-hour day at the newspaper, a day none of us who are old enough to remember will ever forget.
It's hard to fathom there is a whole generation born since it happened.
I hope that generation and the generations to follow never have to experience what happened on that Tuesday 20 years ago.
But life teaches us tragedy is always lurking. All we can do is be prepared as best we can.