THEY WON'T FORGET

Tracy Holmes

Coeur d'Alene

Everybody old enough to remember has a 9/11 story.

The rear-view mirror might lose a little clarity over time, but the lingering effects of that jarring crash 20 years ago are still felt to this day.

Here are just a few snapshots from a cross section of local residents. Today, maybe you'll do some remembering yourself.

Tracy Holmes had just dropped off her children at school when the news broke that a plane had crashed into one of the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001. Instead of going to work, Holmes, now 61, drove home and turned on the television. 

"Sitting here talking to you, I feel the same feelings I did then," Holmes said. "It's a terrible feeling in your gut, a deep sadness that makes you cry." 

She saw people jumping to their death on the television screen, people running, screaming, as the tower fell to the ground.  

"It consumed everything, everyone," Holmes said. "For months, they were pulling bodies from the rubble trying to find survivors. Every day we watched the news to see if they had found someone else."

She remembered watching phone numbers loop across the screen, layered over clips replaying the crash and first responders on the scene. After the initial shock, Holmes said, people came together to gather supplies and aid for people impacted by 9/11. 

"When stuff like that happens, everyone comes together. It didn't matter if you were Black, white, rich, poor - we were more united under the tragedy," Holmes said. "It's the human spirit."

Holmes said that for her, and she assumes many others, the events on Sept. 11 drove home the reality that you never know what could happen tomorrow. 

"It made me nervous about even taking the kids to school. You never know if it is going to be the last time you see somebody," she said. "We were all on alert because we didn't know if something else was going to happen. America had been attacked."

Steve and Nancy Bronk

Coeur d’Alene

Sept. 11, 2001 started out as a normal day for the Bronks of Coeur d’Alene. Nancy was at home getting ready for work while Steve was working in an office auto body shop in Washington when they saw the news on TV that the towers had been hit.

“I just couldn’t believe it,” Nancy said. “But once it sunk in it was just horror. I couldn’t believe that it happened.”

Steve said the thing that really jarred him was Flight 93, the fourth hijacked aircraft that crashed into an empty field in Pennsylvania after the crew and passengers fought back against the hijackers.

“It definitely brought an awareness to the terrorism in the world,” Steve said. “That was probably the biggest impact out of that.”

Nancy said the passengers and crew on the flight were definitely heroes, and the attack really brought to light that terrorism was real and not very far away.

“You just never think that’s going to happen,” she said. “From that point on, it changes your world as you knew it. It will never be the same for us.”

Steve said one of the oddest things was not seeing airplanes in the sky afterwards as planes were grounded for two days following the attack. Nancy said her sister was overseas during the attack and her return flight was delayed for a week.

“I don’t want it to ever be forgotten,” Nancy said. “And I really think that we could educate our kids with the next generation and on about it and what did happen, and never, never let it leave our guard for the future generations.”

 Grace Stamsos

Coeur d'Alene

Lifelong Coeur d'Alene resident Grace Stamsos was only 13 when the towers came down in New York.

Looking back, she said the events likely shaped many of the interests she pursued later in life, like politics, history, and global studies.

"That was when I started watching the news and paying attention to the world around me. Not just watching Disney or whatever," Stamsos said. "The world was different from 9/11 on. A different world than ever before." 

That morning, Stamsos and her best friend were at the gym on the treadmills, training for cheerleading. 

"We were talking and laughing when all of a sudden all the TVs switched to breaking news. Everything stopped as we saw the first plane hit the first tower," said Stamsos, now 33. 

At first, Stamsos thought the crash happened in a foreign country.

"Before 9/11, there were really no terrorists, you know? That was never a thing people thought about," she said. 

Before the act of terrorism became known, Stamsos said people were confused, trying to blame it on a mechanical malfunction or a pilot falling asleep on the job. But when the second plane hit, she knew it was on purpose.

"That was one of the first times in my life that I realized the reality that a person would want to hurt another person. I never thought that there were bad people in the world who would hurt someone they didn't even know," Stamsos said. "We were just kids." 

Stamsos said the feeling of trust disappeared. She remembers everybody was "looking for somebody to blame."

"All of a sudden, people had racial ideas, conspiracy theories - you didn't know what to believe," she said. "I had never felt suspicious of a race or people from a different country."

Alan and Sandy Moody

Rathdrum

Alan was working in an oil refinery in Washington when the attack on the Twin Towers happened.

He said it was a normal day, and then the first plane hit and the crew all started sneaking to the computer on breaks to watch the coverage.

“I was on our volunteer fire team at the time, too, and it was hard to, once the numbers started coming in, (hear) about how many firefighters that you lost, and law enforcement,” Alan said. “That's one of the things, even though we were part time, you kind of have a bond to other people that do that kind of work.”

He said his brother worked at the Pentagon and Alan wasn’t able to get hold of him until later in the day.

“He was the biggest concern for us,” Alan said. “Turned out he was at home that day.”

Sandy said she hopes America never faces something like the 9/11 attacks again.

“It was a terrible disaster,” she said. “You don't want to repeat something like that.”

Alan said that by looking at some of the things that have transpired since 9/11, he wonders if Americans actually learned from the disaster.

“I think we're still making the same mistakes,” he said. “I don't think you have to look very far, either. We recently had Afghanistan that looks like a total failure in intelligence.”

Jeff Gallup

Coeur d'Alene

Jeff Gallup, 70, has lived in Coeur d’Alene since 2003. Gallup comes from a military family; his father was in the Army and his mother worked in the naval intelligence division. He graduated from high school in 1970 and vividly remembers the Vietnam era.

“We wouldn’t be in Afghanistan if we had given Bin Laden the hospitals and schools that he wanted,” Gallup said.

For him, the 9/11 attacks were part of a continued and intentional political war effort that has been going on for all of American history.

“Old men start wars and young men fight them,” Gallup said.

Gallup said the anniversary of 9/11 is mostly a reminder of government inadequacy and and that it brings up feelings of extreme frustration.

“In my opinion we still don’t know what happened,” Gallup said. “It doesn’t add up. It just doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Mary Lou Reed

Coeur d'Alene

Mary Lou Reed has been a Coeur d’Alene resident for 67 years. She vividly remembers 9/11 as “a very sad day.”

“It’s not a day we will ever forget,” Reed said. “It lays into our memory, the horror of seeing the building fall.”

Reed remembers that she was doing very mundane things the day that the 9/11 attacks occurred.

“Then everyone was suddenly glued to the news, like when Kennedy was shot,” Reed said. “The whole nation was watching.”

“But we are a very resilient people,” she added.

David and Mila George

Coeur d'Alene

Mila George was asleep in her room in Long Island, N.Y. on Sept. 11, 2001 when her roommate burst in and said, “The building just exploded.”

“I could see the smoke from the window,” she said. “It was shocking. We were both completely numb.”

Mila said that in days that followed, people in New York including herself just moved around like robots on auto pilot.

“Believe it or not, I went to the gym that day and there were people in there,” she said. “They were all pretty much in the same state. Some people were really angry, some people were crying. But the smoke, the smell, it was just unbelievable.”

Mila said she went to the gym because she had to do something after sitting in front of the TV for hours.

“I saw the Statue of Liberty in flames in a vision after that,” she said. “I knew immediately what happened, that there will be a war, that they will use it, that this is not the end. So I just immediately thought of the things to come.”

She said the smoke lasted at least 10 days. Her husband lived in Brooklyn Heights during the time of the attack and was on the road.

“I was already in New Jersey on a road where if you look to the left, you can see the Trade Center, and it had just happened,” David said. “I saw smoke.”

David said he was going to a car dealer to get maintenance work done and when he got there everyone was watching TV and he couldn’t get back home for three days.

Mila said everything was a blur after, but she remembers taking the subway to Manhattan, N.Y. She said she remembers seeing an older man crying and they made eye contact and could tell they were both thinking about the same thing.

“It was a strange atmosphere,” she said. “But it seems like people were very much together.”

David said that after the attack, it was very common for people to put a little American flag in their car, and he did it as well.

“At that point, partisan differences just disappeared completely and that lasted for a long time,” he said. “People were all Americans at that moment, and that’s a long standing impression that I had.”

David said both he and his father had worked in the World Trade Center at one point, so to him this was an extreme violation.

“I could never go back to the site for three years,” David said. “People at that time were making special trips to go look at what I called ‘the hole in the ground.’

“I could not bring myself to do it.”

Mila said if Americans could learn something from the events, it's that they have to stick together.

“(America) is so divided that if it happened today, there would be people celebrating,” she said. “Days after the event, people were probably the most responsive to each other. Everybody was together.”

David said he doesn’t think people fully appreciate the sacrifices made that day and years that followed, with survivors of the rescue teams suffering with lung cancer from the toxic fumes.

“Many cops and firemen risked their lives for a long time,” he said. “Cops were volunteering in the days that followed to go down and look for people, and it was dangerous. And people don't appreciate the sacrifices that people like that made. They brush it off.”