It took me a long time to face what I knew to be true about 9/11 I was born in 1950. Mom moved back to New York City with my two brothers and me in 1955, and we became New Yorkers.
I watched the South Tower “top off” in ’71. Mom had worked close to the Empire State Building during the War and would mention when we were growing up how, on a foggy July day in 1945, a B-25 had flown right into it. In ’78, I was watching the antenna being attached to the North Tower and remarked to my first-grade buddy that somebody “sure could run into those big things.”
Many veteran New Yorkers were rubbed the wrong way by their design. Manhattan is actually a small piece of real estate. Interwoven neighborhoods. People walk there. Shoulder to shoulder. I tended to stay far away from them even though I worked in a little theatre only 15 or so blocks away for 12 years.
At age 51, I permanently moved away with my younger sons two weeks before September 11, 2001. The towers were indelible reference points to me by then. To all of us.
William C. Hurt at the Toronto Film Festival in 2005 (right)
On the day of the attack, I was in Boston with my eldest in a café having breakfast, with the pickup parked and packed, ready to go to Montreal for a gig. There was a little TV hung to the molding of a wall. Someone said, “Look.”
Being a general aviation pilot, my first thought was, “That’s no small plane. And no accident.” My next thought was of family and close friends. We called and, thank goodness, they were all okay.