Voices of the Past
Joshua Wilson: So we’re going to skip ahead a little bit to September 11, 2001, and, uh, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Um…I assume you remember that day…
Kimberly Wilson: Definitely, I do remember.
Joshua Wilson: So can you tell me about where you were, how you heard about the attack, if you remember what was your reaction, what were you feeling, when, when, when you heard about it? What was going through your mind?
Kimberly Wilson: A lot of adults have specific memories of that day because it was such a huge event and tragedy that um we went through that we had never experienced before. And for people who may not have memories specifically about other things, that will always be a memory in our minds. But I remember, um, I was working at the New Hartford, uh, Nursery School, um and it was a beautiful September morning. I remember taking the kids outside to the playground and coming inside and not really hearing anything actually until later when I took them upstairs for their snack, and one of the teachers in the two-year-old room came out—they had a TV back in there although I don’t think they had it on, I don’t know what they had—but somehow they heard.
They said that the World Trade Center had, a plane had flown into it. Well nobody thought too much about that being a terrorist attack at first, we all just thought, you know, oh how awful somebody was off course or…we didn’t really understand until much later. Um…and I…I remember, you know, thinking about it and all of a sudden I thought, “oh my goodness, my sister works in the World Trade Center.” It just kind of popped into my mind and I remember calling your dad at work and he said he had heard about it. And I went through the rest of the morning ‘cause I left about, I think it was like 12:30/1:00 or something like that. And I was volunteering at the Care Net Pregnancy Center on Tuesdays at the time, and this was a Tuesday. And I drove straight over there and I kept thinking and kind of praying, you know, because I didn’t…I heard on the radio later—of course I had heard by now it was a terrorist attack—and um, I went into the CPC and they had the TV on, and they were all standing around the TV I remember.
And I was going to do my work but I got up to go in there and they asked if I had heard and I said, “yes,” I said “my sister was in, works in the Twin Towers.” And literally just burst out crying, and one of the women came and prayed with me, and decided that I needed to go home. So I got home and uh turned on the television and was watching um the news, and um called my mother, and she said she had not been able to reach Amy at all.
So I called Amy’s uh cell phone and just left her a message on the cell phone. We found out later that she actually got out; she was in building number two and as soon as the plane hit in building number one—the story that I heard—was that they just sensed or they knew, they heard it, and her co-worker had been in the bombing in ’93, the bombing of the World Trade Center and all she said was, “Amy, get out now!” People just, there were people that just knew, maybe because of that, I don’t know. But Amy actually got out of the building before the second plane hit the building and she left everything: her purse, everything, she just literally just left. There was a man that escorted her back to her apartment that she had worked with and um—she lived several blocks and I don’t know how many blocks away she lived. Uh, but I did hear that on his way back he was hit by debris and was killed on the street. So I think the reason we couldn’t get ahold of her was because the phone lines were tied up and everything.
Um, I have never specifically talked to her about it; um my mother has told me that she will not talk about it, so we don’t really know what she was thinking or what she went through. Um, but you know, being reminded of it every year, um I think it good because we need to be reminded of these things. Because it just keeps them in our minds, it not something that happens and everyone forgets about it, we need to remember the people that, that were killed.
