The day everything changed
As published on page one of a special commemorative insert in The Keene Sentinel on Sept 11, 2011, and online.
It was 10 years ago and hundreds of miles away, but the events of Sept. 11, 2001, are still clear in the memories of Monadnock Region residents.
"Everybody knows what they were doing that date and time, and I think that changed the way everyone thinks about things now," Bennington Police Chief C. Steven Campbell said in a recent interview.
Ten years ago, Campbell was one of a group of local emergency personnel who reacted to the disaster of the attacks on the World Trade Center by traveling to New York City to offer their services.
Photographs from that mission still hang on his office wall.
"I remember a little bit about everything. Everything was gray from all the dust -- it was just gray colors. Everyone was in a somber mood," he said.
The scene downtown was like nothing he'd seen before, Campbell said. There was "a big pile of rubble, dozens of buildings with holes in their sides, and 4 to 5 inches of dust and mud that stretched for blocks."
Campbell and other officers from the Monadnock Region were stationed at Bellevue Hospital, where they helped with crowd control and security.
Staff at Bellevue -- and in its morgue -- were busy treating those who survived the attacks and identifying those who did not.
The hospital became a gathering point for people searching for family members and loved ones who had disappeared.
Ten years ago, when a Sentinel reporter interviewed Campbell after he returned from New York, he talked about the gratitude and friendliness of the residents of the stricken city.
A decade later, that's still part of the story he tells.
"I'm a country boy. When you hear about cities all you hear about is crime," he said. But New Yorkers went out of their way to thank the visitors for their help. "They were in shock, obviously, but that kind of changed my perspective about how I thought about big cities."
In a Burger King, he encountered a stranger who, seeing his out-of-state police uniform, paid for his lunch.
Campbell and his wife went back to New York a few years ago as tourists.
They visited ground zero, Central Park and Broadway, and while the dust and rubble were gone, the feeling of welcome remained.
"Overall, people still know what occurred there and I think they still appreciate what people did for them," Campbell said.
"Even though you hear a lot about the bad things in the country, in a time of need people do come from all over to help each other out."
Keene State College Professor Lawrence Welkowitz also left the region and traveled to New York immediately after the attacks.
But the people the native New Yorker most wanted to help weren't strangers. Welkowitz's parents lived in Lower Manhattan.
"I remember on that day being at the KSC campus and huddling with other people who had family down there, and of course we couldn't get in touch with any of them," he said recently. The small group watched coverage of the attacks on television. "We all kind of huddled together just to be near each other."
Welkowitz later learned that his parents were safe, but had seen the planes hitting the towers of the World Trade Center while out on a walk that sunny September morning. His mother suffered post traumatic stress disorder after witnessing the attacks, he said.
Joan Welkowitz, a professor at New York University, died from cancer five years ago. But her son remembers her reaction to the tragedy.
"My mother called it 'the day the world changed.' Her biggest fear was that people would use this to strip people of their civil rights. That was her immediate reaction," he said.
The attacks happened on a Tuesday morning, and by Thursday Welkowitz was in New York.
"The air was thick with all this stuff and I had to make my way downtown," he said.
Walking through the dusty, car-free streets of his home was "eerie."
"Being in Lower Manhattan at that time, there were two major reactions that I could feel from my friends that were down there," he said.
"One was tremendous sadness, and the second was -- especially for my friends that had kids -- was the sense of disruption, that their city was disrupted and they were trying to figure out how to get to work and how to get to school."
People were watching the local news rather than national broadcasts that replayed the attacks, he said, and were unaware of small American flags popping up on cars across the country, along with mounting calls for revenge.
"It was more of a sadness and 'how do we get back to living,' rather than 'let's get these guys,' " he said.
Another memory was of a friend who initially volunteered his carpentry skills to make coffins for the victims, before it became clear that service wouldn't be in as much demand as people thought.
"There were going to be no bodies -- people were just dust," he said.
Welkowitz believes some of the legal steps that have been taken to increase national security in the wake of the attacks -- including more frequent government wire tapping, changes to search and seizure laws and tightened immigration policies -- show that his mother's fears were justified.
But he also remembers how quickly his home city returned to its busy routine.
"By the time I was leaving Friday morning they were letting cars back into Lower Manhattan," he said. "By the time I got to Midtown, it was New York City."
Nancy Proctor did not go to New York. At least, not right away.
She was in Keene when her husband -- Jonathan Proctor, who was then the principal of Keene Middle School -- arrived at her workplace and pulled her out of a meeting after he first heard of the attacks.
Their then-24-year-old son, Aaron, worked in the southernmost tower of the World Trade Center.
"(I remember) the unbelievable horror of what was happening, not only with my son in New York City but the whole country," she recalled.
The Proctors waited more than an hour before they made phone contact.
"There was no cellphone service; I couldn't get through to anywhere," Nancy Proctor said. "After he had got out of the south tower he had run about two blocks to another building where he had a friend and spotty cell service. We talked for a few minutes and then we lost him. It was like that all day. ... At least we knew he was alive and out."
Aaron Proctor came home to Keene for a few days after the attacks, but then returned to New York.
His mother remembers calling him a few days later and being shocked to learn that he was part of the crowd at a baseball game at Yankee Stadium.
"I was more fearful I think than he was -- not being there," she said.
Aaron Proctor still works in Manhattan, and in 2006 he was joined in New York by his brother Bradford.
Their parents visit often.
"I love Broadway," Proctor said. "But it's always nice to see that sign with 'New England' and the arrow pointing north when I'm going home."
Even 10 years later, Proctor sees a change in the country as a result of the attacks.
"I just think people realized it could happen here. Before that you never worried about that," she said. "I think we're cautious. We're more observant. When you hear things on the news you tend to panic a little more."
But the worries need not be paralyzing.
"I've noticed with my son, his attitude is 'you just live your life,' " Proctor said.
Because life goes on and decades pass -- even when memories don't seem to fade.
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