The Crash of AA Flt. 587 November 12, 2001

When American Airlines Flight 587 crashed shortly after takeoff from New York’s JFK Airport, the nation stopped dead in its tracks.  Afterall it was two months and a day after 9/11.   Were we under attack again? 

On this the eigth anniversary of that crash it has faded from our memories because it was not terrorist related.  Even still it remains the second deadliest U.S. aviation crash in history,  260 people on board were killed, five people on the ground.

Crash site of AA Flt. 587 Belle Harbor, NY

I arrived on the scene early that evening after coming in from Buffalo.  Having left immediately after learning of the crash I saw little TV coverage and didn’t know what to expect when I got there.  When I arrived I was floored by how small an area had been impacted by such a massive jet.  Afterall this was an Airbus A-300.  What was overwhelming was the smell of the Jet fuel that lingered in the air.  The jet crashed 103 seconds after takeoff so it was loaded with fuel.

What I quickly learned about Belle Harbor was this was a community of hard working men and women that was absolutely devastated by the attacks of September 11th with just about every resident either losing a member of their own family or a neighbor in the terrorist attacks.

I remember standing the next morning outside St. Francis DeSales Catholic Church on the edge of the crash site, where 9 a.m. mass was packed with a Sunday sized crowd.  This is a church that had been the site of almost daily funerals, 30 to date at that point, as the victims of 9/11 were identified.

John Heffernan, FDNY Killed 9/11

Outside I met Mary Heffernan, a woman with a brogue as thick as could be, who rode her bike down to see for herself what had happened to her neighborhood.  In talking with her I quickly learned that Mary had lost her son John, a New York City firefighter in the September 11th attacks.  I remember being struck by just how calm she was in all this but in reality like so many people here she wasn’t so much calm, she was just  numb.  These people at this time just had to be thinking why us?  How much more can we endure?

The cause of the crash was quickly ruled not another terrorist attack but a takeoff that followed too closely the takeoff of another jet causing extreme turbulence which in a nutshell led to the crash.

Anyway as we look back on that day here’s the piece I put together that night for WKBW-TV on the people of Belle Harbor.

Celebrating the Accordion! (Seriously)

Ask me to pick one story over the last 20 years that stood out among the rest and I’d make a strong case for this one shot in Buffalo celebrating of all things, the accoridon.

Take a look.

I loved this story because I certainly did not anticipate meeting someone like Edwin when I set out to do it, he was enough to carry the story alone.

 Then when I borrowed one of his accoridons to talk with people I did so thinking that I’ll approach people with a big accordion around my neck, ask them to guess which musical instrument we’re celebrating this month, then be totally surprised when they all guess correctly the accordion.  

The only problem?  No one got it, no one put two and two together.  ABC’s World News This Morning ran the story as a kicker which prompted Barry Mitchell (he of World News Polka fame) to send along a… well… interesting autographed photo which if I can find…and am allowed to post… I will.

VOTE YES ON ISSUE 44 & 1/4

A vote yes for Issue 44 & 1/4  is a vote not only for Ohio’s future but our past present.

Issue 44 & 1/4 will;

- Create Jobs – Lower Taxes

- Raise property values

- Reduce our dependence on imported beer

- Improve education

- Take inches off our waists

- Make our streets safer, cleaner and self repairing

- Put a chicken in every pot

- Make our children respectful

- Restore pride

- End male pattern baldness

- Give us a lush, green, fuller lawn

- Make us the envy of the other 49 states. (Guam, Puerto Rico & American Samoa too.)

DON’T BE FOOLED: Those who oppose Issue 44 & 1/4 are mean hateful people who live out of state, never call their mothers and don’t like puppies, kittens or small children.

Ohio the time is now to stand up and be counted. On the 12th of Never vote YES on Issue 44 & 1/4, You deserve it!

-The preceding message was furnished by the Council of Confusion Over All Issue Ads. – I.B. Baffled, Treasurer

Cleveland Browns; The Pittsburgh Jinx

Cleveland Browns Stadium (where the Steelers are 9-1)

Since the Cleveland Browns returned to the pro football scene in 1999 (I know many would argue if they’ve actually returned) much and I mean much has been made about their inability to beat the Pittsburgh Steelers.

The next chapter in this decades long saga will be written October 18 at Heinz Field.  Recently a co-worker, photographer Tom Livingston, asked me to make a copy on DVD of some old stories he did at WEWS-TV when he was first starting out here in 1980-’81.

A number of those stories caught my eye and ear for being timeless but none more so then the one I post below from October of 1981.  It was after a heartbreaking 13-7 loss to the Steelers in Three Rivers Stadium.  The story by reporter Allen Davis looks at the Browns inability to win in Pittsburgh and raises the question of some sort of jinx.  (Which then head coach Sam Rutigliano does his best to shoot down.)  28-years later though the discussion continues.

Ohio Issue 3; What to expect.

As the debate over Ohio’s Issue 3 heats up I felt the need to re-post these two pieces I did on Atlantic City in 2001.  I covered the casino industry there  for four years and put these stories together when New York State was about to dive into the waters of casino gambling.

This piece looks at the unanticipated consequences when gambling came to Atlantic City.

This piece picks the brains of those who saw Atlantic City through those difficult days to see what they think any state looking at gambling should or shouldn’t include and what they need to be prepared for.

Issue 3 Debate; Gambling in Ohio

I’m not taking a stand either way on Issue 3, the proposal to bring free standing Las Vegas style casinos to Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati and Toledo, so don’t take it as such.

But what caught my ear in a commercial the other day was what opponents of Issue 3 claim as one of it’s downfalls.  That at no time will it create 34,000 jobs for Ohioans.  That many of those jobs will go to highly skilled workers from other parts of the country rather than taking the time to train Ohio workers.

Would I like to see Ohioans in those jobs? Absolutely 100%.  But let’s not forget that we as a state and especially in Northeast Ohio are hemorrhaging residents.  In fact in a story I did on the subject in 2008 I pointed out that  in a 7 year period the city of Cleveland alone lost an average of 15 people a day.

 So is it necessarily a bad thing that people will actually move to Ohio for jobs?  That they’ll maybe buy up some of our housing stock and pump their savings (earned elsewhere) here into Ohio?

The debate on gambling is a great one with many great back and forth’s to come, arguments that hopefully create more of a discussion than this one.

September 15th, 2001

Picture I took from Hoboken the morning of September 15, 2001

I was driving along a part of Interstate 280 in New Jersey, I don’t know the mile marker I just know it.  It was the spot coming down a hill where the Twin Towers would always first come into view.  On this morning though there was nothing.

It was Saturday September 15th, 2001 and after covering the events of September 11th from Buffalo my wife and I knew we wanted to get away from the television and be around family.  As we drove to Pennsylvania I told her I need to see it, so we decided to drive to Hoboken that morning to a spot across the river we liked where the World Trade Center always seemed within reach.

As we got closer we saw only smoke where the towers once stood.  We parked the car off Hudson Street and we went to a little park on Sinatra Way where a memorial was beginning to grow at the rail on the Hudson (photo above).   After a while we decided to take the nearby Subway into the city to see how close we could get. 

Sitting across from us on the train was a woman with a thick stack of flyers baring the picture and description of someone lost in the collapse of the towers.  In the days following September 11th this became the last hope of family members, that maybe their loved one somehow had amnesia or was hospitalized unconscious and unidentified.  All over the Subway and lower Manhattan we found the flyers on poles, storefronts and stuffed under wipers on windshields.  What started out as a way to find their loved one quickly turned into a way to memorialize them.

The subway took us only us so far and we walked south from there.  What struck us most was the silence.  The signature noise of  the city, the beeping, the brakes and tires squealing- silenced.   There was a stunned look on most everyone we passed.  We walked down a near empty side street and Senator Bill Bradley passed us.  I had interviewed him so many times over the years working in Atlantic City, in a normal situation I would have introduced myself and said hello,  this wasn’t the place, we walked.

My wife pointed out that on the street where the Yellow Cabs would line up, there were now yellow bulldozers and front end loaders ready to be put to use. 

As we stood at the perimeter out walked some medical personnel.  They were in their scrubs ready to administer first aid once survivors were pulled from the rubble.  As they walked toward us the crowd began to applaud their efforts, the look on their face though told the dejected story of failure, there was no one to save.

When we left we made our way back up to Canal Street where we found some of the shops were open.  Inside people were buying up World Trade Center postcards and souvenirs.  

I thought to myself here we are a few blocks and a few days removed from this horror and there were signs of life, signs of commerce and I thought if they can rebound maybe we all can, maybe we are going to be okay.

9/11 and President McKinley

Artist's interpretation of the shooting of President William McKinley September 6, 1901

September 6th marks the 108th Anniversary of the shooting of President William McKinley.   It is an event that will, for me, be forever linked with 9/11.

In September of 2001 I was working as an anchor in Buffalo, New York.  All summer long there were festivities marking the 100th Anniversary of the great Pan American Exposition.

The Expo was to be a celebration of all things great about the Electric City highlighted by the Electric Tower, a magnificent building lit up nightly with thousands of  colored bulbs and floodlights.  (You’ll notice the resemblance to Cleveland’s own Terminal Tower built 25-years later.)

The visit of President William McKinley in early September 1901 was to be the highlight of the Exposition but it quickly turned into a tragic event that would forever define the Expo and Buffalo. 

 The date was September 6, 1901, President McKinley was greeting guests at the Expo’s Temple of  Music, when he was shot twice in the abdomen by anarchist Leon Czolgosz.

Milburn House Delaware Avenue in Buffalo

  McKinley was taken to the nearby home of John Milburn who was head of the Exposition board.  The  house sat on Delaware Avenue in Buffalo and was literally  just around the corner from where I was living at the time 100 years later.  (It’s now a parking lot for Canisius High School where the late Tim Russert went to school.)

McKinley would lie mortally wounded in the home for the next eight days as his cabinet assembled around him.  He appeared to be recovering before taking a turn for the worse.  He died September 14th of 1901.

I had started a nine day series of stories on September 6, 2001 which were to run through the 14th.  The pieces focused on what was happening in Buffalo 100-years ago today. 

Pres. McKinley lying in state, Buffalo City Hall

  My goal was to try to capture the feel of what it must have been like in Buffalo back then, the panic, the shock, the concern having a President shot and later die in your town.

 But as hard as I tried to understand what the city was going through the reality was I just really couldn’t, afterall I wasn’t there.

That changed on Day 6 of the series,  September 11th, 2001.  

I was anchoring the morning show at WKBW-TV and learned over the ABC squawk box that there was a fire in the World Trade Center and that they were working to put up a live signal.  I looked up to see that it wasn’t up yet and at that time no network had broken in.  Seconds later the shot was up on our closed circuit feed from ABC and it was clear this wasn’t just a fire but an explosion of some sort.  Seconds after that one by one the networks broke into programming and we all know the rest.

After a long day at work my wife and I returned home that night where we remained glued to the coverage from New York.  Around 7:30 I broke away to take our dog out for a walk and as I strolled down the street  I was actually able to follow the network coverage on this warm summer night through the open windows of my neighbors who like all of us were glued to their TVs.

As I walked along eavesdropping on the neighborhood televisions it dawned on me the streets were still, there was no traffic, no one else out walking, by this time most folks were home spending the night with loved ones.  

When I got to the corner of Delaware & Lafayette I looked down to where the Milburn house once stood.  It was at that very moment that it dawned on me,  100-years ago to the very hour a President of the United States lay dying there and it was only then I realized that this, what we all were feeling the night of 9/11, was what it was like to have been alive in this city 100-years ago that night.

The Perfect Storm; Halloween 1991

Mention “The Perfect Storm“ to most folks and they’ll think of the George Clooney film about a group of fisherman lost at sea aboard the “Andrea Gail” during the Halloween Storm of 1991.   I know the storm as the one that claimed my first car, a 1982 Monte Carlo.

Returning to Ocean City, New Jersey last week brought back memories of the storm and that caused me to dig up some old pictures from October of 1991.  I follow them with the same area  today.

17th Street & Boardwalk looking South. Ocean City, NJ October 31, 1991

17th & Boardwalk, Ocean City, NJ August, 2009

The enormous Nor’easter which was actually a combination of different systems was far out to sea but it was so powerful that it pushed tides to a high not seen in some parts of Jersey since the Great Atlantic Hurricane of 1944.  Before it was over it would claim about a half mile of Ocean City’s boardwalk while flooding out much of the barrier island.   

17th & Boardwalk Ocean City, NJ looking north 1991

17th & Boardwalk Ocean City, August 2009.

The storm started to affect Ocean City on October 30, 1991 when under beautiful sunshine the massive system churned up the surf and prevented the high tides from adequately subsiding at low tide.  As a result each successive high tide got higher and the island began to flood. 

My parents who were staying with me at the time headed home that afternoon to Philadelphia just as the floodwater started to rise.  I was anchoring the 11 p.m. news that night and decided not to go home to Ocean City that night but to head up to Philadelphia as well.  

Satellite view of the Halloween Storm, 1991

At midnight though I suffered a blowout on the exit ramp from the Garden State Parkway to the A.C. Expressway.  There are no lights on the ramp and in the pitch dark I hastilly changed the tire. 

My first car, a victim of the '91 Storm

Because it was so dark I couldn’t tell though if I did it right.  To play it safe I returned to the flooded Ocean City and made the mistake of coming in the 9th Street Causeway.  The flooding was much deeper than I anticipated.  I jumped a curb and made it through but the damage was done.  Salt water is extremely corrosive, the rusting process starts as soon as the water hits air,  within a month my beloved Monte was dead.

The so-called Halloween Storm was the first of three “100-Year Storms” that we would see in Ocean City over the next 18-months. 

The newly rebuilt Ocean City boardwalk getting it's first test in December, 1992 storm.

The boardwalk was rebuilt but as you can see by the pictures above it was moved out a few feet from the bulkhead so until the beach was rebuilt the waves hitting the bulkhead at high tide could go straight up and not hit the boards.

Through beach replenishment the once 15-foot drop from the boardwalk to the sand below was eliminated, dunes eventually took shape and what was once the place to go to watch a storm in Ocean City became a distant memory.

17th Street & Boardwalk December, 1992

52nd & West Ocean City, NJ December 1992

These are all images from the December 1992 storm, the third of the 100-year storms we saw in 14-months.

 

Shoobie; Man’s… My Best Friend

Shoobie on top of Big Pocono Mountain, Tannersville, PA 1998

Here’s what I love about a blog,  the opportunity to write about things you might not normally get the chance to so with Cleveland and the world around us in relative calm at this hour (relative being the operative word) I wanted to take the opportunity to introduce you to Shoobie.

Shoobie is a 9-pound Shihtzu who joined our family in January of 1998 not long after my wife Stacey and I got married.  I never had a pet in my life, my wife grew up with lots of them, Shoobie was the compromise.

   Since Stacey got the dog I got to name it.  Many people who know me think “Shoobie” was some sort of Shoobie doobie do Sinatra reference. 

In reality “Shoobie” is a South Jersey term.  Downtheshore you had the locals and you had the Shoobie’s or the tourists.  The term came about in the old days when the day trippers would come down on the train from Philadelphia, they would be easy to be spot on the beach because they carried their lunches in shoeboxes… so they were “shoobies.”  Since our new puppy could fit in a shoebox we decided the name fit.

Shoobie opened my eyes to what I had been missing all those years of not having a dog, your worst day at work seemed to disappear when you came home to this ball of fur who was now experiencing the best part of her day at the sight of you walking through the door.

With each move we made in this business Shoobie was the constant for us, the one who let us know this new place we were living in was now our home.

Shoobie & Aidan; Halloween 2003

In 2003 though Shoobie would get company in that department with the birth of our son Aidan.  Shoobie could have been jealous of the competition for our affection but instead became a protective older sister to this child who insisted on poking her and pulling at her, never once did Shoobie snip or try to get away.  Someone once said when you don’t have any kids your dog is your baby and when you do have kids your  dog is your  dog.   I swore that would never be the case but the reality of parenting is there  is a hair of truth in that statement.

Luckilly Shoobie never realized that, she just knew her world revolved around three people who relied on her daily in more ways then she’d ever know.

August 18th marks the one year anniversary of Shoobie’s sudden death.  The hole she left in our hearts will never be filled.  People say get another dog but it’s not that simple.  It wouldn’t have been fair to introduce a new dog until we were ready.  We didn’t want to look in the loving new dog’s face and think ‘you’re not Shoobie.’ 

After a year though I think we’re very close to the point where we can once again open ourselves to getting another dog.   In writing this and reflecting on what Shoobie brought us in her 10 years I realize to not get another dog is our loss.

Shoobie & Aidan Fall 2007