September 11th, 2001 How The Day’s Events Unfolded
By Benjamin Groff II GroffMedia© | benandsteve.com | ©2026
September 11, 2026
We Will Never Forget September 11, 2001
The Morning Everything Changed
For me, September 11, 2001, began as an average day.
There was nothing about that morning that suggested history was about to interrupt ordinary life.
It was just before 9:00 a.m. I had stopped at the Mayor’s Office in Wichita, Kansas, to drop off schedules and some other papers. After finishing there, I stepped into the elevator to head down toward the Chief of Police’s Office.
Several other people were riding with me.
Then my phone rang.
At that time, it still wasn’t especially common for everyone to be carrying a cell phone the way we do today. I looked at the incoming number and knew immediately that I probably needed to answer it.
I barely had time to offer a greeting.
I was told to stop what I was doing and get over to the Wichita Eagle as quickly as possible to monitor what I could from the wire.
There had been an attack on the World Trade Center.
That was all I knew.
I made my way toward my vehicle, still trying to understand what I had just been told.
Then another call came.
A second airplane had struck the other tower.
I remember saying aloud, almost in disbelief:
“What? An airplane just hit the towers? Two of them?”
The people standing nearby looked at me in shock.
They wanted to know what was happening.
I told them the only thing I could tell them with any certainty:
Get to a television or a radio.
It appeared our nation was under attack.
By the time I arrived at the Wichita Eagle, the newsroom—or bullpen, as we called it—was unusually quiet.
It was full of reporters, but there was none of the ordinary newsroom chatter.
I stood just outside the room on the landing, watching television monitors and listening as the Associated Press wire sounded with update after update.
Someone would grab the latest report and read it aloud.
New York.
Then Pennsylvania.
Then Virginia and the District of Columbia.
Each update seemed worse than the one before it.
You could feel the realization spreading through the room that this was not going to be a normal news day.
It was going to be a very long day.
None of us standing there could have known just how long its shadow would become.
September 11 would destroy thousands of lives in a matter of hours. It would leave families grieving, reshape national security, change the way Americans traveled, and alter the direction of the country.
But history also has a strange way of reaching into individual lives in ways we cannot immediately see.
That day ultimately became part of the chain of events that changed my own life.
The economic and employment changes that followed would eventually lead Steve and me away from Kansas and the lower Great Plains and toward Arizona.
We went from winters of ice, snow, and cold prairie winds to the Sonoran Desert and summers measured in heat waves.
Years earlier, I had made Steve a promise that someday we would live in Phoenix.
I simply believed that “someday” was still twenty years away.
Life had other plans.
There is something almost impossible to reconcile about that.
A national tragedy that brought unimaginable grief to so many families also became one of the forces that redirected countless other lives.
Mine was one of them.
That does not lessen the tragedy.
If anything, it reminds me how far the consequences of a single day can travel.
A person can wake up believing they know exactly what tomorrow will look like.
Then the telephone rings.
A television screen changes.
A headline appears.
And suddenly the future takes a road no one had planned to travel.
That is what I remember most about September 11.
Not only the towers.
Not only the newsroom.
Not only the sound of the wire delivering one terrible update after another.
I remember how completely ordinary the morning had been just moments before.
And perhaps that is the lasting lesson.
We never really know which ordinary morning will become the dividing line between before and after.
So love the people around you.
Say what needs to be said.
Keep the promises that matter.
And never assume that because today began ordinarily, tomorrow is guaranteed to look the same.
Some mornings quietly become history.
By Benjamin Groff II GroffMedia© | benandsteve.com | ©2026
