FROM THE RIVERSIDE READER ARCHIVES: FOUR WESTSIDERS RECALL 9-11 Though none of us will ever forget where we were or what we were doing 12 years ago today, four westsiders found themselves closer than most to the terror that occurred on 9-11-01. Former Pointe Coupée residents Elizabeth Barry and Ja’nea Bello were flight attendants in Boston, and in New York, Plaquemine native Bob Freeman had secured a fashion industry job and Rebecca Walsh of Port Allen had taken what she’d learned from her father in the insurance business and was applying it at Fireman’s Fund. Elizabeth Barry A native of Houston, Elizabeth Barry fell immediately in love with New Roads on her first visit to the small, quaint city in 1992. “I was living in Houston and had an antique shop. A friend of mine, Ron Evans, asked me to do an antique show in New Roads, Louisiana in April 1992. “Well, I had never heard of New Roads. It took me 30 minutes just to find it on the map,” she recalls. But, Elizabeth heeded her friend’s request and made the 270-mile journey east on I-10 until they reached Grosse Tete. “The drive along the interstate was so boring, nothing really to look at. But as soon as we got off the interstate it was like, ‘Whoa, look at the plantations, look at the oak trees.’ “Ron thought I was insane,” she recalls. Elizabeth adds that she called home to her boyfriend that first night and gave him the news: “We’re moving to New Roads.” “I found a house the first day there and a realtor got me in touch with the owners. The woman who had lived in the house had died and it had been vacant for eight years,” she remembers. From 1992 until 1999, Elizabeth operated a bed & breakfast at 300 North Carolina Street in New Roads. But Elizabeth says she eventually grew tired of always having strangers in her house and her next stop was Santa Barbara, California where she hired on as the housemother for the Kappa Kappa Gamma Sorority. But dealing with a houseful of college girls turned out to be a bigger challenge than having strangers under her roof and a late night phone call from a friend soon sent her in an entirely new direction. “A friend of mine was a pilot for Continental and late one night while he was in an east coast hotel room, he gave me a call. He was looking for someone he could call at that hour and since I was three hours behind him in California, he knew I’d be up. “When I told him I wasn’t real happy with my job, he put the little bee in my bonnet. He said that the airlines were hiring more mature women as flight attendants and he told me I should go to work for United,” Elizabeth recalls. From there, Elizabeth went to United Airlines’ website and she enrolled in its Sept. 4, 2000 class which involved six weeks of training. The airline then assigned her to Logan Airport in Boston. Elizabeth recalls that among the routes she regularly flew was United Flight 175, a nonstop morning flight from Boston to Los Angeles. “I had been assigned to that flight at least once a month,” she recalls. On the morning of Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, Elizabeth was in a Chicago hotel room recuperating from injuries she had sustained the night before when a beverage cart had collided against her hand. “I was supposed to have flown back to Boston that morning but my crew went back without me. I was in Chicago alone and watched it all happen on TV. It was very surreal. “I got so many phone calls that my battery went dead. I called Gay (Augillard) in New Roads and left a message on her answering machine to let her know I was alright,” she recalls. Ja’nea Bello The daughter of Pointe Coupée Parish Manager Jimmy and Sharon Bello, Ja’nea was a new hire for American Airlines who was also based at Logan Airport in Boston on Sept. 11, 2001. “I was going to LSU but always wanted to travel so I got online and looked at the different airlines. Two weeks later I got an interview with American and I began flying with them in May 2001,” says Ja’nea. Living in a second-floor “crash pad” just outside Boston with four other flight attendants, Ja’nea says she was enjoying her new career. She recalls that American gave its flight attendants a monthly schedule of the routes that would be flying and in September 2001, she was flying three days on and three days off to San Antonio and was scheduled to fly American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles at the end of the month. In that first week of September, Ja’nea worked with 41-year-old flight attendant Jeffrey Dwayne Collman, who was an Illinois native then living in California. As a new hire, Ja’nea says she was still learning the ropes and was immediately impressed by the way Jeff, a three-year veteran with American, handled his job. “He was the most friendly guy I ever met. He was very welcoming and great at his job. “He was our team leader. He was the Number 1 attendant on our San Antonio flight, which meant he did all of the announcements and was in charge of first class. “I was still so new and the job came so easily to him. When we were off the plane he kept the whole crew together and made the trip fun,” she recalls. According to Ja’nea, their San Antonio run ended Monday, Sept. 10 and she was scheduled to have the next three days off. Jeff, on the other hand, picked up a flight he wasn’t scheduled for, Flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles, to make some extra money. That night Ja’nea went out with a group of flight attendants and spent the night at their apartment. Sleeping in late on her friends’ couch that fateful Tuesday morning, Ja’nea recalls, that in an effort to continue sleeping, she twice put her phone on mute when the calls showed up as being from her father and ex-boyfriend. When her father called a second time, she turned off her phone, still tired from the night before. Soon afterwards, the news arrived. “One of the flight attendants had tried to go to work and she came running in and told us to turn on the TV,” she remembers. Suddenly, she understood the reason for the early morning phone calls from Louisiana. But when she tried to call her to let her family know she was all right, she couldn’t get through. “The lines were tied up. None of us could get a call out. I didn’t get through to my parents until 2:30 that afternoon,” she recalls. Though the city itself didn’t come under attack, Ja’nea recalls that Sept. 11 was a bad day to be in Bean Town. “There were so many things going on in the City of Boston. There were rumors about a bomb here and a bomb there. It was mass chaos,” she recalls. One of her roommates, a guy named Rich, was in the air headed to Logan Airport on the morning of Sept. 11, she recalls. “Rich was the Number 1 flight attendant on his flight and the pilot called him to the cockpit to tell him what was going on. No one on the plane, not even the rest of his crew, were aware of what was happening. “On their way back to Boston they flew over the site where (United Air Lines Flight 93) had just crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. Rich saw the crash site from his plane. “There was two million dollars in the belly of the plane he was on and he was worried his flight might be next. When they landed, he and the people on that flight were detained for questioning. “He was pretty shaken up,” she recalls. Ja’nea says she only flew twice more for American before the layoffs came. “I was Number 432 of the 1000 flight attendants American laid off. We were all new hires. “My next flight was the San Antonio line I was scheduled to take with Jeff. It was really, really strange. You were just suspicious of everybody who looked different. The flights were really, really empty. It was like a ghost plane. “When I got on that flight, they had a replacement for Jeff. I saw one of the girls I had worked with earlier that month. We just cried as soon as we got on the plane,” she recalls. Ja’nea says she flew home on Sunday, Oct. 8, a day when it was snowing in Boston. She has been living back home in Louisiana since that day. Today Ja’nea is working in Baton Rouge as the branch coordinator for a mortgage company. Bob Freeman The son of former state legislator and Lt. Gov. Bobby and Marianne Freeman of Plaquemine, Bob Freeman was living and working in New York City in 2001. Though Bob is now deputy chief of trials in Orleans Parish, he was once again in New York City when the Riverside Reader caught up with him on the tenth anniversary of 9-11 two years ago and asked him to recall what it was like to live in the Big Apple in that time period. “I had left law and was working for Tommy Hilfiger. I was at 41st (Street) and Fifth (Avenue) getting coffee. It was about a quarter till nine. “People were pointing up and they were saying a commuter plane had just hit the World Trade Center. We could actually see it. “I went upstairs and saw another plane. I saw when it hit. I saw the smoke and debris coming from the second tower. I knew it wasn’t a coincidence,” he recalls. Bob says the events of that day drew “different flavors of reactions” from the people he worked with. “Tommy wanted all of us to stay in the office. Some people were crying and others went about their work. We didn’t know if it was terrorists for sure. “I was actually able to call out and let my mom know I was okay. She’s an early riser and had just seen the news on TV. She didn’t know where I was in relation to the World Trade Center but I was actually five blocks from the Empire State Building,” he recalls. Over the three days that followed, Bob says he doesn’t recall getting any sleep at all. “I was getting by on pure adrenaline,” he notes. As a south Louisiana native who grew up knowing how to prepare for hurricanes, Bob says he impressed his friends when he went into “hurricane mode.” “I didn’t know what to expect so I immediately went to the ATM and withdrew some cash in case the banks closed and I went grocery shopping for things you didn’t have to cook. “My friends asked me how I thought to do all of that and I told them that you grow up being prepared for disaster when you live where I’m from.” He notes. Bob says he saw an immediate change in the people of New York City that lasted about a year. “People were very sensitive; they were acutely aware. Everyone was very gentle. People weren’t aggressive at all; they were very, very gentle. “It was really, really remarkable,” he recalls. Rebecca Walsh Shortly after 9-11, the Riverside Reader interviewed Lester Walsh, his wife, Catherine, and their daughter, Rebecca. Most of what follows comes from those interviews 12 years ago. On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Lester Walsh of Port Allen was getting ready for work when the phone rang. The call was from his son John who lives in Atlanta. John was calling to see if his parents were watching the morning news. The news he called with wasn’t good. An airplane had sliced through one of the World Trade Center’s twin towers. Though the man-made disaster had occurred half a continent away, the news hit home for the Walshes. Their daughter Rebecca worked in the World Trade Center. For the Walsh, like other Americans, it was an unimaginable moment. Lester Walsh describes himself as an optimist. He convinced himself that his daughter was unharmed. “I just told myself she hadn’t arrived to her office yet. I convinced myself she had stopped off somewhere before work,” he recalls. But other family members, including his wife, were not as confident. There was nervousness and there were tears. As the Walshes watched smoke billow from Tower One of the World Trade Center, family members, including their other three children who all live still live in this area, began arriving. “We didn’t know if she was in Building One or Building Two. Building One, Building Two… it didn’t mean anything to us,” Lester says. Catherine Walsh says her daughter calls her from work every morning. Though the time had come when she generally received that phone call, there was no call from Rebecca. Monitoring her television closely with her husband, Catherine says she was frantic. “I saw the second plane hit. Right away I knew it was her building,” she recalls. Rebecca Walsh, a graduate of Holy Family School, St. Joseph’s Academy and LSU, worked for her father in the insurance business for about a year before moving to New York in 1987. In 2000, she moved from her apartment in SoHo on Manhattan Island to Plainfield, New Jersey after her building was renovated and the rent on her one bedroom apartment doubled. At the time of the tragedy, Rebecca was an IT Director with Fireman’s Fund McGee Marine Underwriters. According to Rebecca, she was in her office on the 47th floor of Two World Trade Center when she and her coworkers heard an explosion. “We saw flames and debris going past our window. At that point we didn’t know what was going on. As soon as the explosion hit, the building shook and we saw papers going passed the windows,” she says. Rebecca says the workers on her floor quickly began to evacuate down the inner stairwells of the 110-story building. “People were scared to be in the outer ones,” she explains. The strong smell of fuel from Tower One made them suspect a natural gas leak, and not a jumbo jet, she says. As she descended 30 flights of stairs, she says there were no smoke alarms and no announcements. Upon reaching the 17th floor, Rebecca says the first announcement came across the intercom. “The fire marshal came on and said we could go back to our floors and stay there for an orderly evacuation. “We completely ignored that message,” she says. Five flights of stairs later, a second jumbo jet, United Airlines Flight 175 enroute from Boston to Los Angeles, crashed into Tower Two of the World Trade Center. “The lights went out. The building shook. People fell in the stairwell. “At that point we knew something monumental was going on,” Rebecca says. As Rebecca and her coworkers continued down the stairs, they were met by firemen who were headed north. Once on the streets, Walsh began looking for a friend of hers who was five-months pregnant with twins. According to Catherine, her daughter looked for her friend for about 15 minutes when her building, Tower Two, began to collapse. “Everything turned totally black with fiberglass and ash. She couldn’t find anyone. “She lost all of the friends she had been with from work,” Catherine relates. Rebecca made her way to the Staten Island Ferry and called a friend who, in turn, called the Walshes to let them know that their daughter had made it out of the building unharmed. On the ferry Rebecca located a couple of friends and she spent the day on Staten Island. Lester says his daughter was finally able to reach them by phone about three hours after the terrorist act occurred. Their tears from fears were replaced with tears of joy, he recalls. For Rebecca, this was not the first time she was at the center of a terrorist attack. The 36- year-old former Port Allen resident was in the lobby of the World Trade Center when a van laden with explosives detonated in the building’s garage on Feb. 26, 1993. “She wasn’t working at the World Trade Center at the time. She worked a block or two away on Broadway. “She was on her way to work and stopped off at a bookshop to pick up a newspaper when the explosion went off. It wasn’t hard for her to get out of that building because she was in the lobby,” her father recalls. That incident killed six and injured more than 1,000 others. That incident, which caused nearly $600 million in damages, was the first devastating act of terrorism on American soil. Today Rebecca is still living in New Jersey and is still working for Fireman’s Fund. Though five years have passed, her mother told the Riverside Reader last week that Rebecca still doesn’t like talking about the events of that day. “What we hear, we hear from other people. Rebecca doesn’t talk about it with us. “Last winter the water’s were frozen and the ferry she normally takes from New Jersey to Manhattan wasn’t running so she had to take a train. The train line went right through the (World Trade Center) site and that bothered her. She said she would never do that again,” says Catherine. Last December, Rebecca received a promotion with Fireman’s Fund, making her one of the company’s vice presidents. Her office is now located at One Chase Manhattan Plaza. Rebecca was in Port Allen last week. She had come home for a week to visit with family. Publisher’s note: The article above was expressly written to contain exactly 2973 words— one word for each of the victims it is estimated who died on Sept. 11, 2001. In the last five years, more than 3,000 servicemen have also given their lives in this nation’s War on Terror and we also wish to remember them for making the ultimate sacrifice so that the rest of us may live in a free society.
Posted on: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 13:45:12 +0000
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