Photos (clockwise from top) by Eleanor DeSantis, Jen Sens, and Monique Scollin (two). All are students in Advanced Photojournalism II taught by John Freeman.

The phone lines were jammed after the terrorist attacks on Tuesday, Sept. 11. You couldn’t get a call into New York or Washington. But even if you were nowhere near the sites of the tragedies, you still probably phoned home or emailed anyway. It was a time to reach out to other people, to let them know you were all right and to make sure that they were OK.

Many of our graduates work in the media and were touched in some way by the tragedy. Many of them reached out to us, to let us know they were all right . . . and to tell us what they had seen. Here are some of their messages.

Sara Lyle, JM 1994, is associate editor at YM (Young Miss) in New York:

When I walked out of the office and on to Fifth Avenue, I saw an enormous cloud of gray smoke billowing up from the end of the island, and I smelled it. It didn’t smell chemical-ish like it did by the next day. People weren’t panicking; most were walking uptown, along the avenues that were clogged with cars, away from the smoke.

There was a line already forming around the block to donate blood [at St. Vincent’s Hospital]. I found out that people with type O blood (I’m O positive) were being shuttled to the front, so I followed the rest of the Os and proceeded to meet a lot of caring New Yorkers. As we stood there in the mid-day sun, dozens of volunteers kept us from being thirsty or hungry, with bananas, water, orange juice, soda, crackers, cookies, candies, raisins, pastries, celery sticks, even sandwiches and pizza.

People with radios gave updates to the rest of us; others recounted what they saw first-hand just hours before. We watched ambulance after ambulance pull up, and the doctors and nurses who were waiting on the curb outside quickly wheeled victims into the hospital. Some went by in stretchers, completely in shock.
I think I fixated on giving blood so much because it was all so overwhelming. I just wanted to do something.

I met [my boyfriend] Dan [Borntrager] at a grocery store. You could only pay with cash, no credit or ATM cards; there was hardly any bottles of water left on the shelves; the lines were incredibly long; there was no money in the ATM machines; yet people were still calm and not one bit rude. Then, until 3 a.m., I sat glued to the TV at home, no doubt like the rest of America had been all day. I got out a few calls on my cell phone, and Dan and I went up on the roof to see if we could see the spotlights downtown that the rescue workers were using to sift through the wreckage. We couldn’t because of the smoke. Occasionally, fighter planes would fly overhead. I can’t say I felt all that safe.

Tiffini Theisen, MA 1997, is a workplace reporter for The Orlando Sentinel:

I had gone to Washington for a journalism conference but was pressed into reporting duty at the Pentagon. After four straight days on the story, the tragedy seemed finally to hit me when I woke on Saturday morning. I sat in my hotel room and cried till almost 2 p.m. I felt like a rag doll that had lost its stuffing.

I was near the Pentagon most of the week, but I was also sent out to Dulles airport on Wednesday to report on what was going on there. It was deserted except for the American Airlines counter, which was taped off and surrounded by police officers with explosives-sniffing dogs. FBI agents in white gloves began dusting the counter for fingerprints in a last-ditch attempt to capture the prints of the suspects. I walked up there and starting chatting with these three FBI agents and another man, who I thought at the time was a news photographer because he was wearing one of those beige vests with all of the zippered pockets. About 20 minutes later, the photographer turned to me and said, “So what squad are you from?” My blood turned cold as I instantly realized this was no photographer, but a plainclothes detective, and furthermore he and the FBI agents obviously thought I was some sort of policewoman or detective myself. “Squad?” I blurted out. “I’m a reporter.” You know those billboards that flip over and turn into another advertisement? That’s what happened to their faces. They turned from relaxed and chatty into brick walls. For a terrifying, irrational second, I thought they were going to arrest me or something for trying to impersonate an officer. But the funny thing is, I wasn’t trying to deceive them at all. I assumed all along that they knew I was a reporter — I had my notebook and pen in my hand (although I took no notes during our conversation). Anyway, they didn’t say anything after that, just continued looking grim and stony-faced and would no longer look me in the eye.

At the Pentagon, I mostly attended press briefings by the fire and rescue teams, which weren’t very informative, and I also interviewed onlookers and families who were holding vigil near the site, as close as they were allowed to get. It was a pretty macabre scene, even from as far away as we were forced to stay (several hundred yards). The chunk that the plane took out of the building is charred black and still smoldering and smoking days afterward. Windows several hundred feet to either side of the point of impact are melted and cracked, the lower floors are gutted and blackened, and power lines hang like spaghetti from the wreckage. A wall of neatly framed photographs remains intact, surreally, on a sheared-off ledge. Helicopters have been swarming the air, removing bodies and taking them to Dover Air Force base, the military’s largest morgue, in Delaware. In the tent city of rescuers and volunteers on the Pentagon’s west lawn, I could glimpse officers patrolling with cadaver dogs, and exhausted soldiers lying on the ground to nap.

I talked to a woman, Christy, who was holding vigil with her best friend, Traci, in a borrowed pickup parked just inches behind the police tape. Traci’s husband, a civilian accountant, worked near the attack site. Late Wednesday, he was officially declared missing in action. Traci had pinned up a photograph of Eddie among the bedding and food in the back of the truck. In the picture, he reclines on the low branch of a large shade tree, wearing denim shorts, smiling. He is 32 years old, and she is 27. They have two young daughters.

Andrea Billups Kneeland, MA 1990, is a reporter for The Washington Times:

I was getting ready to leave for work when the first plane hit, but stopped to watch CNN and was aghast at the second plane crash. By the time I was ready to go to work, I got word of the Pentagon. My husband Scott (Kneeland, JM 1992) was in the shower and I yelled, “Honey, we gotta go now.” He took me to work that day.

I called my mom from my cell phone. She begged me to turn around.

“You can’t go to work,” she said breathlessly.

“I can’t not go to work, mom,” I said, trying to reassure her. “This is what we do,” I said.

Oh course, she was a Pearl Harbor teen and she thought we were getting attacked as we drove. Guess it was probable, given what we know now.

Inside the newsroom, it was like entering a bubble. We rushed, all hands on deck, to do a four-page special section “Extra.” I am a national education reporter, but was ordered to help our metro staff. I first called schools and colleges to find out what they were going to do about closing. I filed about 10 inches, cobbling together as much relevant info as I could.

“This is not the time to call,” said one school secretary curtly.

Indeed, she was probably right.

People were scared, but so engrossed that we just kept our nose to it, calling, typing, all the while gathering around televisions to see what was going on.

I ended up doing a story about reaction around the nation, putting together a piece from my own interviews and compiling copy from three reporters across the nation, one in Colorado, another in Texas and the third in Oregon.

By Wednesday, I got pulled off daily stories entirely and was asked to do the paper’s usual Sunday special report. They called it “Shining Through,” and it was essentially profiles from people in the D.C. area and across the nation. I got some good stuff, a kid who just signed up for the Army, a bond trader who hiked out of Wall Street amid the chaos, a Pentagon worker who was driving at the facility only to see it go up in smoke. I also did a nice piece on a UF master’s student, Lee Cobb, who rushed to Century Tower to play patriotic music on the carillon.

You definitely got a sense that people were struggling to get a handle on their emotions. Conversations were circular, strange, often emotional. I had two men cry on me — big heaving sobs — and by Thursday afternoon, I walked into my editor’s office and confessed that I felt emotionally unstable. I never did get a good cry in, though. I was just too busy.

It’s hard to listen and type and not get sucked into their stories. Even if they weren’t injured, people were emotionally wounded and struggling to come to terms to their stability. Much of my work was phone work, so that protected me a little, and I confess that I was grateful. But you also heard a lot of goodness percolating out there. Certainly shock, and disbelief, and then a lot of anger, too.

But it made me feel good to hear people, particularly young people, stand up with such fierce determination on behalf of their country.