LOOKING BACK: Often when we reflect on famous — or infamous — days in history, we can remember where we were, what we were doing and maybe even our feelings from an exact moment.
On Page A-7, staff writers for The Era share their memories of Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001. Those memories range everywhere from mourning the death of a loved one to being almost too young to fully grasp the gravity of the situation.
However, in the newspaper business, we’re always working a day ahead — Monday night’s work gets printed and published in Tuesday’s newspaper. That was the case on 9/11, when readers across the area may have just been waking up, taking a drink of coffee and reading what most thought was just a regular Tuesday morning paper.
In that morning’s paper, there was a story about repercussions from a teenage party, while an Associated Press photo shows President George W. Bush boarding Air Force 1 for Florida, where’d he’d spend the next day reading to elementary-aged children in support of his No Child Left Behind legislation.
That day’s ‘Round the Square featured many things, including the difference between concrete and cement.
On the Sept. 11 sports front page, Barry Bonds was chasing Mark McGuire’s single-season home run record, basketball star Michael Jordan “all but confirms” he’d come out of his second retirement to join the Washington Wizards and the Steelers were reeling after losing 21-3 in their opener vs. the Ravens.
The late Greg Clark covered a University of Pittsburgh at Bradford volleyball match where the Lady Panthers knocked off Frostburg State, ending the Lady Bobcats 47-match conference winning streak. Also from Monday, the Bradford High Lady Owls soccer team, under the guidance of head coach Ann Nuzzo, won the program’s first game, routing Curwensville, 7-0, on the road.
The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 changed many things in the world — and how the next day’s newspaper would look. The Wednesday, Sept. 12, paper simply had “Day of Terror” as the main headline.
Other stories included local reaction from county officials and how the attacks affected Bradford Regional Airport.
With so many stories and photos, the sports section was reduced to one page — a banner story talked of postponements across the major sports leagues. The Era’s Ron Kloss, sports editor at the time, still had his Wednesday morning Midweek Report on the Owls’ football team as they prepared for their game that Friday.
