Garth Stapley on 9/11: Through a Modesto lens, remembering that fateful day 20 years ago
Something really big, perhaps life-changing, has to happen for newspapers to crank up the presses in between normal runs and print a special edition. “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!” newsboys would cry from busy street corners a hundred years ago, trying to sell them to passersby.
The last time a hard copy special edition happened here at The Modesto Bee — and I don’t expect it ever will again, now that digital news is instantly at our fingertips — was Sept. 11, 2001.
The day that horror hit home. The day terrorists hijacked passenger jets and flew them into the World Trade Center’s twin towers, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field, ending thousands of lives and forever altering countless others.
It’s strange how something on the other side of the country can affect us here in Modesto and round about. Deeply and individually. Even if we personally didn’t know anyone killed or maimed in the terrorist attacks a continent away.
The Bee’s Ron DeLacy, who died in 2013, sent from his Jamestown office that day a message throughout the newsroom noting the significance of the date — 911, universal code for “we’ve got trouble; please help.” No doubt the same chilling thought was dawning across the stunned country.
We printed 40,000 special edition copies of The Bee that afternoon, stuffed with early news from New York City as well as local stories and photos. Over the next week, The Bee continued publishing special sections devoted to all things 9/11, distributed along with the regular paper. Because there was lots to tell.
Local reaction to 9/11
Commercial flights were grounded at the Modesto Airport, as everywhere else. Bomb threats closed Beyer High and Wilson Elementary schools here in Modesto.
The response was uneven, though. Most other schools stayed open, but canceled sports events. Stanislaus State University in Turlock closed, while Modesto Junior College sports played on. Anchors at Modesto’s Vintage Faire Mall — Sears, Gottschalks, J.C. Penney and Macy’s — welcomed shoppers, while all others closed.
Stanislaus County supervisors postponed their meeting that Tuesday morning for a week, while the Modesto City Council went ahead a few hours later with an abbreviated night meeting. Then-Mayor Carmen Sabatino, who died in January 2020, told me just after adjourning, “The goal of terrorists is to disrupt our society, to make us give up our democratic freedoms. To me, this (carrying on) is symbolic.”
The Bee’s pages were full of local response to the attacks, including blood drives and special church services. Stores couldn’t keep enough American flags in stock to meet demand. A vigil was staged at the iconic McHenry Museum in downtown Modesto. Sensing people’s need to pull together, city leaders allowed Friday-night cruising.
Our reporters tracked down people from here who happened to be there, and who told riveting stories: an E & J Gallo exec on a business trip; a woman raised in Modesto working one block from the White House in Washington, D.C.; a dancer from Modesto living in Brooklyn; a Modesto man with four relatives working in the World Trade Center, three of whom survived.
Columnist Judy Sly, and others, asked people not to seek revenge on the innocent. An inmate in Merced County Jail lost three teeth and said his attacker mistook him for an Arab, although his family was from India. And Palestinian owners of a Delhi market reported receiving a late-night phone call threatening to kill them and their families.
Gary Condit exits daily headlines
It was wryly observed in the newsroom that it took something as monumental as the terrorist attacks to finally move Gary Condit off the front page.
The formerly popular Ceres congressman had been withering since he was linked to Chandra Levy, a former federal intern from Modesto who had vanished in D.C. a little more than four months before. Rumors of romance, and speculation that he might be involved in her disappearance — he wasn’t, authorities agree — consistently kept Condit in headlines and on TV news nearly that whole time.
Less than two weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, I found myself chatting with ABC News’ Connie Chung in the DoubleTree Hotel at 4:30 in the morning, because that was the only time she was free to discuss her landmark interview with Condit. That ABC interview pretty much put the final nail in Condit’s political coffin.
If a national spotlight had stayed on Condit back then, might authorities have found Chandra earlier? They didn’t recover her remains until May 2002, a year after she went missing.
Chandra’s parents, Susan and Bob Levy, spoke with former Bee writer Jeff Jardine only a few days after 9/11 and pleaded with media not to drop Chandra’s story. Their fears were well-founded.
Finding normalcy in chaos
In fall 2001, as the nation prepared for war, the news was all 9/11, all the time. Understandably.
Nothing like that had happened before. The unprecedented nature of this terrorism added to our national shock.
On that day 20 years ago, Bee editors decided it was important to deliver readers a reminder that despite the national tragedy, not all was lost. They sent then-photographer Joan Barnett Lee into our community with a specific charge: Find something normal, something to reassure people that life will go on.
At Modesto’s Graceada Park, Joan found it: happy children in the playground. And the next day, Modesto Bee readers were reminded and reassured by the innocence of young life.
Newspapers are helpful in times of crisis — not just because they provide news about the crisis at hand, but also because they bring information, and information helps to bring order.
When evil and chaos strike, order must be re-established so that we can return to sanity and to normalcy, and move on.
This story was originally published September 9, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
