“Well, that’s weird.”
When my then-fiancée (now my wife) told me that a plane had just struck one of the Twin Towers, it didn’t register as anything nefarious. I was getting ready for work and figured it must’ve been pilot error. But when the second plane crashed into the second tower, we knew.
We all knew.
Immediately.
On Sept. 11, 2001, I was working at 1250 WTMA radio in Charleston, S.C. — “Your news-talk leader in the Low Country!” We were the top-rated news station in the Charleston marketplace, but we weren’t alone: There were seven or eight sister stations under our roof, too. Our parent company owned a slew of stations, but we were the largest. Most of the others only had skeleton crews and were run via computers patched to satellites, whereas we had an entire team of on-air talent and a dedicated, award-winning news crew.
Plus… me!
I was still in my 20s and the low man on the Low Country totem pole: My job was to produce a three-hour weekday show for the lovely and talented Nancy Wolf, and I had my own (low-rated) talk show on the weekends. Producing a talk show can mean different things at different stations, but at WTMA, it meant that I was responsible for booking the guests, prepping the host, clipping the show’s content, running the board, and fielding incoming calls from listeners.
Nancy Wolf never went national, but she developed a strong, dedicated following in the South and was a recurring guest on “Politically Incorrect” with Bill Maher. She was a quick-witted, tart-tongued right-winger with a gift for gab and the willingness to traffic in filthy, off-color jokes (off air), so we got along famously.
But there was always tension between the talk show teams and the WTMA news crew. It happened all the time. They were considered “hard news,” and we were “editorial.” When stories broke, there’d often be unpleasant — and highly competitive — overlap. Sharp elbows were a way of life.
Yet the moment the second plane hit the second tower, all rivalries were set aside.
We didn’t know what the hell was going on: Our station was receiving reports of car bombs exploding throughout the country, and we were hearing about other planes crashing as well. Nobody could tell which reports were legitimate. Then, when we tried to call our colleagues in New York City, nothing was getting through: The New York phone system collapsed from overuse, which only added to the bedlam.
That’s probably the biggest thing the public still doesn’t know: On 9/11, media outlets became inundated with false reports of all kinds of chaos; because of the uncertainty, we weren’t sure what we should tell the audience. We were hearing (unverified) reports of car bombs exploding in downtown Washington, D.C., in New York City, in Los Angeles — everywhere! Charleston is a military town, so tensions were already at a fever pitch. The last thing we wanted to do was disseminate false information.
Fred Storey, our news director, pulled me aside: “Scotty, do you remember what you said in January about the election? When we were talking about Florida?”
I glumly nodded.
Nine months earlier, Fred’s team was covering the “hanging chad” hoopla from the 2000 election. We were inching closer and closer to Inauguration Day, and the winner of the Bush vs. Gore election was still unresolved. Fred told me, “I guarantee you, this will be the biggest story of the year!”
“Well, you better hope so, Fred,” I quipped at the time, “because, if it’s not, then something REALLY horrible happened.”
“The election isn’t the biggest story of the year anymore, is it?” he sighed.
I had no answer.
Nancy Wolf was on the air, but we were struggling. People wanted insight — everyone had questions! — but we didn’t know what was happening either. We ended up bundling all the radio stations together, so we broadcast Nancy on all of them simultaneously. Nobody cared about anything else that day. As far as I know, this is the only time that’s ever happened in the Charleston market.
We were trying our best, but there was a near-total news blackout. With everything unfolding in real-time, the government was paralyzed; hours went by without any updates. Our audience was begging for something — anything! — that could make sense of it all.
Finally, I had an idea: Dolf Droge.
He was a national security legend, having worked for John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and every president in between. I met him when I interned for a radio show in Virginia, and the guy was simply extraordinary: Even when the cameras stopped recording, he was rattling off encyclopedic breakdowns of CIA history without breaking a sweat. He not only knew where all the bodies were buried, but you also kind of suspected that he juuuust might’ve played a role in putting the bodies there in the first place.
If anyone could make sense of this, I figured it was Dolf Droge.
So I called. He answered.
Moments later, I put him on the air with Nancy.
He stayed on the air for the next several hours.
Dolf told our listeners that this was clearly the work of Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda terrorist organization. He went into explicit details about their methodology, tactics, and objectives. Dolf even used the language “drain the swamp” when we asked him what we could do to stop them.
By the time we reached the evening, everyone was mentally exhausted. Nancy had powered through a marathon show, packing in a week’s worth of work in a single day. We were emotionally drained.
But before we finished, one of the engineers handed me an old CD: "The Star Spangled Banner."
I put the disc in, and everyone there — the on-air talent in the studio, the folks in the room with me, the guys in the hallway, and the people working in news and advertising — stopped dead in their tracks.
They all stood still.
And they all put their hands atop their hearts.
Nobody dared move until the end.
At least half were crying.
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