9/11 memories still fresh after 15 years

Bill Hewgley was an eyewitness to history on Sept. 11, 2001 in New York City.
Bill Hewgley was an eyewitness to history on Sept. 11, 2001 in New York City.

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It took Bill Hewgley 15 years to talk much about 9/11.

Hewgley, president of Metalworking Solutions here, is a Chattanooga industrialist who happened to be in New York City for a trade show on the morning of the 2001 terrorist attacks.

He flew over the twin towers of the World Trade Center at about 8:30 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, about 15 minutes before the carnage began. In real time, his family back home in Chattanooga thought he was a passenger on one of the airplanes that exploded into the towers.

Recently, Hewgley sat down to share his memories of that day - recollections he has kept bottled up for a decade and a half.

It's one thing to have experienced 9/11 through the filter of television news. It's quite another to be inside one of the first cars stopped near the the Midtown Tunnel in Queens as the curtain of security dropped around Manhattan.

But, let's back up.

In the fall of 2001, Hewgley was executive vice president of American Manufacturing, a Chattanooga company that built metal displays for retail products. He and the company's then-vice president for sales and marketing, Rick Davis, were traveling to New York on Sept. 11 to attend a trade show at the Jacob Javits Convention Center on 11th Avenue. They were there to show their wares.

Hewgley and Davis were in the LaGuardia Airport area after their morning flight from Charlotte, N.C., when they noticed smoke from the World Trade Center.

"I thought to myself, 'Osama bin Laden has come back to finish the job,'" Hewgley says.

The two headed toward Manhattan in a cab, not knowing what they would encounter. When their car was stopped en route to the Convention Center, the pair say they watched the building fires unfold from an elevated freeway. They were close enough to make out the tiny silhouettes of people jumping to their deaths, both men say.

"People were jumping from all sides of the building," Hewgley said. "I was thinking about the horror of these people having to make a choice, either to be burned to death or to go ahead and jump and get it over with.

"I kept thinking, 'What would I do? What would my choice be? How do you hurt so badly that you jump out of the 95th floor?' A lot of them (were photographed coming) out with their arms up, looking like they were praying. It was like a nightmare right in front of our eyes."

In the meantime, Hewgley remembers looking at the grim faces of emergency workers in passing vehicles as they rushed toward the disaster site.

"I often wonder which ones of those guys never came back," Hewgley says. "What amazed me is that they all went. They had to know they were marching into hell."

Hewgley remembers seeing light glint off the exploding glass near the top of one of the towers as the windows blew out in a prelude to the building's spectacular collapse. He said the visual effect, against the clear blue sky, was like a giant Fourth of July sparkler being lit.

"Then, the building started sinking into the growing mushroom cloud," he recalls. "We were sitting there just dumbfounded. It was like it wasn't real."

As a United States fighter jet circled overhead, Hewgley remembers thinking that it, too, might be in the hands of terrorists and could open fire on pedestrians at any second. He braced himself to run for cover.

"I'm a country boy, and all I knew was that a rabbit needs to get in a hole," Hewgley says, remembering how he immediately began to devise a plan to find a hotel room on Long Island.

As the cab retraced its path back toward the airport, Hewgley and Davis witnessed mass panic unfolding at LaGuardia as people streamed from the airport and tried desperately to rent cars to escape the chaos nearby.

The two happened upon a motel in Port Washington on the North Shore of Long Island, and Hewgley rushed to the front desk to claim two rooms. Meanwhile, a line of desperate refugees from the city immediately lined up behind him.

"It was one of those motor inns where you can read the paper through the bath towels," Hewgley recalls.

For two days, the Chattanooga pair holed up in the motel rooms and planned their return to Tennessee. Most of the exit bridges from New York were closed, but the two were able to find a sympathetic cab driver from Mobile, Ala., who took them from Brooklyn to Staten Island via the Verrazano Bridge.

Hewgley said, "The cab driver was an African-American man who said he was from Mobile, and that his mother used to clean houses and wash clothes and cook there. He said, 'I never forgot, there were bad white people and good white people. And you remind me of the good ones.'"

The driver risked his job to race across the Verrazano Bridge, which was in the process of being closed. Next, Hewgley and Davis waited in a Hilton Hotel lobby in New Jersey until an associate came to pick them up and carry them to Virginia, where they were eventually met by a company representative sent up from Chattanooga.

Hewgley said it took him several days to unwind from the stomach-churning panic he had felt in New York City, and many years to talk about the experience.

"Only after I had slept in my own bed with my wife, Jan, in my arms did I start to come down to feel the overwhelming grief at what we had seen," he recalls. "Upon awakening, I turned on the TV to see the children [of New York] holding pictures of their [missing] parents, asking for help.

"I wept - as I wept when my parents died - for about 15 minutes, got up, showered, shaved, went to work and got on with my life."

Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645. Follow him on Twitter @TFPCOLUMNIST. Subscribe to his Facebook updates at www.facebook.com/mkennedycolumnist.

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