25 years later, wounds of September 11th still fresh for Butler Eagle staffers
At first, the Butler Eagle’s front page on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, seemed like it was going to look very different than how it ended up.
Among the stories that seemed destined for the front page that day, some of them wouldn’t look too out of place 25 years later. Butler Township was proposing an ordinance to curb noise from barking dogs. Mars borough residents were opposing a proposed cellular tower. A Krispy Kreme in Cranberry Township hosted its grand opening. The price of stamps rose to 37 cents. A Philadelphia-area “cyber charter school” was legally barred from serving students in Butler County.
By noon that day, all of those stories would be relegated to the back pages, replaced by images of terror and destruction in New York, Washington and Shanksville, Pa. The front page that Eagle readers saw that day carried the simple and striking headline, “Under Attack.”
“I think we felt really safe (before 9/11),” said former managing editor Donna Sybert, who was a news editor at the time. “We were confident that we could move about freely and didn’t have any issues. We didn’t worry about others if we were traveling. … This is the day the world changed. All of a sudden, we accepted being searched, and we accepted security at the airport and things like that.”
Sports Editor John Enrietto was at work at the Eagle’s sports desk when he first heard about the disaster.
“Somebody from the newsroom came running through the sports office yelling that a plane flew too low and hit the World Trade Center,” Enrietto said. “That was the first thing everyone thought. Everyone thought it was an accident. And then someone else from the newsroom yelled, ‘My God, the World Trade Center just got hit again. We're under attack.’
“I remember those words like it was yesterday. ‘We’re under attack.’”
Paula Grubbs, who worked for the Cranberry Eagle at the time, vividly remembers where she was when she found out about the initial attacks on the World Trade Center that morning.
“Back then, not every computer had the internet. I think we only had one computer in the Cranberry Eagle office that had the internet,” Grubbs said. “I'd gone to work like any other morning … and my husband called me and he said, ‘Oh my God, can you believe what's going on?’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ And he said, ‘What kind of newspaper are you running there? The country's under attack!’ And right when he said that, all the phones started ringing in the office.”
At that time, unlike today, the Butler Eagle had a noon deadline and went to print in the afternoon, giving the staff just barely enough time to front load that day’s edition with wire stories and photos cataloging the devastation in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. This was what Sybert spent much of her workday doing.
“When it happened, we were on deadline, and we had already picked the stories for the day. So when it came across that a plane had hit the tower, we had to change everything,” Sybert said.
Before long, it became clear to the Eagle’s top brass that this was a truly historic moment which warranted a truly historic response.
“The managing editor (Mark Mann) called and said, ‘We are holding the presses,’” Grubbs said. “I think it was only for the third time in over 100 years.”
Despite the fear and uncertainty caused by the attacks, the Eagle staff — as journalists do in every crisis — immediately buckled down and got to work.
“We had to get in our cars and go out in our areas we covered, and just get knee-jerk reaction from people,” Grubbs said. “And of course we had a hard time making calls because all the cell towers were being overused, so a lot of times calls wouldn't go through that day.”
“The newsroom production staff was very professional in saying, ‘We have to get this in the paper. We have to get it out for today’s edition,’” said Mark Mann, who was the managing editor at the time. “So we were in kind of a working mode to get it done. We had like two or three hours to get this together.”
Due to the timing of the disaster and the Eagle’s publishing schedule, stories of the disaster’s local impact would not appear until the following day.
Ironically, one of the items featured in the latter half of the Sept. 11 edition of the Eagle was an opinion column from economist Paul Krugman with the headline, “Hold Bush to his promise to protect the (Social Security) surplus.” After the events of that Tuesday, this would be among the least of the president’s concerns.
Not long after the attacks, Grubbs ended up speaking with U.S. Rep. Melissa Hart, who represented a district that included part of Butler County.
“The Butler reporters were trying desperately to get a hold of her, not only for a comment, but they were afraid she was injured or worse in the Pentagon crash,” Grubbs said. “She was in D.C. and nobody could get a hold of her. She called me at the Cranberry Eagle and said, ‘Paula, everybody at the Eagle’s trying to get a hold of me.’ So I wound up interviewing Melissa Hart.”
Before she headed out, she and a colleague from the Eagle were listening to radio reports of the attacks from KDKA and the police scanner, as the Cranberry Eagle did not have a television. At one point, due in part to an erroneous radio report, Grubbs feared that Butler County itself might have become part of the story.
“At one point when we were listening to the radio, the reporter said the whole attack might have originated in Pittsburgh. And that terrified us,” Grubbs said. “And then the scanner radio went off, and it was a breathless policeman, and he said, ‘I have five men of Middle Eastern descent handcuffed at the turnpike exchange in Cranberry Township.’ And we were just like, ‘My God, we’re unsafe.’”
While most major and minor sports were forced to shut down for a period after the attacks, Enrietto did get to cover one unique high school football game on the Friday after 9/11, when Moniteau High School traveled to Clarion County to play Keystone. According to Enrietto, it was the only football game played anywhere in Pennsylvania that day.
“They had a very moving pregame ceremony there that had all the local police officers, firefighters and EMTs,” Enrietto said. “They passed out tiny American flags to every person who came to the game, and they just had a long, long moment of silence and remembrance and recognition of what happened three days earlier. It was a very, very moving night. … The game was secondary. I couldn’t even remember who won the game.”
It wasn’t until after everyone got home that night that the enormity of the attacks finally set in.
“When the president came out and said that thousands of lives were suddenly ended, it kind of put in perspective that this was an act of terrorism, and that kind of confirmed everything,” Sybert said. “And Bush vowed to avenge their death, which kind of gives you a chill down your spine when the most powerful man in the world, the president of the United States, vows to avenge death. We know that things are going to happen, that the world is going to change.”
“I sent my stuff in and told the managing editor, ‘I have to go home. I don’t want my kids to turn on the TV by themselves,’” Grubbs said. “I set the land speed record from Cranberry Township to Penn Township in my Dodge Intrepid.”
Later that day, as the Grubbs family watched the grim replays of that day on TV unfold, her 11-year-old son, Tommy, was spontaneously overcome by the patriotism that would consume the country in the months that followed.
“After a few minutes, my son disappeared,” Grubbs said. “I looked outside, and he was lowering the flag to half-staff without saying a word to anybody.”
