Les Shively, 92, of Grove City remembers watching the towers burn.

Shively was at Butler Memorial Hospital, the morning of Sept. 11, taking his wife to a doctor's appointment.

Sitting in a waiting room, Shively glanced up at a news report playing on the TV.

“I thought it was an old movie until the second plane slammed into the building,” he said. “I didn't know how to feel to tell you the truth.”

“It gave you an awful feeling that they got past us,” said Shively of the events of that morning.

The lesson he takes from that morning, he said, “Every day is a blessing from God. We should thank him for it.”

Sue Christy of Fenelton was working as a library clerk at Oakland Elementary School when a custodian ran in to say a plane flew into one of the towers in New York City.Christy said, “Our librarian turned on our TV and it was covering the crash at the Pentagon.”“We were confused because it was not New York,” she said. “We were watching in horror as the screen suddenly switched, and we watched the second plane hit the second tower in real time.”Christy said she decided to call her father who she knew was very knowledgable on current affairs to ask who would want to attack the United States.Christy said she had never heard of his answer, Osama Bin Laden.“I couldn't understand what he was saying, so I asked him to spell it out. I wrote BIN LADEN on a piece of paper and held it up to our staff that was in the library. We all just stood there saying ... who??? No one had ever heard of him,” she said.Christy said her husband, Earl “Buzz” Christy, was a coach for the East Butler Bulldogs midget football team and he was trying to decide if he should have practice or cancel it.He and his coaching staff decided to go ahead and keep things as normal as possible for the football players.“We all gathered together before practice, prayed the Lord's Prayer and they held practice as usual,” she said.“It was an eerie night because it was so quiet, no planes flying overhead and no car traffic could be heard,” she added.

Lauren Christman of Slippery Rock was an eighth-grader at Slippery Rock Middle School on 9/11.She said no one told the students until the end of the day.“The teacher told us to go home and turn the TV and be with our family. I got on bus and the high school kids got on bus after us and were crying. They saw the second tower on live TV.”“9/11 impacted my life because we don't know what will happen when we leave home. Always say goodbye and good night to those you love and care about,” Christman said.

John Paul, executive director of the Butler Transit Authority, said he was on the third floor of the city building “listening to Howard Stern on the computer.”“At the first hit, they thought it was an accident, Robin (Quivers, Stern's co-host) said,” Paul said.“I got to the council chambers and turned the TV on.”

Roberta Balas of Butler Township was working for a construction company at a job site in Weirton, W.Va., when the project manager told her a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.“I thought it was a small plane,” said Balas. “I was driving home from Weirton to Wexford. I had KDKA on and kept getting reports about what was going on.“When I got back to Wexford, I went to a big-screen TV in a bar to see what was going on,” she said.The news struck particularly hard for Balas because she said she used to work at the nearby World Financial Center when she worked for Merrill Lynch from 1996 to 1998 and often shopped at the underground mall at the World Trade Center.She said if she had not moved back to Pennsylvania for personal reasons, she might have been working in the financial center when the attacks came.Speaking of the anniversary, Balas said, “It's hitting me a little hard this year, I'm getting older. It's been 20 years, but it seems like yesterday.”“I remember the sky was crystal clear blue, not a cloud in the sky. How the heck could a plane crash into a tower?” she said.She said where she lived was on the flight path to Pittsburgh International Airport.“On that day, there wasn't a plane in the sky, which was kind of eerie.”