DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli. Today, we commemorate the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks - attacks that took place on the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and on United Airlines Flight 93, which was heroically diverted by passengers and crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. For anyone who is old enough to remember the events of that day, they also remember what they were doing when they heard about it or saw the coverage live on TV. Today's show will focus on what happened at the World Trade Center and the interviews we recorded in the aftermath. First, we hear from former Deputy Chief Jay Jonas of the New York City Fire Department. He was a captain on 9/11 and led his men up the stairs of the North Tower. After the South Tower collapsed, they headed back down the stairs, presuming the North Tower could fall as well. On the way down, they found Josephine Harris, who could barely walk.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
TERRY GROSS: Chief, you knew you were risking your men's lives and your own life to rescue Josephine Harris and that the odds were you wouldn't save her either because she was so slow and the building was on the verge of collapse, and you were - what? - on the 27th floor?
JAY JONAS: Yeah. We were on the 27th floor when the South Tower collapsed. That was...
GROSS: Yeah. So...
JONAS: ...Our big indicator for us to make our escape.
GROSS: So how did you decide to stop for her, knowing it meant you would all be leaving very slowly, probably too slow to get out?
JONAS: Well (laughter), it was a lot easier decision for the firefighters under my command because they didn't really know that the South Tower had collapsed. And there was another captain on the 27th floor - Billy Burke, the captain of Engine 21 - and I told Billy, you go check the south windows, I'll check the north windows, and we'll come back here. And I kind of felt that a piece of our building had just collapsed, that's why our building moved so violently. And he just looked at me and he said, the South Tower collapsed.
And I didn't realize it, but my firefighters under my command didn't hear the conversation with Captain Burke and myself, and I just looked at them and said, OK, if that one can go, this one can go. It's time for us to get out of here. And they looked at me a little quizzically because they had just climbed 27 floors with a hundred pounds of gear on their backs.
And once we made it to the 20th floor, we saw Josephine Harris standing in the doorway, and she was crying. And my guys stopped, and one of my firefighters, Tommy Falco, turned around to me and said, hey, Cap, what do you want to do with her? And it was - how can I put this? Every fiber in my being was screaming at me to get out of this building. Every second that we waste was one second closer to us not getting out of the building. But that's not what firemen do. We were there to save people's lives. And that culture, the firefighter culture, overtook whatever personal need I felt to get out of the building. And I said, OK, let's stop, and we'll save this woman. And, you know, it was the right thing to do. There was a lot of other firemen who were in that building who were doing similar things to what we were doing.
It wasn't until we got to the fourth floor - was when she couldn't even support her own weight anymore. She fell to the floor and she started yelling at us to leave her. That's when I decided to break into the fourth floor to look for a sturdy chair that we could have put her on, and we can pick her up with her in the chair and we could run with her. And the fourth floor was not an office floor, so it didn't have any chairs. So I was way on the other side of the building when I just thought to myself, well, we're just going to have to drag her down the stairs. And I started running back to the stairway.
GROSS: At what point did the building start collapsing?
JONAS: Just before I made it back to the stairway on the fourth floor. That's when the collapse of the North Tower started.
GROSS: Can you explain how in the world you managed to survive when the North Tower collapsed on top of you? You were on the fourth floor.
JONAS: The only thing that I can offer as an explanation is that the two buildings collapsed in two different ways. The South Tower collapsed differently than the North Tower. The South Tower collapsed - it kind of leaned over first, and then it collapsed because the way the plane hit it. The North Tower collapsed the way it was designed to. You know, they - these - you know, people think that it could fall over like a tree. Well, that's not true. They're not designed to be loaded like that. It actually collapsed in what's called a pancake fashion. And the building actually just kind of peels away the - similar to the way you would peel a banana, and we were the banana.
We were in the geographic center of that building, and everything just kind of fell outward and down. If you were a little higher than I was, the stairway was intact up to the fifth floor. So you would survive if you were up on the fifth floor, but if you were on the ground floor, you wouldn't survive because the weight of everything coming down would have crushed you. So you kind of had to be where we were - you know, somewheres between the first floor and the fifth floor.
GROSS: Could you just describe what you experienced as the tower collapsed on top of you?
JONAS: Well, it started out, the floor started to move. And you - since the collapse started about 1,300 feet away, the sound was off in the distance, and it got louder as it got closer. And you could hear the floors hitting the other floors, and every time that happened, it created tremendous vibration in the stairway. And you could also hear the sound of twisting steel all around you. And it got louder as the collapse got closer, and the vibration got more violent as it got closer as well.
GROSS: Were you shocked that you were alive after the collapse was over?
JONAS: Yeah. My first thought initially was that I didn't get my men out. That was my first thought - that I had failed them. And I just covered up as best I could and hoped for the best, and then the collapse stopped. And we were coughing and gagging, trying to get pieces of debris out of our mouths, our noses, our eyes.
And my first thought was, all right, I wonder who else is still alive. And I gave out a roll call, and my - all my people were accounted for. And we had a - you know, I didn't know Josephine's name at the time. I said, what about the woman? And they said, yeah, the woman's still here. She's alive. So our initial thought was, OK, we're alive. Let's dust ourselves off and continue down the stairway. And word came quickly from down below that we couldn't get out from down below. So that's when we started our survival mode, I guess.
GROSS: How did you get out?
JONAS: Eventually - like, about four hours later - the smoke and dust cleared enough outside where, all of a sudden, some sunshine started to hit the stairway where we were. And all of a sudden, I could see a pencil-width beam of sunlight hit the stairway. And - well, I looked up, and I see a little sliver of blue sky. And we were in the dark most of the time. So all of a sudden, I realized that there used to be 106 floors over our heads, and now I see blue sky. I said, well, we're on top of the World Trade Center.
GROSS: Oh, wow. You mean you're saying, like, at this point the fourth floor was like the top floor 'cause everything had collapsed beneath you?
JONAS: Yeah. Yeah. And it was at that point that we were able to - with the additional light, that we were able to figure out that we could reach a hole in the rubble and work our way out.
GROSS: So you climbed out through what had become the top of the World Trade Center?
JONAS: Yeah. Yeah. The fourth floor at this point - 'cause the rubble pile at that point was about four stories tall, about 40 feet high.
GROSS: So when you escaped the collapsed tower of the World Trade Center, did you allow yourself to experience the elation of surviving, or was your heart too heavy, knowing about how many people had not gotten out of those towers?
JONAS: Well, the - your - my first thought once I exited the rubble and I actually saw what it looked like outside - we really didn't know what it looked like outside. You know, just - we were trying to get a visual from talking to different people over the radio. But once I saw the complete devastation, my first thought was, oh, my God, I can't believe that I survived this. And you want to be happy, but, you know, you can't.
You know, later in the day when I was being treated at an ambulance, one of my guys was talking to me. Tommy Falco was talking to me. He says, hey, Cap, how many guys do you think we lost here today? And I stopped, and I thought about it, and I looked around. I says, oh, Tommy, I don't know - maybe a couple hundred. And then I caught myself when I said that. I said, what the heck did I just say? I said, prior to that day, our biggest life loss was in 1966, we lost 12 firemen in the 23rd Street collapse. And I said, and I just said the words a couple hundred. And it turns out I was off by almost double, you know? So it was hard to feel any sense of joy or accomplishment or anything like that, that - looking out and knowing how much pain and grief that's going to be going on out there.
Soon after I spoke to Tommy Falco, one of the - there was a guy who was one of my contemporaries, Jimmy Riches, came up to me, and he said, Jay, he says, I heard your radio transmissions. Congratulations. He says, that was unbelievable. That was one of the most dramatic things I've ever heard. I said, oh, thanks. It's - you know, it's good to be out. And then he said, by the way, did you see Engine 4 today? And I thought to myself, Jeez, what an odd question. And I thought about it and I says, no. No, I can honestly say I didn't see Engine 4 today. And he said, oh. He said, my son was working in Engine 4 today.
And it - that hit me like a ton of bricks, that this is going to be monumental, the amount of grief and suffering. You know, you had so many father and son and brothers within the fire department that this is going to be monumental in scope as far as grief and bereavement.
GROSS: You say in the book that you don't like it when people say to you, you survived because God was with you. Why don't you like it when people say that?
JONAS: Well, first of all, it's a little pompous (laughter) to say that you were a miracle, you know. But second of all, by them saying that God was with me that day, you're also kind of saying that God was not with them that day, and that's certainly not the case.
You know, I think of the one radio transmission between Chief Pete Hayden and Captain Paddy Brown. Chief Hayden's talking to him as we're coming down the stairs, and I'm hearing this over the radio. Pete Hayden is calling Captain Paddy Brown on the radio. He says, Command Post to Ladder 3. Get out of the building. Get out of the building. And Paddy Brown gets on the radio, and he says, I refuse the order, which is unbelievable, you know, that somebody would say that. He says, I refuse the order. I'm up here on the 44th floor, and I got too many burnt people with me. I'm not leaving them. You know, it still sends shivers up my spine hearing that. And, you know, that...
GROSS: I take it he did not survive.
JONAS: No. Paddy Brown, all the men from Ladder 3 and all the people that they were treating all died in the collapse.
BIANCULLI: Former Deputy Chief Jay Jonas of the NYFD, recorded in 2011. He retired in 2022 after nearly 43 years of service. Josephine Harris died in 2011.
We continue this commemoration after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
This is FRESH AIR. Ken Haskell is a retired New York City firefighter. His father was a firefighter, and so were his two brothers, Tommy and Timmy. His brothers died in the towers on September 11. That morning, Haskell was off duty, but when he heard the news of the attacks, he headed to ground zero.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
GROSS: When you got to ground zero, right after the towers collapsed, you first started trying to put out the fire in Building 7. And then you had an instinct that it was going to fall, so you walked away, and it did. It did fall. And then, eventually, what you took on as your work was looking for the remains of people who had been trapped in the towers. When you started doing that job, did you think that your brothers might be in those remains?
KEN HASKELL: Well, obviously, anybody who was there on the scene, you know, had the realization that there was going to be a tremendous amount of casualties. One thing that was striking, for me, I'm sure a lot of everybody else felt the same thing, that there really wasn't many remains left around the site. You know, the whole site had been reduced to basically anything that wasn't metal was reduced to ash, you know, or completely pulverized, you know, which was really a true testament to the energy that was created when those buildings fell, you know? So the likelihood of anybody surviving was minimal.
And that was a realization that set in very quickly for me. And you're always an optimist when you're working in situations like that. You're always hopeful that you're going to be able to help somebody, you know, perhaps save a life. So you're still - you're going to continue to work, regardless of the circumstances that are in front of you. And unfortunately, on September 11, there just wasn't too many survivors. And that was very apparent, almost immediately, for anybody that was working the site.
GROSS: One of your brothers, Tommy, was never found, but the other, Timmy, his body was found pretty intact.
HASKELL: Right.
GROSS: How do you think his body managed to remain intact? What kind of scenario did you create in your mind to explain that?
HASKELL: Well, you know, when Timmy was found, I was actually underneath the south tower because I would actually alternate my time, parts of the day, once between the north tower and once between the south tower because I knew one of my brothers were in each. Now, the fact that we were able to recover him was because Timmy had gotten so high in the north tower. From my understanding, he was in the upper 30s, close to the 40th floor.
My brother, Tommy, you know, having put the pieces of the puzzle together by asking questions about guys who were in the vicinity of him and his company, I was able to find out that they were located near the lobby area of the south tower at the time when it collapsed. So really, there was no expectation of any kind of recovery for him or anybody else that was in that portion of the building because just the radiant heat from all the fires and the compression and, you know, the energy that was created when the buildings collapsed just pulverized everything at that point.
GROSS: Did it make a difference in how you and your brothers' families and your mother grieved for them, the difference between having an intact body and having no remains at all?
HASKELL: Well, you know, even throughout Timmy's wake and his funeral, you know, the conversation...
GROSS: Timmy is the brother whose body was intact.
HASKELL: My brother Timmy...
GROSS: Yeah.
HASKELL: ...You know, was found in the north tower. We recovered him, and we were able to have a funeral. But all throughout his wake and the funeral itself, there was hopeful talk amongst the families, you know, whether we were going to recover Tommy or not. We still held on to that possibility that perhaps we someday would. You know, as the weeks and months went by, it became obvious that that wasn't going to happen. So in November of '01, we decided to go ahead and have a memorial because we just felt that it was appropriate thing to do.
And rather than have a funeral, we had a memorial where a casket was actually there, and everybody was asked to bring something in relation to Tommy or write a note or put a picture in or something that meant - was meaningful to them, which also meant something to my brother. And subsequently, we buried that casket next to Timmy.
GROSS: Yeah. Was there ever a part of you that thought you can't still be a firefighter because two of your brothers had died at the World Trade Center on 9/11? You were the only remaining son your mother had. You'd seen one of your brothers' wives become a widow. Did you ever think, like, I really can't go back and do that because I have to make sure I don't die in the fire for the sake of my family?
HASKELL: You know, I thought - I had thought about that, and not so much concern for myself, but for my wife and for my mother, obviously. But it was quite the opposite for me. I felt more of a responsibility to give to the department after my brothers were killed. I mean, I felt the responsibility to stay on because we lost so many guys, and I knew we'd be hiring a lot of young guys, and there'd be - there would be, you know, a need for senior guys to help these guys, to show them the way. You know, I actually, after my brothers were killed, I actually transferred to a busier firehouse than the one I had been working at at the time.
So not to say that, you know, I enjoy taking chances or I'm hooked on the danger. I mean, I do love the job still. I'm most happy when we're busy and when we're doing things. But it really came from a sense of respect for the job and almost a sense of obligation that I felt personally to give back in the spirit the way, you know, in the way that Tommy and Timmy served and the other 341 firefighters that we lost within the FDNY. I mean, those guys are the true symbolism of heroism and commitment, and I have a tremendous amount of respect, you know, for the legacy that they left.
GROSS: Well, Ken Haskell, I want to thank you for the work that you do.
HASKELL: Thank you. Nice talking to you, Terry, and take care.
BIANCULLI: Firefighter Ken Haskell recorded in 2011. He is now retired. He is president of the Seaford High School 9/11 Memorial Committee. The high school lost five alumni on September 11, including Haskell's brothers, firefighters Tommy and Timmy. They are holding a memorial service today. After a break, we continue our September 11 commemoration. I'm David Bianculli, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE WESTERLIES' "ENTROPY, PT. 1")
BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. I'm TV critic David Bianculli. Today, we are commemorating the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks in New York City, Washington, D.C., and a field in Pennsylvania.
Dennis Smith was a writer and retired New York City firefighter who, on September 11, walked to his neighborhood firehouse in Manhattan and went with the firefighters to ground zero. He arrived just after the second tower collapsed and helped with search and rescue efforts. He wrote the book "Report From Ground Zero."
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
GROSS: Let me ask you a kind of general question about skyscrapers. And granted, there's never been a catastrophe in a skyscraper like there was on September 11. But when firemen get to a skyscraper fire, what are some of the things they have to keep in mind that make skyscraper fires different than any other kind of fire?
DENNIS SMITH: Well, the most fundamental consideration is how many floors of stairs do you have to walk up? Because you're carrying equipment, and that always is a challenge, just walking up the stairs. So that's the first consideration. The other is the water supply. And you have a standpipe system at the bottom of the building, which you feed into, and you put the water in the standpipe system. And your fundamental consideration at any fire, whether it's in high-rise or not, is the life issue, life safety. Who is trapped? Who is above the fire? How do you get them out? Have they been trained? Have they had fire drills? These are all the kinds of considerations that are made.
The - I guess, Terry, it'd be intelligent to explain to you the architecture of the building to help you understand that this building was built - if you think of a straw and then square the straw some way, and then that each floor was attached to the sides of the inside of this straw, and through the middle of the building itself was a shaft, and in this shaft were the elevators and the stairwells - the three emergency stairwells. And that gave the architect a huge amount of space to use - you know, usable or rentable or sellable space. And that is, of course, the mission of an architect, is to try to build a building with as much, you know, economic usable space as possible. And in a building this size, normally you would get 50% of the floor space usable. And here, with the design that Yamasaki made when he designed this building, he got 75% usable space, and the 25% was used in the middle of the building with the elevators and the stairwells.
GROSS: How did that affect how the fire spread?
SMITH: It affected it greatly because when the plane came in, it went through this middle column of the elevators and stairwells, and so that immediately cut off the stairwells for any kind of escape either down or up. I mean, these people couldn't get to the roof either because the fire was coming right up the stairway shafts now. And so that was a flaw in the design that they didn't recognize was flawed when they originally designed it, in my opinion.
And it also enabled - because there was no structural steel supporting this anywhere except for around this middle column, it allowed those floors to pancake so that when the first floor fell to the floor beneath it, the floor beneath it could not sustain the weight of one falling floor with the dynamic and, you know, weight of the fall. And then that, of course, led to a pyramid collapse, one after another after another.
GROSS: What are you taught about, when you're training to be a fireman, about when you go into a burning building and risk your life and when it's just too risky and you don't - you know, you just don't go in, knowing that you're going to be killed.
SMITH: Well, I think that you're - the - what you're taught initially is that you have to trust the experience of the person next to you, your - and your lieutenant or your captain. And if that person is bringing you into an environment that's - you know, by definition is pretty hostile, if he's bringing you in there, your chances of being safe are pretty good because his experience would - you know, or his or her experience would have brought you there. So you have to trust your leaders because they're the only people who've been inside enough burning buildings to get a sense of what will happen.
There are the academic understandings, but sometimes they don't serve you so well. For instance, the fact that steel stretches at 1,200 degrees inherent temperature is an academic understanding of the physics of fire, but it didn't help anybody knowing that in the World Trade Center because of the way this plane came in. A plane that normally travels at 350 miles to 400 miles an hour comes in at 550 miles an hour. It is loaded with fuel. It has 24,000 gallons of fuel. It creates a comprehensive fire load on the floor. It heats the steel up comprehensively at every edge of the building. And when the steel buckles, it - they all - it - the steel all stretches sort of simultaneously and it creates this pancake effect when it finally collapses. No one ever thought that. There was no precedent for it. And now we know. We didn't know that before.
BIANCULLI: Writer and former New York City firefighter Dennis Smith, recorded in 2002. He died in January at the age of 81. He wrote the book "Report From Ground Zero." He made his writing debut in 1972 with the book "Report From Engine Co. 82," which became a bestseller.
Our commemoration of September 11 continues after a break. Coming up, poet Sekou Sundiata. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. A year after the September 11 attacks, we invited New York poet Sekou Sundiata to talk about life in the aftermath and to share one of his poems. He read an excerpt of a poem, not yet titled, about September 11. He began with his description of ground zero.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
SEKOU SUNDIATA: (Reading) The crater recalled a lonely planet - a pock-marked moon of ridges and man-sized valleys, earthmovers, dump trucks and cranes. A priest kneels in the powdered ash. The rescue stops for the Holy Ghost and the angel of death to cross paths. Someone calls for the jaws of life. Earth, water, fire, air. The sky, Ellington blue, pours over the harbor, black smoke curling into its soft watercolors, mixing those burning isms into a mute and inscrutable beauty.
I stood citizen-to-citizen, three rows deep. A man flipped through the daily news, matching pictures to the scene. A couple in a doorway argued hip-hop versus R&B in times like these. They look up from their ideologies to agree. Mercury must be retrograde. A woman to my right worried a flag the size of a handkerchief - the kind you get at the fairgrounds. And, yes, little Emmett Till came to me - a face that long ago cured my faith in that schoolboy lyric so that I could no longer sing with a voice of praise as if it was my own, o beautiful for spacious skies.
I walked the Avenue of the Americas, past the photocopy gallery of the missing and the dead, mounted on buildings and store windows and lobbies, posted on police barricades along the streets. I searched for familiar faces and found a few, but the names were wrong. Yet I knew them all by their fictions. The light-hearted Capricorn from Seven Hills playing with her cat on a Crate & Barrel sofa. The Hindu newlywed who emigrated from India to the golden city. Nestor (ph), the brother of Milagros (ph), menacing the lens ringside at the gym. A Miss Trinidad lookalike caught in a calypso on Eastern Parkway, and a pensive man in one of his moods, red, black and blue at the root.
I could see my own anonymous face in that show, cut and pasted above a word or two about my love of swimming in the ocean and my taste for sentimental ballads where what's missing and gone is half the song. I drowned in a flood of burning jet fuel. Down was looking like up when I jumped with my brains on fire. I ran from the falling tower and wandered for days. I heard (non-English language spoken) calling from miles away. I followed horse trails through secret pathways. E pluribus unum. I went home and wrote history to the bone. I have been written.
BIANCULLI: Sekou Sundiata, recorded in 2002. His poem was published in the journal Heart: Human Equity Through Art. He died in 2007.
In September of 2001, shortly after the September 11 attacks, we asked former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky to read a couple poems he turned to for comfort.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
GROSS: Robert, would you read another poem for us?
ROBERT PINSKY: This is a very dark poem. And it's one of the mysteries of poetry, I guess - maybe of art - that there's a kind of comfort in having absolute loss and things that are completely dire articulated. This is Edwin Arlington Robinson's poem "The House On The Hill."
(Reading) The House On The Hill. They are all gone away. The house is shut and still. There is nothing more to say. Through broken walls and gray, the winds blow bleak and shrill. They are all gone away. Nor is there one today to speak them good or ill. There is nothing more to say. Why is it then we stray around that shrunken sill? They are all gone away, and our poor fancy-play for them is wasted skill. There is nothing more to say. There is ruin and decay in the house on the hill. They are all gone away. There is nothing more to say.
GROSS: How did you first find that poem?
PINSKY: It's a poem I've known for many years. I remember my wife once wrote a paper about it when she was in college. And my friend, the fiction writer Leslie Epstein, sent me and some other friends a group of things he had read that seemed relevant to him, and that reminded me of this Robinson poem, which is a very beautiful, though very bleak, poem.
GROSS: Have you been feeling more like writing poetry or just reading it?
PINSKY: I have not felt like writing. I have written prose sort of to myself. Like many of us, I was reassured by work. I wrote a book review while I was stranded in my hotel in Los Angeles. I wrote a review of Alan Dugan's wonderful book of new and complete poems. I would love to be the kind of person who responds immediately with eloquence or penetration. I'm not. I tend to write about things after they've happened by quite a long time, and I tend to sneak up on things rather than approach them directly. So it would be deeply uncharacteristic for me to take the emotions I'm feeling and articulate them.
In some ways, I suppose I'm an easy talker and glib. In other ways, I am not comfortable with the first or second or third thought about a thing. I'm not comfortable with the idea that poetry is therapeutic. I think it's something - its comforts are more oblique and complicated like that. You know, poetry is often a lot more like the moon than like the sun. You know, it's kind of reflective and partial and deeply idiosyncratic. You know, each person is different. And I think poetry, being a vocal art, in each person's voice emphasizes that. It's not like a brass band. Nothing against brass bands.
GROSS: (Laughter).
PINSKY: I thought when the brass band at Buckingham Palace - the Coldstream Guards - when they played "The-Star Spangled Banner," I was quite moved by it. But that and the immediacy of television are different and have a different role than the role of poetry.
BIANCULLI: Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, recorded in 2001, shortly after the 9/11 attacks. The poem he read was "The House On The Hill" by Edwin Arlington Robinson. Pinsky has a new book, which combines his first two poetry collections.
Coming up, saxophonist Sonny Rollins recalls leaving his apartment in Lower Manhattan after the attacks. This is FRESH AIR.
This is FRESH AIR. The great tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins lived six blocks away from the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan and saw the second tower fall. Four days later, he was scheduled to perform at a concert in Boston, a commitment he honored and recorded. The subsequent live album became known as "The 9/11 Concert." Sonny Rollins died in May at the age of 95. He spoke with Terry in 2005.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
SONNY ROLLINS: We couldn't leave the area. No one could really leave the area. And there were a lot of emergency vehicles, of course, there. So I went back up to my apartment and called up my wife. And at that point, the phones were still working. Lights were still on and everything. And I was even stupid enough to take out my horn and start playing, you know, practicing, sort of, you know?
GROSS: What was stupid about that?
ROLLINS: Well, it was stupid because there was so much toxic fumes and everything. And I did feel a certain stomachache. So - and that actually was why I stopped. But I still hadn't brought the two things together, you know?
GROSS: And I imagine, when you're playing, you take really big breaths.
ROLLINS: Sure, sure. Yeah.
GROSS: Now, I know your building was evacuated by the National Guard. At what point did the National Guard come by and tell you, you had to get out?
ROLLINS: Well, the next day. Now, later that day, the lights went, the phone went, all of the things like that went. And so the National Guard at that time came by to the people that were still left in my building, and came by to our apartments and said, OK, everybody's got to go. So I picked up my horn and I got my briefcase. And we made our way down the stairwell in the dark to the street, you know?
GROSS: So you're on the 39th floor?
ROLLINS: Right. And so that was sort of rough. And I think there was three other people. There was another kid, who was the son of a woman on the floor, and another woman. So we were the only people, I think, left in the building.
GROSS: Did you ever return to your apartment?
ROLLINS: I did return to my apartment on a regular basis. But I never slept in my apartment again.
GROSS: Why not?
ROLLINS: But I would go down there to get things out, you know? And I had certain things that I felt I would like to try to salvage. But most of the things in there I had to eventually throw away, get taken away. You know, I had left my piano there, which was very sentimental to me. A lot of the guys played on that. Monk used to play on it, all the people who came by to my house. And I lost a lot of clothes that I had there. I lost a lot of books.
GROSS: Why did you leave your piano behind?
ROLLINS: Well, because I was so afraid of the fact that toxic material might have gotten into the mechanism of the piano. And I know that some people in that Tribeca area had found these problems when they examined the air ducts and everything in their buildings. So I was afraid that I would be handling something of that sort.
GROSS: Do you know what happened to your piano?
ROLLINS: No, I don't.
GROSS: Well, after you were evacuated from your building on September 12, you drove to Boston, where you were scheduled to play on September 15. So many events were canceled in the days after September 11. Did you speak to the producers at that event and have a long talk about whether you should go on with the show or not?
ROLLINS: Well, I spoke to my wife, Lucille. And I was all for not doing the show because I was really very unsteady on my feet. And...
GROSS: Did that have to do in part with having walked down 39 flights of stairs?
ROLLINS: (Laughter) Right. Right, right. It did. And also, you know, I was just really shook up. So I wanted to cancel it. But you know my wife, Lucille. And Lucille was a person that never wanted to violate a contract in any way. And she also may have had a feeling that it would be important to do a concert at that particular time, you know? So, anyway, she convinced me to play the concert.
GROSS: I thought I'd play another track from your new CD, "Without A Song: The 9/11 Concert." And this is "A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square." It's a beautiful version of it. And how did you first hear this song?
ROLLINS: Well, you know, "A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square," I guess I heard it during the '40s when I used to see all the movies that came in town every week. And it's funny that "A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square" may have had some connection to World War II. And the scene when I was evacuated and I walked down those steps that day, when I came downstairs, it was very reminiscent of those World War II pictures when there was The Blitz of London, with all of the emergency vehicles.
And, you know, it was a - and the smoke and the fumes. I mean, it was really something that, of course, I don't want to go through it again. But it was something that I guess I'm fortunate that I got out. And but I guess it's something - I'm trying to say that it's stored someplace in my mind. So I guess since I'm still alive, I might have a way to turn it into some kind of a positive experience.
GROSS: Well, here's Sonny Rollins from his new CD, "Without A Song: The 9/11 Concert."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONNY ROLLINS' "A NIGHTINGALE SANG IN BERKELEY SQUARE")
BIANCULLI: That's tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins. The legendary tenor saxophonist died in May at age 95. His live album commemorating the tragic event that occurred 25 years ago today is titled "Without A Song: The 9/11 Concert." And that concludes our own commemoration on FRESH AIR. On Monday's show, former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick. He grew up the only Black kid in a white family in a town that was almost entirely white and learned early to keep the racism he endured to himself. Then, in 2016, he took a knee during the national anthem and started a movement. His new memoir is "The Perilous Fight." I hope you can join us.
(SOUNDBITE OF CRAIG TABORN, TOMEKA REID AND CHES SMITH'S "WHEN KABUYA DANCES")
BIANCULLI: To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at @nprfreshair. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube.com/@thisisfreshair. We're rolling out new videos with in-studio guests, behind-the-scenes shorts and iconic interviews from the archive.
(SOUNDBITE OF CRAIG TABORN, TOMEKA REID AND CHES SMITH'S "WHEN KABUYA DANCES")
BIANCULLI: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Sam Briger. Roberta Shorrock and Danny Miller produced today's show. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support from Julian Herzfeld and Adam Staniszewski. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Our social media video producer is Hilary Kissinger. For Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley, I'm David Bianculli.
(SOUNDBITE OF CRAIG TABORN, TOMEKA REID AND CHES SMITH'S "WHEN KABUYA DANCES") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
