A Good Antenna

Continental Flight 14 from Honolulu to Newark would be arriving at around 10:00 a.m. that Tuesday morning—about 20 minutes ahead of schedule. Aboard the aircraft was my father-in-law who, after retiring to Hawaii a few years earlier, was making his annual visit to New Jersey and looking forward to seeing his new granddaughter. As an added “bonus,” he’d get to watch yours truly run in the NYC Marathon a few weeks later.
Despite it being a workday, as usual I got the assignment to pick him up at Continental’s Terminal C at Newark International Airport and take him back to my home in northern New Jersey. I like to think it’s because I’m reliable, but I’m usually the one who gets these assignments—all families have one!

Knowing I’d likely be tied up for a few hours, I thought I’d stop at the office, which was along the way, to check on a few things before I headed down to the airport.

I had been at my desk for only a few minutes when the phone rang. The caller was a familiar voice: my uncle, who is the chief of the Paramus, New Jersey, Police Department.

“Turn on your radio,” he said. “A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center.”

It was 8:55 a.m. on September 11, 2001.

I immediately concluded that some “knucklehead” had got too close and flown into the World Trade Center. I remember feeling sorry for anyone on the ground who might get struck by falling debris as I flashbacked to 1977, when a helicopter crashed into the Pan Am building in New York and part of the rotor hit a woman on the street several blocks away. But I muttered that it was “just my luck” that I had to go to Newark Airport—which is only about eight miles west of the World Trade Center. Traffic on the NJ Turnpike, which runs parallel to the island of Manhattan, is hectic enough during rush hour, especially at the Lincoln and Holland tunnel approaches to the city. This was just going to be a mess, I complained.

I immediately left the office and decided to head west, take the Garden State Parkway instead and go to the airport the back way, avoiding the traffic and rubberneckers.

It was a beautiful, clear, sunny morning, but even at a distance of about fifteen miles north of the World Trade Center, the smoke was intense. As I listened on the radio and headed closer to the airport, all the details started to emerge. This was no accident. As I turned off the parkway and onto Route 78, approaching the airport, the smoke was now billowing out of both towers. What I remember most was there was not a single plane in the sky. Newark is ranked 22nd in the world’s busiest airports, accommodating nearly 32 million passengers per year, yet there was not a plane taking off or landing. I was not aware the FAA had grounded all flights.

But my concern at that moment was Continental Flight 14. Surely it had to land; they couldn’t send it back to Honolulu!

My “internal antenna” suggested I ditch my car at the first opportunity, fearing traffic would be halted and the airport closed. The parking lot for Terminal A was my first chance. With the marathon only seven weeks away, it was easy for me, even in dress shoes, to run from Terminal A to Terminal C. As I ran along the paths between the terminals, I could now see the entire lower tip of Manhattan covered in gray smoke. The South Tower, I learned, had just collapsed.

It was now 10:00 a.m. and the display monitor at the Continental terminal still showed that Flight 14 was scheduled to land at 10:00 a.m. Passengers were streaming out of the Continental terminal by the thousands. “Were you on Flight 14?” I’d randomly ask exiting passengers. “No, my flight was canceled,” they routinely said.

Looking east over the Hudson River, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people stared at the gray cloud that had now descended over all of lower Manhattan.

It was eerily quiet, as I remember it.

Continental’s baggage claim was totally empty. No one—I mean, absolutely no one—was there, except a Continental agent in a red blazer, who finally informed me that Flight 14 had landed safely in Columbus, Ohio.
I ran back to Terminal A and turned on the radio in my car, only to learn both towers had now fallen, the Pentagon had been struck, and United Flight 93 from Newark, which had departed from that same Terminal A less than two hours earlier, had crashed in Pennsylvania. Looking around at the cars in the lot, which ones would not see their owners return, I wondered?

With my father-in-law now in Columbus, I headed back to my office. Our network consultant’s wife was there. She worked only a few blocks from the Trade Center, had hitched a ride out of NY along with two strangers, and they were using my office to call their families and arrange for a pick up. They were coated in a gray dust that a few hours ago had been part of two of the tallest buildings in the world. What was in that dust, I wondered?

It was a surreal few hours. Selling tape seemed quite insignificant at that moment. I managed to find a 13" TV with a set of “rabbit ears” in the warehouse, and struggled to catch up to what had transpired during my time traveling to and from the airport. The reception was dreadful, and for good reason. Atop the North Tower, known as 1 World Trade Center, was the antenna that transmitted the VHF, UHF and FM signals for the New York City market.

The reception didn’t matter very much as I watched in horror the video footage, particularly of the collapse of the North Tower. I would learn later that my friend’s brother, attending a breakfast meeting in a restaurant known as Windows on the World, on the 106th floor of the North Tower, had perished—his remains were never recovered. But at that moment, I watched the replay in shock and sadness as a special symbol to me—the antenna atop the North Tower—was painfully swallowed up in a sea of gray smoke.

It’s still hard for me to even comprehend how an inanimate structure like a television antenna could appear to be in such pain and distress. I almost wanted to stick my hand into the TV and catch it before it disappeared from view, because at that moment I was suddenly transported back in time to June 1980, when I was a young salesman for Ampex Corporation magnetic tape division.

At that time, one of my best customers for blank videotape was a local UHF station called WNJU Channel 47.
WNJU was located inside a place called Symphony Hall on Broad Street in Newark, New Jersey. The chief engineer, George Kraus, a towering but gentle man, wanted to expand his audience and take viewers away from his competitor, another Spanish language station called WXTV Channel 41. Transmitting from the World Trade Center was essential, he told me.

There wasn’t any cable or satellite TV at the time in New York, so over-the-air broadcasts were the only means of transmitting television programs. UHF stations, unlike VHF, needed more powerful transmitters to expand their coverage and reach wider audiences.

Most of the UHF and VHF stations eventually ended up on 1 World Trade Center, moving from the Empire State Building once the Twin Towers went up in the early 1970s.

They didn’t have much of a choice, however. When the World Trade Center was being constructed, it caused serious problems for the television stations, most of which had to move to World Trade as soon as it was completed. After all, the construction of these two huge structures at the edge of Manhattan would interfere with the TV signals from the Empire State Building, affecting the residents of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.
George Kraus and I were having lunch at a small Portuguese restaurant down on Ferry Street in Newark one day, when he blurted out a sentence that I will always remember. “We [WNJU] just changed the skyline of New York,” he boasted. Perhaps he exaggerated WNJU’s role, or we had had too much sangria, but when he said, “How would you like to go and see the antenna on the roof of the Trade Center?”, I jumped at the opportunity.

It was a short ride over to New York City through the Holland Tunnel, which connects New Jersey with lower Manhattan. I distinctly remember that the elevators in the World Trade Center were like a “rocket,” rising so quickly you had to swallow to equalize the pressure in your inner ear. You needed change on the 77th floor to get to the transmitters, which were on the very top of the North Tower, on the 110th floor. I seem to recall that only WNJU and WCBS were operational at that time. We walked up a short flight of stairs and were now standing on the roof of the North Tower. It was a warm, sunny day, and standing on the flat roof a 1/4 mile (1368') up gave me the jitters. I was terrified to walk, I remember. A "trench" around the perimeter of the building, gave me a sense of security that at least I wouldn’t step off the edge.

The antenna was massive. It stood 360' high—the length of a football field from goal post to goal post.

Completed in 1972, the North Tower would later support ten main television antennas, numerous auxiliary antennas and a master FM antenna. Transmissions from the mast began in June 1980, and it is my recollection that WNJU was the very first, or perhaps the second, to transmit from the North Tower. Ten television stations in the NY metropolitan area, including all the major networks, would eventually broadcast from the World Trade Center. Additionally, six stations broadcast high-definition, digital television.

At precisely 8:46 a.m., the first hijacked jetliner, American Airlines Flight 11, hit the North Tower between the 94th and 98th floors of the World Trade Center, just below the transmitters, and knocked eight of New York’s biggest TV stations off the air for at least a day. Stations quickly scrambled and began operating at back-up facilities on top of the Empire State building, and the Armstrong Tower in Alpine, New Jersey, just a few miles north of the George Washington Bridge. Six men who had been monitoring their transmitters on the 110th floor from WNET-TV, WABC-TV, WNBC-TV, WPIX-TV, and two from WCBS-TV, were lost when the North Tower collapsed.

But New York City is a tough town and life for us carried on.

The NYC Marathon thankfully did take place as scheduled, on Sunday November 4, 2001. Mayor Rudolf Giuliani flew back from game six of the 2001 World Series between the NY Yankees and Arizona Diamondbacks to be with the runners as we queued up at the base of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, which spans New York Harbor and connects the borough of Staten Island to Brooklyn.

Normally there would be about 32,000 runners from all over the world, but this year there were about 7,000 cancellations, mainly from international runners. A NYC policeman sang a beautiful rendition of “God Bless America,” but what I remember most were how many of my fellow runners had t-shirts noting the names of family members, friends or acquaintances who had died on that dreadful day.

The saddest part for me, however, was wondering how many runners, who had trained so hard and looked so forward to this day, like I did, were lost on September 11th, thus never making it to the starting line. It was a number I never wanted to learn.

Running across the Verrazano Bridge during the first mile of the marathon, I looked to my left across NY Harbor at the Statue of Liberty, which served as an inspiration.

She still stands only one mile from where the twin towers once stood, I proudly remember.

And then I flashed back one more time to George Kraus and his remark about how the antenna had “changed the New York City skyline.”

The skyline had changed once again—along with so much more.

It was a good antenna.