September 11, 2001, was my 55th birthday. I was in Blackwood, NJ, at the MCI sales/service facility when it all started. I was there because a Brooklyn customer was to take delivery of six buses and dropping off six trades. They never made it because bridges and tunnels were quickly closed. 

We had a TV in the waiting room, and as word of an airplane striking the South Tower of the World Trade Center spread throughout the facility, we all gathered to watch network news coverage. At first, virtually everyone assumed it was an accident. 

The second plane that hit the other tower quickly ended that.

When the North Tower fell, everyone wondered what had happened. It never occurred to us that the tower had imploded.

A substantial amount of the talk on TV centered around the fact that 50,000 people worked in the area and that the number of casualties might be massive.

Before the towers collapsed, the visual image of people jumping from the buildings to escape the flames was both horrifying... and riveting. 

It wasn’t immediately obvious what the falling objects were, but once it became clear that they were human beings, everyone, media, and watchers, was mortified. This still remains one of my most vivid memories, even though modern media exercises unusual good judgment by rarely showing it.

I spent the night in South Jersey because there was no easy way to get past New York City to New England, and my wife Susan was on call at Boston Children’s Hospital for the hundreds of casualties they expected, which never came.

John Oakman, Senior Executive Vice President at Coach USA, then arguably the largest bus line in the US, had been my best friend for many years. He called to ask if I could meet him in Hoboken NJ, early September 12, to help retrieve buses that drivers had been forced to leave in New York City, after the incident.

Coach USA needed to pull them out of Manhattan in order to resume running commutes into the City from Northern New Jersey. Many New Yorkers commute by bus, and until service was restored, no one could get to work.

John was at the Buscon show in Cleveland. There was no air service or rental cars available. He hitched a ride to Columbus, Ohio, and commandeered “Piggly Wiggly.” This was a converted MCI 102DL3 that Coach USA owned and parked there. Firing it up, he headed east, driving to Coach USA’s Hoboken facility across the Hudson from New York City.  

His plan was to use the bus not only for transportation but also for lodging, correctly assuming that all the hotel rooms in the area would be occupied by stranded airline passengers.                                       

I got up early September 12 and headed towards New York, unsure that the police would even let me into Hoboken. Driving north on the NJ Turnpike, I wondered what would be visible from where the Twin Towers had been prominent on the skyline. There was a vertical pillar of smoke at least three times as high as the towers had stood. 

Hoboken was a ghost town, and I drove directly to the bus garage.  Piggly Wiggly was parked inside, with John emerging from the door, wrapped in a towel, searching for a shower. In a different situation, it would have been humorous. 

A group of Coach USA people, mostly managers, several with little driving experience, volunteered to help, and our motley crew climbed into a van. 

They took us to the PATH (Port Authority Trans-Hudson) rail terminal, a train that goes under the Hudson from New Jersey to New York. Bridges and tunnels were still closed, and there were few ways to get into the city. Service was free that day, and the trains were packed. It was eerily quiet, and no one gave us a second glance even though several of us were wearing jumper cables around our necks in case our buses didn’t start.

Everyone on the train was nervous because we were in a tunnel, under a river. At that time, no one knew who had destroyed the World Trade Center or if there were more attacks coming. Under a river did not seem like a safe place. We ended up making that trip four or five times.

On the Manhattan side, a driver picked us up in a van and drove us south towards the World Trade Center. We picked up the first group of coaches within sight and sound of the rubble and smoke.

Several of the buses were MCI’s, purchased as part of the New Jersey Transit acquisition and had different controls than I was familiar with. The ignition “switch” was a round knob similar to those on the old GM 4106 buses, and there was a moment of panic, fear that the convoy would leave without me and I had no idea where I was. 

While we were starting the buses, a tow truck dragged a crushed mail truck up 11th Avenue past the Jacob Javits Center. It was flat, less than two feet high…, with no wheels, grinding along with sparks flying, steel on the pavement.

At that time, the only way out of Manhattan was to drive all the way up to the George Washington Bridge at the north end of Manhattan, cross the Hudson, and then drive all the way back down the NJ Turnpike to Hoboken, which is near the Lincoln Tunnel, midtown.

The most vivid memory of this long trip was seeing stunned people sitting on steps and in parks. They stared at us because there was very little else moving. It seemed to take forever to reach the George Washington Bridge, but there was no traffic. A real blessing to the members of our gang who were not skilled bus drivers.

The first posters with photos of missing people were just going up. 

Each group of coaches we retrieved was farther from the World Trade Center site. Once we had worked north to the Port Authority Bus Terminal in midtown, which is by far the largest bus terminal in the US, with 200,000 people moving through there per day, we expected 15 buses to be there. It turned out we had more than that parked in the dark enclosed garage.

A young Port Authority Police Officer was guarding the place. Normally there would have been thousands of people there, but he told us the only other person around was his Sergeant, who was inside the terminal. 

While waiting for the Sergeant to grant permission to move the buses, the officer told us that he had lost many friends on 9/11… he still didn’t know how many. Nice guy, very subdued.

In a bit of irony, in the immediate aftermath of the worst terror attack on US soil… our only credentials for taking the coaches were the jumper cables around our necks and dirty hands, but no one questioned us.

The Sergeant told us he’d be VERY happy if we got the buses out of there because there was some fear that they might have explosives aboard. Did we mind if they checked each for bombs before we left? We thought that an EXCELLENT idea…

The last trip was again to the Port Authority. This time, the police officer asked if we’d like to take the Lincoln Tunnel, turning a 20-mile trip into a 3-mile one. He would open it just for us. One of our guys was an executive with little driving experience who said he was a bit nervous about driving in the narrow tunnel. 

The cop looked at him and said that there were two lanes, we’d have a police escort, and no one else would be in the tunnel. Things went fine.

After going all day without eating, that night, we all had a very sober dinner in Hoboken.

At a time when everyone wished they could “do something,”… we all felt grateful for the opportunity to have had something to do.