Sept. 11 left everyone flailing about. Journalists included.
From the first radio and television broadcasts of the attacks to the “extra” editions and the full-blown coverage the next morning, they scrambled to report what had happened.
From the first radio and television broadcasts of the attacks to the “extra” editions and the full-blown coverage the next morning, they scrambled to report what had happened.
They struggled to find the words and the camera angles to portray a surreal reality. They labored to arrange the incredible disorder into a credible form. What. When. Where. How. Why.
Who.
Not only Who committed these awful deeds, but also Who had died.
Before the week was out, The New York Times began publishing individual stories on those reported missing. Short stories they were, but stories that brought to The Times’ readers the human beings behind the tallied names.
The small profiles put faces with the names. With the faces emerged lives described in lyrical, poem-like fashion, personalities with friends and partners, spouses and children, parents and brothers and sisters.
When he was hugging the side of a mountain he felt most capable and in control. Transport Edwin J. Graf III to the Grand Tetons or Yosemite, and he was instantly at peace.
Within a day, on Sept. 17, The Oregonian began publishing those profiles offered by The New York Times.
Readers did not know then, just as editors of The Oregonian did not know, that those personal stories of lives lived and snatched away would continue for 125 more days.
No one knew that over the next few months we would be touched by more than 1,800 lives, that we would come to know quirks and traits and ambitions of those lives in ways unimaginable before Sept. 11.
They would come to know Who.
For Nereida De Jesus, life equaled Lauren. Lauren was her daughter, a bubbly 7-year-old whom Nereida, 30, was raising alone in Woodlawn, in the Bronx. Mother and daughter would do everything together — get their hair done, go to movies, take bubble baths.
Like others, Mark C. Cogan, a Portlander who had lived in New York for 18 years, had made the profiles part of a daily ritual. So much so, he wrote, “It is the first thing I look for when I get the paper each morning.”
The Oregonian’s presentation of the profiles from The Times ends today. The last of them appears on Page A2. A related story begins on the front page. With today’s profiles, this newspaper has published those that appeared in The Times through Dec. 31, when that newspaper ended daily lication.
As a journalistic venture, the space and time devoted to these compelling stories the past four months has been unusual both for The Times and for The Oregonian. No other newspaper has published The Times’ profiles on a daily, continuous basis.
John Harvey, the senior editor in charge of the National/International desk, drew Sunday duty on Sept. 16. Impressed by the profiles in The Times that day, he decided to use the first group in the next day’s editions.
Peter Bhatia, executive editor, liked what he saw. “I loved them from the get-go,” he said. “I was riveted by them.”
Maynard S. Spence Jr., 42, Barbara’s husband, was a man with a deep devotion and a flair for the romantic. A few years earlier, Maynard had exhausted an entire pad of sticky notes writing words of love to his wife and hiding them around the house; even today, Barbara is finding them.
The profiles had found a second home. “I wondered,” Harvey said, “how far we could continue to use them.”
Readers answered that question.
I wrote in a Sunday Public Editor column in October that their future was uncertain. Before that day was out, more than 80 readers had telephoned with their plea to run all of the profiles.
The number of readers commenting soon grew to more than 250. All but a handful urged the newspaper to continue publishing the small biographies.
Sandy Rowe, editor of The Oregonian, noted last week that although the initial publication of the profiles had not been her decision, she came to see the significance of them.
“These snapshots of lives lost have brought home this tragedy in a way that numbers and news stories cannot,” Rowe said. “They have honored each individual, powerfully asserted our shared humanity and given voice to our grief.”
A news decision made first on a day-by-day basis became a conscious one, she said. “We knew pretty quickly what a chord they were striking with readers,” she said. “It really is one of the things I am proudest of that we have done this past year.”
Her four nephews christened Suzanne Geraty the Kiss Monster for obvious reasons: When she wasn’t chasing them around the park, she was smooching them. Or tickling them. “She was the best aunt,” said her sister, Erin Durkin.
Strike a chord they did.
Lifelong residents of the West Coast found themselves pulled into lives they had not imagined knowing. People in small towns found themselves and their family members in the faces and families described each day.
Chelsea Hand, a high school freshman in Yamhill, wrote: “The saddest one to me was (headlined) ‘Like a kid, with bagels.’ I can connect my father with hers, and it makes me sad, but it also makes me grateful that my father is still here.”
Florence Bancroft, 71, of Northeast Portland had a similar perspective from another point on the age spectrum. “These people are my children and my grown grandchildren,” she wrote of those who died. “Their stories help tie our country together across the expanse of our nation in a special bond.”
Pat Vessely of Lake Oswego wrote, “Those profiles have been a confirmation of the ordinary goodness in most of humanity.”
In Brooklyn, at the Tillary Street firehouse, Lt. Paul T. “Big Daddy” Mitchell, holder of three citations for valor, was off duty on Sept. 11. He had stopped by for coffee around 8 a.m. When seven bells rang, and the truck left without him, he grabbed someone else’s gear and rolled.
Dozens of readers said the profiles were challenging, whether they read a few or all, but they felt it their duty to read them.
Mary Helen Dirkes of Beaverton said she works nights as a registered nurse and reads them when she arrives home in the morning. “I have read every single one every single day,” she said last week. “It has been my commitment to what all happened. They are so lovely and so gracious.”
Sarah Henderson also has read nearly all of the profiles. Henderson, a copy editor on the National/International team, put together most of the 126 pages in this newspaper. She tracked each person, designed the pages and clarified potentially unfamiliar New York references.
She took a previously planned trip to New York, too, and while there visited ground zero. At first she felt intrusive, she said. Nevertheless, “I needed to connect those people with what I had been working on.”
Much of the work of news reporting is focused on hard facts: the names, the occupations, the revenue reports and the school board votes.
The journalism of the hundreds of profiles, however, traveled a road more emotional than most. The vignettes have opened doors to hundreds of living rooms, where accountants and custodians found their real joy, where they were appreciated for more than their titles, their professional accomplishments, their ability to take on any job.
Those stories answered the question: Who? They also reminded readers to look closer to home.
“It makes me realize each one of us has a story,” wrote Jennifer Campbell of Tigard. “I have begun again on my scrapbooks and family trees and just connecting with family and friends. I want to make sure some of the many stories of my family are told before they are forgotten.”
