That Tuesday was bright and beautiful, here in Houston and in New York City.  I was helping set up for a studio shoot for the Winning Walk Television Show at Second Baptist Church.  In the control room on the monitor wall I had the news on a small black and white monitor since we were setting up lights and cameras, those images were on the larger color monitors.  We were on schedule for video taping Dr. Ed Young Intros and Outros tomorrow, Wednesday September 12th.  As I was matching two cameras, my eye caught an unusual image on the small B&W monitor where I had the news.  I walked over to the switcher and put the news up on the large color monitors and turned up the sound on the audio mixer.  The first plane had just hit, and the commentators were talking about what they knew about what had just happened, which was not much.  They think an airplane had collided with the tower but was not sure if that was what happened or maybe there was an explosion. I called my coworkers into the control room.  We were standing in front of the grass valley switcher watching, trying to comprehend what was going on, when another airline struck the second tower.  We all stood there speechless.  I went to my computer and wrote an email to my Pastor in Dickinson who is a retired Army Attack Helicopter Pilot who served in Vietnam.  In the email I asked, “Do you think this was Bin Laden”?  I went back to the studio where everyone had slowly gone back to work.  Since we were about finished with setting up the studio, we went back to the control room to continue watching when we got word from the Church Leadership that they were shutting down the Second Baptist Campus for the day so we were free to go home.  Before I left, I checked my email and my Pastor had responded, “… I was thinking the same thing, it has to be Bin laden.”

As I was leaving the parking lot, I saw that I was low on gas, so I went a gas station to fill up.  There was a line to the pumps, so I got in one.  I sat there listening to the radio and the local news was recommending people to leave the downtown area and stay away until we have a better understanding for what was happening in New York.  After I filled up the tank, I went to the beltway which kept my distance from Downtown Houston.  The traffic was heavy and fast.  There were no slowdowns, everyone was trying to get somewhere in a hurry.  I thought this was the perfect storm for a bad accident, but I made it back o my hometown without incident.  I went directly to my son’s school to pick him up.  I was shocked to see a line of car waiting to pick up their kids.  As I was closer to the pickup area, I stepped out of the car, walked over to the flagpole and lowered the flags to half-staff.  When Will got in the car we went home.  I followed the news the rest of the day.  I will never forget that day.