Baby boomers face their Pearl Harbor
By Larry Thomas, Bedding editor -- Furniture Today, September 16, 2001
I came to work on Sept. 11 with my day already planned, and I was determined not to let anything sidetrack me.
I would spend most of the morning writing my column — my editors get cranky if I don't turn it in by noon on Tuesdays — have a quick lunch with co-workers, and then dash off to cover the monthly meeting of the International Home Furnishings Market Authority, the group now running the High Point furniture market.
All those great plans came to a halt about 9 a.m., when a co-worker called Furniture/Today's office from her home to tell us what was happening in New York. As the magnitude of human suffering began to unfold, a column about new-and-improved Web sites at Sealy and Simmons seemed trivial at best.
The focus on that bleak morning was on things much more personal. There was the co-worker whose daughter works as an intern in the Rayburn Office Building near the U.S. Capitol, another co-worker whose husband works in the World Trade Center, and countless others who have friends and colleagues working at several of Furniture/Today's sister publications in New York, some quite close to the WTC.
At mid-morning, about 20 of us crowded into a small conference room to pray. And I'm not ashamed to say that the tears flowed freely as we prayed for those personal situations, for wisdom for our nation's leaders, for the rescue workers, for the loved ones of those killed, and even for the evil people who orchestrated the attacks.
The rest of the morning was spent watching news reports on a couple of portable TV sets that seemingly appeared out of nowhere, or trying to access Web sites of news organizations such as CNN or MS-NBC.
By lunchtime, there was some cause for relief, as the above-mentioned co-workers learned their family and friends in the affected areas were safe. But those images of people literally running for their lives before the collapsing World Trade Center towers were permanently etched in our minds.
(We later learned that two employees of Furniture/Today's parent company, Cahners Business Information, were on one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center.)
So where do we go from here? As I was writing this, I had to stop several times to check the headlines on a couple of Web sites. It's still difficult to fully focus on the mattress business knowing that thousands of families are mourning the loss of loved ones.
But on the other hand, do we let a handful of fanatics dictate how we run our lives and our businesses? The answer, obviously, is no. But it's pretty clear that both will be run quite differently from now on.
For my generation — the much-discussed post-World War II baby boom crowd — this is Pearl Harbor. So forgive us if we act a bit melancholy.
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