Here is where some local residents were when they learned about the terrorism attacks:

David Hollister, Lansing mayor: "Peter McPherson (MSU president), Judge Nells Nickerson and I were holding a press conference at the Allen Street School announcing the creation of six family resource centers around the city to deal with families with young children. Peter and I were chatting after the press conference, feeling upbeat about the people in the room and the children and the excitement of where we are as a community in terms of dealing with families with young children. One of my staff stepped up and said there’s been a plane that crashed into the World Trade Center. McPherson was stunned. He knows people there. He used to work in that arena in Washington and New York, so he was instantaneously concerned and we left immediately. I got a call from our fire chief, Greg Martin, who is the official person for our emergency coordination center, and he said there’s been a second plane that’s hit the tower. It was his belief that we needed to convene as a emergency planning group at the headquarters where we would do an assessment of any risk to the Mid-Michigan area. We immediately went to work doing an assessment of what would be the key targets under the circumstances. Ironically enough, in February, the chief had convinced me that we should go through a disaster drill. The entire administration was over at the state police headquarters locked up for three days where we were actually under a simulated attack of terrorists. In that training, we had the legislative office building adjacent to City Hall and the CATA transportation center simultaneously bombed. So we had been through an experience where we didn’t know what had happened but we had to figure it out quickly and figure out a response. So when we got the headquarters on the day of the attack, everybody knew their role and their tasks were clear. The first thing we did was make sure that all of our key partners-hospitals, schools, business that might be under threat, the airport-were on alert and that they had increased surveillance and increased security. We then deployed police and fire for any that weren’t able to get people in those key spots almost instantaneously. Within an hour and a half we were completely comfortable that there was no immediate threat to Mid-Michigan, that all of our partners were well prepared and there was a heightened state of security everywhere. We didn’t lock down City Hall but we were on a heightened state of security, met with the courts and judges and we talked to the governor’s office.
Right when I got to the emergency center, they had two or three TVs set up there so we could watch it. My reaction was stunned disbelief. We heard all kinds of rumors after that, from planes headed to the White House, which was true, to planes circling the Capitol building here in Lansing, which turned out not to be true. The first instinct was to call my kids and make sure they were safe. I have two sons on the East Coast, neither was in New York, but they both do business there quite a lot. The second instinct is do what you’ve been trained to do as an executive, focusing, going over checklists and sorting out what to communicate and how. You set aside the personal shock and anger and say, ‘Okay, what is our responsibility and what do we know and what can we communicate? Are we being thorough?’ So there was a couple of minutes of shock, and then we just had to shift and accept that it’s happened and that we’ve got a role to play, and go out and do it, so that. …
"My hope is that our response will be multi-national, in order to minimize the unforseen consequences. That means keeping the European, Arabic and Asian communities with us. That then isolates the terrorists and treats for what they are – extremists -- and allows for military retribution and allows for sanctions that can isolate them and starve them rather than bomb them out of existence. To me, that’s the best case scenario. What’s happens, I don’t know. That depends on the skill and leadership of our national administration. Whatever we do will have implications locally, which at this point, we can’t even fathom. We hope we can recommendations that are sound and have public support. We need to disagree and debate these things, but when it’s all said and done we need to be united. I hope we don’t sacrifice our civil liberties as we respond to this. Having Americans turn on Americans is one of the worst things we can anticipate, so having a debate and disagreeing on how to go about it is American as apple pie."

Dan Eckman, Lansing teacher: "I was at home, although I didn’t know about it until I got to work. We first heard about what happened on radio, and then watched it on our TV later. After a while, we went back to continue the day as best we could. I gave my students an assignment to write about the tragedy, and not just what happened but how they felt about it, what we should do about it, that sort of thing."
"I had one student who just moved here from Brooklyn. Her uncle was missing for a while, but he was able to evacuate. But her aunt had a heart attack when she heard about it. She lived right across from the towers and saw them go down. She also had three infant cousins in daycare in the South tower (that) are missing as well. Her sister was in the subway and her leg was crushed, and she was moved to Sparrow because they were operating in the hallways in New York.

Mike Rogers, congressman: "I was in my office, preparing for my testimony before the Budget Committee on Social Security. I was notified by someone in my office when the first tower was struck, and like the rest of America saw the second plane hit. Right away, my old FBI training kicked in and I said, ‘That is no accident.’ It was shortly after that when the Pentagon situation started to unfold. I could see the smoke from the Pentagon from my office. We were evacuated immediately, as we were notified that there was likely inbound aircraft headed for the Capitol. Leadership members were taken to certain locations, and other members were rushed to other places. We went about what we were supposed to do, with a little bit of chaos because obviously that’s never happened for real there. The president was in constant communication and the leaders of Congress were in communication, so we were never without representative government in the U.S. We did the things we knew we had to do, which is begin to start setting out the language under the War Powers Act to give the president what he needed.
In the evening we decided to have a press conference on the Capitol steps. They told us at the time that they couldn’t guarantee the safety of the Capitol building that evening and we said we’re not going to let these guys chase us out of the U.S. Capitol. So we had a short press conference with the speaker of the House and the minority leader, Dick Gephardt,, and when it was finished you just got the sense that no one wanted to leave. Somebody right behind me started singing ‘God Bless America’ in a low tone, and by the third word all of the Congress who were up there were singing ‘God Bless America’ to no one in particular, but as it turned out it was to America. There wasn’t a dry eye on the steps and you’d look down to the press, and there wasn’t a dry eye among them either. It was inspiring after a day where something you just couldn’t fathom happening in the United States happening."

McMurray Jefferson, retired Olds worker, Gospel singer and choir director:
I was in my building in the community room when told me about the bombing. That is when I went upstairs to my apartment to turn on TV. and all the channels were about the bombing in New York. This did not come to me as a surprise because of the condition in this country. I’m am 74 years old, and this is the worst thing I have seen Pearl Harbor This has torn the American people’s heart but it has also brought us together for a little while. The president has called for the nation to pray for the family involved in the bombing. For once we came together as a people, as people who loved the Lord, and as a nation. It didn’t matter if you knew the families or not, it didn’t matter what color of skin, all that it matter is that somebody love one had die. Is this what Dr. Martin Luther King meant when he said, ‘I have a dream that one day my children will not be judged by the color of their skin’?
When you take God out of your life, out of the government, you open the door for Satan to come in. The government took pray out of school, and now the government asks for the whole nation to pray. God will bring you back one way or another.

Bill Druliner, Lansing: "Compared to how the way things used to be, I’ve wondered how this will affect everything. I’m 22, and our generation hasn’t really had anything to define us. We as a generation don’t seem to really stand for anything. This has really made me think a lot and realize that there are things that are more important than the daily routine."

Matt Ferguson, news producer, WKAR: "Eventually I became immersed in dealing with all of the different aspects of our coverage and kind of withdrew out of what was really happening. As your dealing with it, there’s TVs on all over the newsroom and the radio going, and it’s hitting you but you can’t stop to take it all in. It was a weird situation, and I when my day was finally all over, I just went home and just completely fell to pieces. I just bottled it all up all day. Compared to some of the people who were actually there and covering it, my problems seem like nothing at all. Obviously that was the worst day, but it was a pattern for the rest of the week. Bad stuff is happening all around, and you can’t really react to it until you go home and just fall apart."

Tim Barron, radio personality, WMMQ-FM:
"We stayed on the air for a while, giving out the information when it came to us, right up until after the second plane. When that hit, we went to the national feed, and then we heard about the Pentagon, and that was it, we didn’t cut in anymore. On Wednesday, I opened the show with ‘Ladies and gentlemen of America, welcome to the rest of the world.’ Things have been blowing up in other countries for many, many years, and we’ve never had to deal with it. In a way, we in America are becoming world citizens by this. The average Joe Six-Pack American can no longer be an ignorant American. How much have we learned in the past week about Afghanistan and Islam? The average American is going to learn more about the world, and the net result of this, as horrible as it was, is that we are all going to be better citizens and better citizens of the world, I really believe that. That can be a positive thing that came out of this."
"Have you taken some calls from people on this?"
Barron: "Oh yeah, hundreds of calls. We get everything from ‘Shoot everybody in the head’ to ‘Round everyone up and send them back to their country.’ That kind of stuff is more widespread than you’d think."
"Anybody against retaliating?"
Barron: "One person. That’s not a real popular response right now. I’m sure others are thinking it, but no one is saying it."


Tom Brandt, buyer, art supply store:
"Like most people, I was at work. A lot of people were saying it was on TV, but I really wasn’t interested in seeing it. I knew immediately that it was going to be one of those images that we see over and over again, like the Shuttle explosion. I didn’t see it until I got home, and from what people told me I had a pretty good image of what it would look like."
"I am all for the flag, and all for this country. I can see many reasons why people would want to fly a flag, because in many ways this is a wonderful place. I am not trying to say that people shouldn’t be proud to be a part of this country. But I am more afraid of what happens when the majority acts, the fear that a lot of people have of the tyranny of the majority. For example, the Christian religion is often associated with the principles that America was founded on, because many of the founders were Christian. To a lot of us of a different faith, the principles represent a freedom from a specific religion. That’s not that huge of a leap. For most Americans, I think the idea of America is a place for religious freedom. And yet, specifically when something like this happens, so many times we see the faith of the majority being brought out and associated with the country itself. That’s a frightening association, and I’ve seen quite a bit of it, though more with our national leaders all lining up in front of the cameras to say their prayers because they’re probably afraid not to. You don’t want to be left out of that photo op."

Jose and Manuela Castilla of Lansing: Manuela:"I was babysitting in Mason, and we had the news on when I saw it."
Jose:"I was at home watching the news, and all of the sudden they cut off and went to what was happening. I was really surprised. I couldn’t believe that happened here in the States. Usually things like that happen in Europe and anywhere else, but I never thought it would happen here. Thank God we didn’t know anybody there, nobody we knew was hurt in New York. But it really affects our lives because war is a bad thing that you don’t want to see. We have nephews in the Air Force and the Marines, and we know that they’re going to go there. One is in San Diego, some are in Germany, and we’re pretty sure they’ll be called into action. War is a terrible thing, but the reason why we are here (at Oldsmobile Park) is because we have to back our government 100 percent because once we go in, there is no turning back until everything is over."