Julie Lythcott-Haims has been married to their husband since 1992. A previous version had incorrect information.
The Post asked the seven members of Palo Alto City Council to recall what happened to them on 9/11.
Mayor Vicki Veenker was woken up by a call from her secretary. They worked in Palo Alto at a law firm that was based in Manhattan, where Veenker started her career and the Twin Towers were a fixture of daily life.
“I remember not knowing how to feel, how to think, what to do. Do I send my daughter to school? Do I go to work?” Veenker said.
Veenker said she hired the group of employees, and she felt responsible for their wellbeing. So she went to the office, and employees filtered in. They didn’t know where their 650 New York City coworkers were, so they awaited news all day as people were located one by one.
“It was an amazing thing, because just as there were a lot of horrific stories, there were also stories of bravery and heroism and kindness,” she said.
For example, Veenker said an elderly senior partner lived in Brooklyn, and the only way for him to get home was walking. So people walked with him for miles, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge.
Veenker said she realized no work was getting done that day, but she and her employees didn’t leave because they wanted to be together.
Vice Mayor Greer Stone was on his way to middle school when his mom told him that something terrible had happened — two planes hit the Twin Towers, and a lot of people had died.
Stone said he didn’t know what the Twin Towers were nor quite understand the impact beyond the fear in his mom’s eyes.
“I had rarely seen my mom in a state like that, so I knew it was something really bad,” he said.
Stone’s mom taught at Ohlone Elementary School, and she said goodbye as he rode his bike to Greene Middle School. But as Stone was about halfway there, his mom pulled up in her car and told him that she was taking him out of school because she wanted to be near him.
Stone spent the day in his mom’s classroom, and then he saw the footage that afternoon at a friend’s house. He recognized the Twin Towers from movies.
“That’s when it really started to set in about what this was and what this meant,” Stone said.
Stone said he looked up at the sky after learning that all air traffic had been grounded, and he thought this would probably be the only time he wouldn’t see any airplanes above.
“I remember having that moment of self awareness of how momentous that all was,” Stone said.
Stone is now a teacher himself, and he said he does a lesson and tells his students about his story every anniversary.
“It was a day for people to reflect on what really matters and what was important,” Stone said.
Councilman Pat Burt and his wife were at home in Palo Alto getting their two kids ready for elementary and preschool when something prompted them to turn on the TV.
“I can still visualize being in the kitchen and our kids not really understanding what was going on,” he said.
Burt chose not to explain to his children, aged 7 and 4, the extent and severity of the attack.
“What we really wanted to do was insulate them from the immediate trauma,” he said.
But he knew they would hear something about it, perhaps from peers at school, so he and his wife attempted to explain in an age-appropriate way.
“It’s not something that a 4 or 7 year old can readily comprehend,” he said.
Councilman George Lu said the entire day is cast in an odd yet memorable haze. He said he watched the news during breakfast, which his family never did, and then felt something was different as he walked to school and waited outside his third grade classroom.
“At that age I couldn’t fully understand what was happening. But I think the sense of fear and uneasiness was something you pick up as an 8-year-old,” Lu said.
Lu said he remembers his teacher being incredibly silent, possibly fighting back tears and trying to answer some questions. He watched looping replays of the towers burning and collapsing on an old TV. School was dismissed early that day. Lu said he doesn’t remember specific conversations with adults about what happened, or what he did after school.
Lu said he caught himself up on 9/11 in middle school by reading Wikipedia and was overwhelmed with sadness.
He said the day made him acutely aware of what it means to be an American and that people may be trying to attack the country. The day teed up a long tail of events from the War on Terror onwards that profoundly changed how he thinks about the United States and politics.
Councilman Ed Lauing descended the stairs of his Palo Alto home to see his wife, an early riser, pointing at the television.
“What is that?” he remembers asking her as she stood speechless. At first Lauing thought the screen showed a preview for a bad movie. Then came a crushing feeling when Lauing realized he was witnessing the deadliest attack on American soil since the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor.
“It was so horrific,” he said.
The rest of his day was “basically just dysfunctional,” said Lauing, who was 53 at the time of the attack and worked from home as an executive recruiter.
Like many Americans, Lauing remained glued to the television. He hoped to see people saved. He hoped the damage was not as bad as it looked. On both accounts, reality crushed any optimism he retained. The bad news precipitated: two planes crashed into the Twin Towers. A third plane crashed into the Pentagon.
“We didn’t know if the next thing was the Transamerica tower in San Francisco,” he said.
Councilmember Julie Lythcott-Haims pulled their six-week-old baby girl out of a bassinet and held her close in bed after hearing about the attacks.
“For my own comfort as much as for hers,” said Lythcott-Haims, who uses the pronouns “they” and “them.”
It was Lythcott-Haims’ first instinct after receiving a phone call from their sister in Massachusetts, with news of the attack. “What kind of world have I brought this child into?” Lythcott-Haims remembers thinking.
The couple’s 2-year-old son had never watched TV, but Lythcott-Haims and their husband plunked the boy down in front of a screen and loaded up a VCR player with kid-friendly tapes.
Lythcott-Haims focused on regulating their own emotions so their children would not notice something was amiss. Their focus: “What is happening, and how do I protect my babies from it?”
A close friend of Lythcott-Haims from high school worked in the World Trade Center. Lythcott-Haims reached out to the friend and his wife to no avail, until finally Lythcott-Haims learned he was safe.
Councilman Keith Reckdahl was up at 4 a.m. the day of the 9/11 attacks, tending to his 6-month-old while his wife caught up on sleep. After his toddler woke up, he focused on keeping the little ones fed and happy, then clicked on the TV in time to see the first tower come down. By the time the second fell, his wife had woken up to see it.
It was like something out of a movie, he said.
“You don’t think it’s really happening,” he said.
An engineer at Loral, a satellite company, Reckdahl spent the rest of the day in and out of meetings — work did not slow down despite the catastrophe. Every time a meeting ended, Reckdahl got updates from his coworkers before ducking into another one.
“In some ways it was kind of nice because you had a meeting that kind of distracted you from what was going on,” he said.
With planes grounded, engineers who had flown up from Southern California found themselves stuck. Many drove south to be closer to their families. Security lines at airports grew so long that when flights resumed, employees still opted to drive.
Reckdahl said he caught one of the first flights to Santa Barbara following the attacks. “Everybody was very nervous,” he said. Upon touchdown in Santa Barbara, the cabin erupted with applause.
Compiled by Post staff Braden Cartwright and Natanya Friedheim.
Be the first to comment