Trio of 60-Somethings Recall 9/11, Other Tragedies

This week, Woburn Patch remembers the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 with a series of stories.

Betsy Dora was home, watching the news on TV, as she usually does in the morning. She heard a report that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. Then another plane hit.

“I was in shock,” she said. “I said, ‘We’re going to be at war.’”

She called her sons. They hadn’t heard the news yet. The oldest, who spent nine years in the service, five in the Army and four in the National Guard, echoed his mother.  “We’ll be at war again,” she recalled him saying.

Woburn Patch spent some time at the last week, talking with people there about their memories of Sept. 11, 2001. Some remember other incidents that also rocked their worlds.

Dora was ready to graduate high school, she said, when President John F. Kennedy was shot, in 1963, on Nov. 22, a Friday, in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas.

“I was old enough to know what was going on,” she said.

She remembers calling her sister from a pay phone at the shopping center in north Woburn, where she was food shopping for her mother after school, to ask if what she’d heard was true. People looked at her, she said, “like I was crazy.”

She also remembers the shooting of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King in 1968, on April 4, on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tenn.

And she remembers the Challenger disaster, in 1986, on Jan. 28, when the space shuttle broke up just over a minute after liftoff. All seven astronauts on board died. She learned about that from her children. They were in school then, she recalled, watching the launch, because teacher Christa McAuliffe from New Hampshire was one of the crew. When the shuttle exploded, teachers turned the TV’s off right away, she said.

From her mother, Dora learned about World War II. Her mother worked, Dora said, before she was born, at the Watertown Arsenal, making guns.

Two months after 9/11, Dora took her first plane flight, to accompany a friend who hated to fly.

She hasn’t flown since, although she said she would.

Barbara Doherty, who works at the senior center, described what unfolded on Sept. 11, 2001, as “surreal.” She, too, had been watching a morning program on television, Good Morning America. She went to work. People barely talked about what had happened, she said, and she got busy.

When she got home and saw all the pictures, “then it struck you,” she said, ”the thousands that were dead.”

Five years later, Doherty and a group of friends went to New York City and visited the Trade Center site.  Feelings were still very raw, she said. “It was difficult. We all wept a little.”  Especially when they read letters left there and saw pictures of the victims. She knew, she said, none of her loved ones was on one of the planes that crashed that day.

Like Dora, Doherty flew shortly after 9/11 – one week after. Flying doesn't bother her, she said.

Also like Dora, Doherty remembers where she was when President Kennedy was shot. She was teaching, for the first time, a fifth grade class in Billerica. The news “shot through the whole school,” she said, “in two to three minutes.” 

Doherty pointed to another tragedy, in Lockerbie, Scotland, where, in 1988, on Dec. 21, a Pan Am flight exploded, set off by a bomb, killing all 259 passengers and 20 residents on the ground.

“That affected so many families,” she said.

Like Dora and Doherty, Vincent Simeone was also watching TV on Sept. 11, 2001. He didn’t know anyone on the planes, he said. Simeone remembered some of the details of the Kennedy assassination:  how the president and his wife were riding in an open car when Kennedy was shot.

Simeone, who is 90, also remembers another national tragedy.  He was a young man when bombs were dropped on American ships at Pearl Harbor, on Dec. 7, 1941.  He remembers hearing about it when it happened, but “I wasn’t there,” he said.