Oklahoma City…and beyond

By my late twenties, already a million miler on American Airlines, I had my share of scary flights…like the DC-10s violent climb that jolted me and 250 others out of a gentle steady hum/cross country cruise (to avoid another aircraft). The co-pilot on a Delta flight in Milan who died of a heart attack before take off.  But nothing prepared me for the violent lurching rollercoaster ride in the chartered Gulfstream that was taking me and a dozen colleagues to Oklahoma City to join Dan Rather and what would be—at that time- the biggest story of our lives:  The Murrah Building bombing in April 1995.

A violent thunderstorm and a parade of tornados encircled Oklahoma City that night. The rain was a nuisance for rescue workers and those trapped in the rubble….and our baby faced pilots. They looked 18 and felt they HAD to get there. I knew this because I knew everything. I read minds.  The kid pilots were starstruck and felt pressure to land in Oklahoma City. I (assumed) knew this!  And I was gonna do something about it. I was going to save our plane. I was going to do what I often did with taxi drivers, waiters, and even baristas who prepare iced coffee (“Hot coffee with ice is NOT iced coffee…its hot coffee and ice..it needs to be chilled first.”) My quest was to tell them what to do and how to do it. How to land our plane safely! That they didn’t have to land in Oklahoma City with their precious cargo but that Tulsa would be fine and we’d walk the rest of the way.

The plane lunged, plunged, climbed and dove repeatedly.  The cockpit door swung wide open and we could see the kids struggling and bright red lights and alarms on their console.  I unfastened my seat belt ready to crawl up the aisle to save our plane—and our lives.  My much calmer friend and colleague Mary Noonan sputtered in the frenetic air:  “what are you doing?, where are you going?” She was extraordinarily pale at this very moment….making goo goo eyes…an incredulous look at me for being crazy..like I was going to fly the plane or something. “I just want to tell them that we can go land somewhere else” because they kept trying to land at OKC airport and after two attempts I had had enough.  She looked at me like I was crazy and I was. I still am.

Just then as I was about to make a fool of myself and crawl to the front of the plane…it all stopped. An incredible warming, mellowing patch of clear sky enveloped us: no more turbulence.

Our legs wobbling like jelly sticks, we deplaned to a long line of limos, rental cars and any means of transportation as Oklahoma City, drenched that night like a film noir day for night movie set from the 1930s, was under siege. The central American city became home to the very first satellite city, swamped by hundreds of journalists from around the world who rented apartments..(one guy even bought a car because he couldn’t find a rental car.) to stay a long time.  Many of us spent sleepless days, weeks, even years attached to that story.

On the anniversary of the bombing a year later I was sent to find a story that hadn’t been done before to fight of “story fatigue” which now happens faster and more than ever.

I profiled the ladies in the Credit Union who were the social center of the building and sadly survivors at the epicenter of grief. 18 of these women perished of the thirty that worked there.  Just imagine that happening in your workplace or school or home or apartment building.

I found my passion and it was often at the heart of big stories like this. How incredibly I have been blessed with having a front row seat to the biggest stories…ever.   I became the “hurricanes eye” of every story I produced, my mentor Gavin Boyle said at my going away party three years after Oklahoma City.  “You need to let go…don’t fall in love with your elements,” said the patron Saint of my career, Mary Murphy. My other patron Saint St. Judith (Tygard) of Orlando will get her own chapter/blog entry a bit later on.

I often didn’t let go. In fact I still haven’t let go of Oklahoma City. When my mother died in 2003, my father and brother drove across country and I made them stop and have lunch with the ladies who survived.  I call three of them every year.

I didn’t really pay attention to my own needs nor my own personal emotional pain which festered. It was visible in my food addiction and tremendous ( literally ) weight gain. That anxiety and pain would explode years later .

In the meantime, I became attached and invested in every story I worked on.  OKC was a prelude to 9/11 and my emotional commitment to come then.  And a story that would move me like no other- a story I would share with Oprah Winfrey and millions of others– the story of a boy, a poet, a peacemaker: a boy named Mattie.