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Ex-New Yorker shares 9/11 memories for DAR event
Like virtually everyone, former New York lawyer Brian Gilmartin recalls dawn’s early light the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 as ”an absolutely spectacular day.”
“Not unlike today,” Gilmartin, who now resides at Cloverdale, added Saturday morning as guest speaker for the Washburn Chapter, Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) 20th anniversary remembrance of the attacks of Sept. 11.
Gilmartin was living in New York at the time, at Washingtonville in Orange County, the same area as the famed Orange County Choppers motorcycle builders. “He was a client,” Gilmartin said of volatile father figure Paul Teutul Sr.
For perspective, Gilmartin was living 12 miles west of the Hudson River and about 63 miles from Midtown Manhattan in what he called “simply an idyllic place.”
Addressing a group of about 25 people Saturday morning at Greencastle’s Robe-Ann Park, Gilmartin said he’d had a late meeting the night before, so when his wife left for her job as a middle school counselor the morning of 9/11, he was still at home.
He recalled that it was a gorgeous morning, belying what was about to become perhaps the worst day in American history.
“There was a touch of fall in the air with a crispness to it,” Gilmartin said, adding that there was not a cloud in the azure blue sky that many people recall as being the bluest of blue skies usually reserved for late fall.
Gilmartin settled into his law office about 8:30 a.m. and it wasn’t long before a secretary told him she’d heard on the radio that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center.
Like many others he presumed the incident to be an accident.
“It had to be a small plane,” he recalled thinking, adding, “it’s sad something like that has to happen.”
But by the time Gilmartin had finished his appointment, the radio was crackling with news that a second plane had hit the north tower.
“When I first heard that, it didn’t compute,” Gilmartin said while sharing his story with DAR members and guests. “I couldn’t wrap my brain around it.”
Neither could most of America.
When he heard the news of the second tower, Gilmartin admitted he was incensed.
“Once a Marine, always a Marine,” he said, explaining his immediate reaction. “I kicked the wall. I have a steel plate in the toe for the rest of my life from that.”
Gilmartin tried to put New Yorkers’ love and respect for the Twin Towers in perspective for the group Saturday morning.
“The way that folks in Indianapolis feel about Monument Circle,” he suggested, “that’s how it was with the World Trade Center. It was the center of things in New York.”
The horrific situation produced an eerie silence, the retired lawyer noted.
“The phones in our office never rang the entire day after that,” he said. ”It was total silence. Everyone was too stunned.”
“A sense of reverence” took over by the time the second tower was struck, Gilmartin said.
Twenty years later, it is still difficult to digest.
“We live in the greatest country in the world. The greatest county ever,” he said. “Sure, we have our differences, now probably more than at any time since the Civil War.
“But the United States is nothing without our people. As in ‘We, the people ...’”
Gilmartin stopped there, not needing to expand upon that point as he looked around to see solemn faces and nodding heads on the lawn just outside the park bandshell
“My takeaway from this story is that we are not about what happens to us but how we handle it,” noted Brittany Brumfield before leading the group in singing the Lee Greenwood classic, “God Bless the USA.”
The program concluded with the planting of an October Glory Maple tree near the DAR Cabin at the Bloomington Street entrance to Robe-Ann Park.
