By Hannah Webb | News Editor
The sky was blue.
So were the ribbons tied around cars; so was the train that Meredith Sutton was supposed to take beneath the World Trade Center.
Twenty-five years later, those shades of blue remain scattered through memories of Sept. 11, 2001 — a clear sky over New York, a crowded Baylor campus watching TV, a country searching for something familiar in the middle of something it could not understand.
Stan Denman remembers the sky most clearly.
The former chair of Baylor’s theater department and current professor had come to work that morning when the scene shop foreman asked if he had seen the television. Denman walked into the faculty lounge and watched the first tower after it had been hit.
“I remember the sky being so blue,” Denman said. “In the same way that it was in the videos that we were seeing.”
It was an ordinary detail on a day that was nothing but ordinary.
Across Baylor’s campus, students were still going to class; professors were still teaching; friends were still eating breakfast.
Then, one by one, televisions turned on.
Adam and Cathleen Pittman, then dating, were Baylor students that morning. Adam first heard the news while driving to Cathleen’s apartment. The radio cut into the morning broadcast to report that a plane had hit the World Trade Center.
When he arrived, they turned on the television and watched the second plane hit. Then they watched the towers collapse.
Afterward, like thousands of other college students across the country, they went to class.
“I don’t even remember what class it was,” Cathleen said. “We were just numb and everybody was just sitting there and not paying attention.”
Adam’s professor, normally known as relatively no-nonsense, was visibly shaken. He covered what students needed to know for their homework and dismissed them about an hour early.
Across campus, students made their way to the Bill Daniel Student Union Building.
The SUB, Cathleen remembered, was full. Televisions were on throughout the building while students sat in silence, watching the same images repeat on the screen.
“You could have heard a pin drop in the room,” she said. “Everybody was just watching the TV, trying to figure out what was going on.”
The silence carried another question: Was Baylor safe?
President George W. Bush had only recently taken office, and his ranch was nearby. The Pittmans said Secret Service agents worked out at the Student Life Center when Bush was at the ranch, and TSTC was the closest airport capable of accommodating Air Force One in the area.
Students knew enough to wonder.
The Sept. 12, 2001 edition of The Baylor Lariat reflected the uncertainty. “AMERICA UNDER ATTACK,” the front-page headline read. Other headlines captured the campus response: “Students join in prayer across campus,” “Despite tragedy, classes continue for Baylor students,” “Local airports grounded,” “Tragedy touches university” and “No local threat apparent.”
The threat may not have been local, but the fear was.
For the Pittmans, the days that followed brought a gradual return to campus life. Fraternities and sororities held Red Cross fundraisers. Student organizations sold T-shirts with proceeds going to relief efforts. American flags appeared throughout Waco.
The flags became small signs of a much larger feeling — patriotism, grief and a desire to belong to something bigger than themselves.
For Sutton, current dance teacher and choreographer for the Department of Theatre Arts, 9/11 was not something she watched from thousands of miles away. She was in New York.
Three months pregnant with her first son, Sutton was working in marketing at Moody’s Investor Service at 99 Church Street, catty-corner from the World Trade Center. Her normal commute would have taken her on the blue subway line — the A, C or E — beneath the towers.
That morning, she was running late.
She initially boarded the E train, the one that got off under the World Trade Center. Then an A train arrived. She switched at the last second.
That small, almost meaningless decision meant she got off one stop before the towers.
“I wonder how God uses little non-decisions in our lives to direct or keep us safe,” Sutton said.
When she emerged from the subway, the second plane had just hit.
“I remember walking up out of the subway, and I lost my balance,” Sutton said. “What I didn’t realize until the next day … that was the shaking from the plane hitting.”
Afterward, she looked up at the chaos to see the fireball erupt on the second tower.
People stood in the street trying to understand what they had seen. Then the realization spread to Sutton: “This was no accident.”
Sutton eventually walked roughly 13 miles north through New York, trying to get out of the city. Along the way, she saw something that would remain with her just as vividly as the destruction — people helped.
“One of the beautiful things about that day was the humanity that I saw,” Sutton said.
Corner stores put out water and paper towels. Bars pulled televisions outside. Restaurants provided food. People with boats ferried strangers across the water.
“Everyone that had a boat was out there giving people rides across,” she said. “I mean, there were people with those tiny little dinghy motorboats, saying ‘I can take two, let’s go.’”
Back in Waco, Baylor students were experiencing their own version of that collective response.
The campus that had begun the morning with classes and breakfast had become a place of prayer, television screens and questions.
But slowly, life began again.
For Denman, Broadway reopening became one of the signs that life could return. The theater department’s heartbeat was in NYC, and the arts, Denman said, offered something people needed after days of watching destruction.
“It’s not all war and devastation,” he said.
But some things never returned to the way they were.
Airports, security and politics changed — the country changed. So did the people who watched it happen.
Twenty-five years later, the details remain: a blue sky, a silent student center, a class dismissed early, red and blue ribbons tied around cars, American flags appearing across Waco and a blue train that could have taken Sutton beneath the World Trade Center but didn’t.
For those who remember Sept. 11, those details are pieces of a life divided into before and after.
For those like Baylor’s primary student body who were born after it, they are pieces of what campus looked like when an ordinary Tuesday suddenly stopped being ordinary.
