It was sunny, and warm 23C late summer morning. My first year being away from home in Fredericton NB at St. Thomas University at 9:46am I would have been waiting by the door for the class before mine to end. By 10:03am, I was sitting by the door listening to my second morning Introduction to Microeconomics with Dr. Andrew Secord in the first floor class room in Edmund Casey Hall. We really were completely oblivious to the outside world, almost no one had cell phones and the computer labs were in the opposites side of campus. Let’s face it the opposites side of campus is a 1 minute walk across the quad.
At 10:37am and 11:03am I would have still been in this class unaware of the world being changed forever. The class let out at 11:20am and prior to going to the cafeteria for lunch I returned to my dorm room on the 2nd floor of Harrington Hall. The room next to mine had two aspiring musicians and movie fanatics, one from Newfoundland the other a foreign student from Maine USA. On their television in the dimly lit room laid the Pentagon in exploded smoke as the plane had struck the building some time prior. I asked them what movie it was and they then told me what had happened, and that this was not a movie it was live TV. As we were taking it was 11:28am and the 2nd tower had fallen.
One does not go to university for a degree in Journalism without a keen interest in the news, so I powered on my computer, since I had a TV tuner card to view cable. I tuned in to ABC and just watched, I remember skipping dinner that day and just watching for survivors to be found, one after the other. When Peter Mansbridge took over the desk at CBC I switched to CBC Newsworld. One of the early questions was the Premier of NB safe since he was in Manhattan on that morning.