All this week on WCCO, we're looking back at 9/11: 20 Years Later in a series honoring one of the most tragic days in American history.
At the time of September 11th, 2001, Norm Coleman was Mayor of St. Paul, Minnesota. Coleman, who was a native New Yorker, would go on to be elected Senator for Minnesota, and dealing with much of the fallout of those terrorist attacks on 9/11.
Coleman grew up in Brooklyn, came to Minnesota after graduating from law school to work with the attorney general’s office, and then succeeded to the office of Mayor in 1994. It was during his second term in Minnesota's Capitol city that the world changed forever on 9/11/01.
Coleman spoke to News Talk 830 WCCO’s Chad Hartman about his memories of 9/11 both as mayor, and later how his term as Senator from Minnesota played out in the aftermath.
“Reflecting on one of the great tragic days of our history, I was actually on my way to DC,” Coleman told Hartman. “I was in-flight. I may have been flying to DC and I was sitting right in coach at the end of the first row, right behind first class. And I remember the flight attendant coming up to me and she was ashen-faced, and there was something distraught. She just whispers to me, ‘mayor something terrible has happened and we're under attack.
I don't know what, but we're being diverted to Detroit. Something terrible has happened.’ And so we get diverted to Detroit. We’re on our way from Minneapolis-St. Paul to St. to DC.”
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Coleman and the rest of the flight, like thousands of others across the U.S., were immediately grounded. In Detroit, Coleman suddenly sees what the flight attendant had been telling him.
“When we land and walk out of the plane, there on the screens are pictures of planes flying into the tower and it was surreal,” Coleman explains. “It's the enormity of it, the kind of horrific-ness, if that's a word.”
Coleman also remembered that this was an important political day in Minnesota which was suddenly forgotten about following the attacks in New York and Washington.
“This was an Election Day, it was Primary Day in St. Paul,” says Coleman. “So one of the decisions that I had to make was, do we keep the primary going? I’m calling into my staff and I’m trying to get back to Minnesota. We ended up getting a car and I drove back. Dave Durenberger was on the flight, former Senator, and we drove back together with a couple of other folks that were just Minnesotans trying to get back home.”
Coleman says that at that point, they made the decision to continue with the Primaries in St. Paul.
“The decision that was made was we're gonna keep the polls open,” the former mayor said. “The last thing we're going to do is let terrorists somehow shut down our Democracy. It's horrific and we're all trying to process, but we will keep the polls open. We're not going to let a terrorist attack shut down an American Election. The primary went on and whatever the results, I don't even recall. Tt was not a great significance, but it was one of those things that you say, do we move forward? The rest then becomes history, but a surreal moment.”
Coleman told WCCO he hopes that these stories of 9/11 and what transpired that day help teach younger generations about the tragedies of that day and keep that history alive.
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“I hope by what you're doing, that young people who weren't there, who didn't experience that, kind of have a sense now, and understand how horrific that was and what an assault it was on lives lost,” says Coleman.
The former mayor and senator from Minnesota also talked about his family in Brooklyn who experienced the horrors of 9/11 up close.
“I grew up in Brooklyn and I still have relatives there,” Coleman said. “And they told me that there was litter coming from the sky, like soot coming down. And this is miles away from Ground Zero. Miles away on the other side of Brooklyn. The soot that was coming down were pieces of fragments of paper from from Cantor Fitzgerald, which was a brokerage firm, I think like on the 105th floor, somewhere just above where the planes struck. One of the planes struck, and I think all 700 of their employees obviously perished. But my relatives, my cousin was talking to me about the sky. It was gray with soot and what was dropping were remnants from the tower."
"The enormity is hard to fully express. It certainly has had a profound impact on America's future.”
Coleman was elected to the U.S. Senate in Minnesota and served from 2003-2009.
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