CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – I wish I could take you on a tour of the old WICC studios in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The radio station had just moved into a newly built office building.
Our General Manager Vince Cremona toured the new building and picked the uppermost floor. It was a wonderful choice. The top floor, the penthouse, was fancier than the floors below. It was the only floor of the building that had floor-to-ceiling windows that wrapped around and created a small skylight with the ceiling above. Anyone who would be assigned a “window” office would have a spectacular view.
WICC’s main studio also had the floor-to-ceiling treatment with a skylight. It looked out onto Long Island Sound; a studio with a water view. On a clear day you could look to the southwest and see the New York City skyline in the distance. We also loved the newsbooth with its big windows. We could look down and see the interchange between I-95 and Highways 8 and 12, which was an important part of our traffic reports.
In the end, picking the penthouse as office space turned out to be a poor choice. The calking on the skylight windows began to fail, and soon rainwater would leak into the offices and onto our broadcast equipment.
But while it lasted, our studios with the view of Long Island Sound was spectacular, except on September 11th. I wasn’t supposed to work that day. I was guest-hosting the morning news on WICC because our News Director, Tim Quinn, was the moderator of a business roundtable with Governor John Rowland. The governor was quickly rushed off-stage when his security detail got word of the terror attacks in New York City.
Initially, our point of reference for the story was wrong. The Associated Pressnews alert said “A plane has crashed into the World Trade Center.” Many people who live near New York City remember an incident in 1945 when a small plane crashed into the Empire State Building. It caused some damage; 14 people were killed. It did not bring down the building.
Several minutes had passed until it was determined that this situation was different. This was a large plane. We didn’t deduce that this was an intentional act of terrorism until the second plane crashed into the World Trade Center 16 minutes later.
Almost everyone who worked at WICC knew someone who knew someone who died. Tim Quinn’s niece, a corporate lawyer, was at the World Trade Center that day visiting a client. My mother’s best friend has a son who lost his wife that day. She was a receptionist at one of the offices at ground zero. A friend of mine, a broadcast engineer for ABC radio, lost one of his assistants who was on the roof of the Twins Towers for a routine equipment check.
But what I remember most about that day was being in the penthouse studios of WICC and looking across Long Island Sound… and seeing the smoke. Otherwise it was a perfectly clear day.
Chris Conley
Comments