The Musical Innertube Extra - September 11th, Mike Hingson and Roselle

DON

Well, hi everyone, and welcome again to the Musical Innertube. I'm Don Rooney. To mark the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, we're going to present to you once again the conversation we had with Mike Hingson. Mike is an old friend who survived the plane crash into Tower One that day. Mike has been blind since birth. He made the trek down 78 flights of stairs with his guide dog, Roselle, his co-worker David Frank, and thousands of other office workers after the first plane put a hole in the building a few stories above his office. To mark this anniversary, we've lifted out the section where Mike talks with John Timpane about his experience on September 11th of 2001. It all begins in 1999, when Mike moved to New York to begin a new job with a tech company.

MIKE

Well, in 1999 I was recruited by Quantum Corporation in their magnetic tape drive division, that's the division that sold products to companies like Wall Street firms that would connect to their networks and backup all of their data. And so, we had the de facto standards for that. And again, Quantum was told if you really want to have a real presence here, you have to have an office. So, I was hired to open an office, and I went looking around and I had all these delusions of grandeur about we ought to do it in the World Trade Center and all that. But I figured it was going to be expensive, and so I didn't go there first, I just looked around a bit. Eventually I said OK, I’ve got to go check it out. So, I went to the World Trade Center and talked to this guy who made a serious mistake in talking to me, because he said, we only have about 80% occupancy because of the bombing that took place in 1993. So, we're really trying to get people. Bottom line is by the time we finished negotiating, we got 1400 square feet of office space on the 78th floor of the World Trade Center at $2.00 a square foot.

JOHN

OK, now Michael, that is amazing.

MIKE

You can't get a house for that!

JOHN

You can't. You really can't. At my house, I won't let you live here for that. In fact, I wouldn't let you live here anyway. Well, yes, I would, but...

MIKE

I've lived in New Jersey.

JOHN

It's just south of New York City, actually.

MIKE

We lived in Westfield, and we loved it.

JOHN

Let's talk about the morning of September 11th, 2001, and you went to work with your Guide Dog.

MIKE

So, we opened the office in August of 2000. And it was a fully functional facility ...alliteration...with staff that sold products, presales engineers, sales support engineers, lots of products to demo for people and so on. And we were up and running, and in fact we had a lot of reseller partners, and we also had what are called distributors. So, distributors, the company that we worked with, they would buy our products, and they would resell them to little companies that couldn't necessarily establish credit accounts with bigger companies like Quantum, and it's not convenient for Quantum to have hundreds or thousands of little reseller accounts when you could just sell the one distributor and let them do it. And they actually established the accounts with all the little companies. So anyway, this one, this one distributor, Ingram Micro, wanted to have sales training for all of its reseller partners and our partners in the New York City area. So, we set that up to do on, yep, September 11th, 2001. So I went to work with my guide dog, Roselle. And we were in our office. Some early arrivals had come from Ingram Micro and a colleague from our corporate office, David Frank, was with me. He had come in that morning from California, where his office was. He was part of corporate. So, the ATL corporate offices were in Irvine, actually, on the UCI campus.

JOHN

That's so ironic.

MIKE

Yeah, I know, isn't it? So, we were there. So, David and I were in my office creating a list of the people who would be coming that day because there were two ways you could get into an office in the World Trade Center complex. Way one, you went to the desk, you showed your ID, they called up and they said, “Can John Timpane come up and visit? Of course, we had a standing order that he could.

JOHN

Thank you, Michael.

MIKE

But you could go and say, “I'm John Timpane, and here's my ID.” And they would call up. And we'd say, sure, send him up. Or we could create a list of the people who we expected, which especially worked with large meetings, and we had 50 people who were coming to different seminars in the course of the day. So, David and I were creating the list. The list was done, I was reaching for stationary to print the list because it had to go in on corporate stationary and then we would fax it down, when we heard a muffled explosion, the building kind of shuddered, and then it literally began to tip in one direction, kind of going southeast, toward Tower 2. David and I kind of wondered what was going on. We had early arrivals, as I said, who were in our conference room, and they were having some breakfast that we had sent up to them and for all the other people who would be coming. David asked if it was an earthquake and I said no, I don't think so, because it's moving in one direction, and I said it sounded like a little bit of an explosion, but it wasn't a very loud explosion. Well, of course it wasn't a loud explosion because what happened was the airplane hit the building 18 floors above us on the other side of the building. So, there's a lot of insulation between us and where the plane hit. But tall buildings like that are flexible, right? And so they're made to tip and be buffeted around in wind storms. And because one aircraft hit the Empire State Building in the 1940s, a military aircraft in a fog bank, they knew the value of having fair, flexible buildings. Picture it like a big spring, right? You fasten the spring to a table to hold the bottom of it and then push the top of the spring. That's exactly what happened to Tower One.

JOHN

Did you personally feel the impact? Did it go through the floor?

MIKE

Oh yeah, you could feel it shudder, you could feel it, and then we could feel the building tip. And in fact, we tipped so far, I say about 20 feet altogether, that David and I said goodbye to each other because we thought we were about to take a 78-floor plunge to the street. .

JOHN

Oh, God. So, you had had a moment of terror even then.

MIKE

Oh yeah, but then the building stopped, and it started moving back to the other way. And I kind of remember letting out my breath, because I didn’t even know I was holding it, right? But it went back to being vertical. And I went back into the office from I was, I was standing in the doorway to our outer office. Really, a lot of good that would do if the building collapsed. But you know, I grew up in Palmdale, and earthquake country, building moves, go to door. Roselle, my guide dog, was asleep under the desk. But as I went back in, she came out. I took her leash. I told her to come around and heel, which meant to come around me and sit on my left side, which she did. About the time she sat down, the building dropped straight down about 6 feet. That's because the expansion joints were going back to their normal configuration.

JOHN

Oh, yes, right. Because to stretch they the joints pay out a little bit. You know, ladies and gentlemen, I just want to say, you can see why Michael Hingson was able to earn a Masters in physics. He's extraordinarily good at explaining things like this, And this reminds me more of you than anything else. You know, just, you know, extraordinary talented that being able to explain these things. Continue.

MIKE

Well, one of the things that I also need to say is, being blind, and being the leader of that office, I felt it was my obligation to know anything and everything I could about the World Trade Center and where things were and so on. So, I literally spent a lot of time early in our tenure at the Center learning where different places were, learning where the restaurants were, ,even not going with a guide dog using a cane to travel around and learning where all the kiosks were in the middle of the floor that the dog would just go around, and learning all the emergency evacuation procedures from the Port Authority people and so on, because I knew that if there were ever an emergency, the bottom line is sighted people, no offense, but sighted people don't pay attention to that. They figured we could look at the science and it'll tell us where to go. Well, that works and doesn't. So, it was important for me to know, if there was smoke and people couldn't see signs, I was there. But the bottom line is, that also created for me a mindset of, if there's an emergency, this is what you do and literally every day I went into the complex, I kind of had a thought flash in front of me, if there’s an emergency today, what will you do? Do you know everything that you need to know? Sometimes I discovered things I didn't know, and I would go find them out. So that literally on September 11th, the mindset kicked in, and after the building dropped about 6 feet, David looked out the window when he started shouting, “Oh my God Mike, there's fire smoke above us. We gotta get out of here right now. There are millions of pieces of burning paper falling outside our windows!”  And you could hear debris falling outside the window and I was wondering what it was, now I knew, millions of pieces of burning paper, according to David. And he kept saying, “We gotta get out of here!” And I kept saying, David, slow down, we'll get out. But no, we don't need to panic. “No, we gotta get out of here right now! The buildings on fire! I can see the fire and smoke and we gotta get out of here!” And I kept saying, slow down, our guests began to scream, and they were moving toward the exit. And then they heard me tell David, slow down. And eventually David used the big line. “You don't understand! You can't see it!” The problem wasn't what I didn't see and understand, the problem was what David didn't see and didn't understand. Sitting next to me was a guide dog who was wagging her tail and yawning and going, what woke me up? Now, John, you were on a newspaper staff long enough, and Don, I'm sure you have too. You've read stories about animals that sense danger and save their humans before the humans detected buildings on fire and all that. Then, Roselle was afraid of Thunder, so I knew what she was like when she was fearful. She wasn't indicating any fear, which was another signal to me that whatever was going on wasn't so imminent for us that we couldn't try to evacuate in an orderly manner of some sort. Could have changed in a moment. But you got to go by the data that you have. And that was a piece of data that I had that David didn't. I finally got David to focus and said, get our guests to the stairs. So, he took them to the stairs, and while he was gone, I called my wife Karen at home and said there had been an explosion or something at the complex and we were going to be evacuating. So, it's right now, about 8:47 - I think I still have the phone bill because I saw that time later when the phone bill came in to the company - but I told her, and I love to say this because it's really true, I scooped Good Morning, America, getting to her 8 minutes before they got an idea that there was a problem at the World Trade Center. Nobody gives me a Pulitzer for that. So disappointed but..

DON

You get a round of applause!

MIKE

But, seriously, you know, like, I told her. And so, of course, she then was watching TV, and at least it prepared her some when people started calling her with “was Mike there?” and all that. So, David came back, we swept the office, we went to the stairs, and we started down. And almost immediately I began smelling an odor. And it took me about four floors to realize that it was something I smelled whenever I went to airports, and I did a lot of travel for the company, it was the fumes from burning jet fuel. And so, I realized -

JOHN

You smelled that when you were in the stairwell?

MIKE

Oh, yeah! Because the aircraft, when it hit the building, crashed through the center and literally blew a hole through the whole building, which was why David was seeing fire and smoke and millions of pieces of burning paper above him, right?

JOHN

Right.

MIKE

So, I smelled that, and when I observed and realized what it was, I mentioned it to other people, David and others who were around us, because we were all wondering what it was. I said it's the fumes from burning jet fuel, and they went, oh, yeah, we couldn't figure it out. That's what it is. So, we assumed we were hit by an airplane. We had no idea as to why. Now the press, the lovely press that we have, every time I've had interviews since, reporters say, or often they say, “Well, of course, you didn't know what happened because you couldn't see what occurred.” I said wait a minute, the last time I checked, Superman was fictitious and there is no such thing as X-ray vision. The airplane hit 18 floors above us on the other side of the building. I got to tell you, nobody where I was saw what happened, right? And I said, look, the bottom line is, I figured out that an airplane hit us before other people did on the stairs where we were.

We had burn victims pass us going down. You probably heard about a woman who was right in front of an elevator when a cloud of vapor, fuel vapor ignited and it burned her. And I think she was one of the ones who passed us. But we had burn victims pass us, and then a woman near us on the steps, stairs, stopped and said I can't go on, and literally we surrounded her and had a group hug and just said come on, you can do it. Roselle was giving her kisses, and we were able to keep her going down the stairs.

JOHN

Was that a psychological moment for her, or a physical moment, that she just couldn't continue going down the stairs.

MIKE

Oh, it's more psychological.

JOHN

And so, to paint the picture, I mean, you are now physically going down the stairs step by step one hand on the railing, one hand holding Roselli's leash.

MIKE

Well, part of the time I used the harness. If I was over on the right side, the rail was on the left. There wasn't a hand rail on the right hand side, but it so if I could I use the harness to let Roselle work. But if it was too crowded or whatever, then I would hold on to the rail. I'd move to the left side, hold the rail, and just hold the leash.

JOHN

 Were all people generally orderly as far as you could tell?

MIKE

Yeah! There were a couple of times that people started to lose it a bit, like at the 50th floor. David did. He suddenly said, “Mike, we're going to die. We're not going to make it out of here.” And of course, you know, as I said earlier, I took the courses and got a secondary teaching credential, and there's a secret course that they have for budding teachers that they don't tell you about, as the class is titled “Yelling at Students 101.”  So - not really a true class - but as soon as David said that, I just said in the sharpest voice as I could, “Stop it, David! If Roselle and I can go down the stairs, so can you!” And he told me later that that brought him out of his funk.

DON

It's really,  too bad you didn't have a ruler to crack him on the knuckles with as well.

MIKE

Well, I was holding Roselle’s harness, so I couldn't get to my ruler. So, I said that, and David then told me, you know, OK, I'm OK now. And what he wanted to do was something that would take his mind off of all of it. He said I'm going to walk a floor below you. And start shouting up to you everything that I see on the stairs. And I will tell you that I think that's one of the most incredible events that I experienced that day. So why? Well, we're going down the stairs and I'm on like the 49th floor now and he's at 48. He's going, “Mike, I'm at the 48th floor. Everything is good here going on down.” I'm up on the 49th floor, “Good girl, Roselle. Keep going forward!” And really encouraging her and speaking to let her know I was OK, because if I started to sound nervous, she's gonna be looking at me and not focusing as well as she should. So, it was important for me to be calm and focus on her. That's the team effort that we both make, and made then, that helped each other. But then I get to 48, David's 47th floor, “All good here.” So why do I think what David did was so great? Because, in reality, he became a focal point for anyone who could hear him above him or below him. They would hear him, “Mike, 46th floor. All is good here.” And they knew somewhere on the stairs there was somebody who was sounding OK. And I know that he kept thousands of people calm just by doing what he did. Which I think was really cool and it's one of the most incredible experiences I had that day. It took me a while to figure out why I thought that was so important. ‘Cause, did I need him to tell me what was going on? No! It wouldn't make a difference to me, but it helped him. But more importantly, it really did help so many other people on the stairs, who heard him, above him, below him, people who couldn't see him. But they all knew somewhere, there's somebody who's doing OK.

DON

Now, like how many people were on the stairs with you, do you have an idea?

MIKE

Oh, I mean, they were all the way up and down the stairs. So, there were thousands. Like, right where we were, there with a knot of anywhere from 10 to 20 people, but they were all up and down the stairs. It was a constant stream of people.

JOHN

You know, that's a really good question Don asks, ‘cause I've often wondered - I mean, OK, so you kept calm and everything, but inside of you, I mean, you must have had all sorts of thoughts.

MIKE

Well, you know, I gotta tell you, I was just listening for any creaking groan that would tell us that the building was going to come down on us, and I knew it wouldn't make a difference, but I was listening. And, you know, I love science fiction. I watched the Twilight Zone and other shows, so I could imagine all sorts of horrible things that might be going on, but I also knew that I had to manage that. And I'm just going to jump for a quick second, that has led to a coaching program that we just started called “Blinded by Fear,” because a lot of people have fear issues. Something happens to them, and they don't know how to control their fear and they get so fearful that they can't make decisions, because the fear has completely overtaken them. So, I want to help people learn how to control those fears, and not to say, don't be afraid. I think fear is a very, very powerful and an invaluable thing to have. But you have to control it, so people can go to blindedbyfear.net and there's an ebook they can download, and we can schedule calls and talk about it.

JOHN

So, it's a coaching program and it's such a wonderful initiative and I want to just repeat that blindedbyfear.net  And that's for everyone.

MIKE

Well, it is, it's not blindness related. I I've been a public speaker for 19 years, so jumping ahead a little bit, afterward people started hearing about me because Guide Dogs for the Blind was one of the first places I called since I had a guide dog from there. And they put out a story and contacted some news media, which led to me being on Larry King Live five times, the first time of which was on the 14th of September, three days later. And so, the media got the story and people started contacting me, saying, would you come and talk to our group, or our company. or whatever. The first call I got was from a pastor who was going to conduct an ecumenical church service to honor the people that we lost on September 11th, and he was doing, I think, two weeks after September 11th. So, it would have been the 25th or the 26th. And I had not really been a public speaker, but I said OK, sure, I would be happy to come and tell the story a little bit. You see, you got like about 5 or 6 minutes and I kind of happened to ask, you know, do you expect very many people? And he says, yeah, we'll probably have about 6000. So, my first public speech was to 6000 people. And Lisa Beamer, whose husband Todd was on flight 93 - he was the guy who said, “Let's roll” - she was also there

DON

Roselle, helping you down, this is something else that - you've worked extensively with Guide Dogs for the Blind. And you've said that Roselle wasn't leading you -

MIKE

You a guide dog doesn't lead. The purpose of the dog is to make sure that we walk safely. The dog doesn't know where I want to go or how to get there. And in fact, I don't want the dog to know that. It was really a challenge working in the World Trade Center to try to find different ways to get from point A to point B so that Roselle would not, and Linnie, who also was my fourth guide dog, who worked before Roselle, would not get in the habit of going one way. Because what if I couldn't go that way in an emergency? So, I was very deliberate about finding various ways, even with just going a different direction around a central area to get back to the same place but doing it in such a way that the dog wouldn't know where I wanted to go. Because their job is to make sure that we walk safely and that's it. So, if we're crossing a street, on the other hand, and suddenly the dog stops and pulls back, my job is to assume there's a reason for that, like a quiet car coming that I didn't hear, which is usually the case. Now, I also point out that working with a guide dog is all about developing a team. And it is a true team relationship in every sense of the word, like SEAL teams and any close-knit team. If it turns out that the dog was distracted, and normally they're not because part of the reason they become Guide Dogs is they've demonstrated they can work without being distracted. But if a dog saw a duck and decided they want to go visit the duck, I guarantee you there'll be a team meeting and the team members will discuss the behavior of somebody who was not doing what they were supposed to do. But you know  it's called “intelligent disobedience.” The dog also has the authority, and I need to respect it, the authority to say that I gotta do this and I have the obligation of following the dog because the odds are incredibly high that whatever the dog is doing, it's doing for a very legitimate reason. It's called “intelligent disobedience.”

JOHN

Interesting was the dissent fairly, from the point of view of the guide dog and you, was it fairly smooth?

MIKE

It was. And, you know, we worked and several of us worked to keep it smooth. There was one point on the stairs where people would get real quiet and it was like about 15 floors after my discussion that I had with, about, David. And people were just getting real quiet. So I just said I can't let these people be so quiet. So I just said. “People you know, look. We're not going to be able to come back into this building for a while, but what we ought to do is, on our first day back, let's all meet on the 78th floor at 8:45 in the morning and walk down the stairs together. What a great way to lose weight, huh?” And then another one that I did, also same principle and same issues, it was getting quiet. I said, as loud as I could, “Now everybody, I want you to listen to me. My name is Mike. I happen to be blind. I've got my guide dog here.” And we had power and lighting and all that on the stairs, and I said, “If we lose power and lighting on the stairs, I don't want anyone to worry. Roselle and I are offering a half-price special to get you out today only.” And I did those kinds of things because I wanted people not to worry. You know, what are the flight attendants doing on airplanes when they're doing those preflight briefings? Well, if they're doing their jobs right, they're also really looking to see who's paying attention to those briefings. Because they've learned over the years that the people who really pay attention are probably the people who can help them if they need to get people to evacuate from an aircraft.

DON

Do we know how many people made it down with you? How many people made it out of the buildings?

MIKE

Well, we know that all the people who were with me made it out. Only about 10% of the people who didn't make it out were below where the planes hit. Most of the people who didn't make it out were trapped above where the planes hit. So, there were some stories of people who couldn't go down the stairs. There was a guy, a quadriplegic in a wheelchair, and there was somebody who was very obese and they just couldn't walk down. And they didn't make it out. And there were people who even stayed with them, things like that. But mostly everyone who didn't make it out were the people above where the planes hit.

DON

How long after you got out of the building before the thing came down?

MIKE

So, we got out at about 10:45? When did we start? We started at 8:45-8:50, we started down, at about 9:35 we got to the bottom of the stairs, about another 10 minutes to go through the whole complex. So, by 9:45, we were out. Tower Two collapsed at like 10:04, 10:05. And we were about 100 yards away. We knew there was fire in the tower, but we had no clue what was going on. No one told us. They just said leave the area. So, we went over to Broadway and started going north on Broadway. We were about Vessey St. - so, what, about 100 yards, airline ways, from Tower 2 when it collapsed. So then everybody ran, and we ran, and ended up in a subway station. Then a police officer came at about probably 10:15, 10:20 and told us that the air was clearer up above, and we needed to get out of there now. And so, we left and went back upstairs and continued to walk away. It was about what 10:30 or so, when Tower One collapsed. So, we were a little bit of ways away from it and so we didn't have the same issues that we did when we were so close to Tower Two collapsing.

JOHN

How did Roselle do once we you guys were outside and walking on the street?

MIKE

She did really well all day. And in fact, when we got home that night, the first thing I did is I took her harness off and she ran to find her favorite tug toy and our retired guide, Linney, so they could start playing together. I mean, Roselle didn't even want to go out. She was too busy playing. Eventually she went out. But yeah, was over for her because there was nothing that threatened her. But she was glad to be home and wanted to show it.

JOHN

I mean in the years since, you have used your story as a way to talk about, you know, the role of the blind in society and, you know, how you were able to function - and in some ways, function better than those who had sight.

MIKE

It wasn't the fact that I didn't see that perhaps helped me focus. It was the fact that I learned to establish a mindset that allowed me to use knowledge to be able to function rather than being afraid. It was something that evolved over time. So, in 2010, a woman named Susie Flory called me, who was writing a book on animals, and on dogs, and famous dog stories, and to include Roselle. But when we spoke, she said you ought to write your own book. And I said, I've been working toward it, but it's just not been coming together. And she offered to help. So, the two of us collaborated. We worked with our agent, Chip McGregor, who is up very famous literary agent, and he sold the contract. And we wrote Thunder Dog, The Story Of A Blind Man And His Guide Dog And The Triumph Of Trust At Ground Zero, that was published in 2011. It was in its first week out a New York Times bestseller. It's been a number one New York Times bestseller. And then two years later we wrote Running With Roselle, which is more for youth, telling the story of Roselle and me growing up.

JOHN

Thunder Dog is great. Great story, great books. I enjoyed reading.

MIKE

It is, it is still very much out there and Thunder Dog is available wherever you get books. It was published by Thomas Nelson Publishing which is now part of Harper Collins and Running With Roselle was self-published. It's on Amazon, and so people can go find one or both books. And being a poor, starving author, we encourage people to go buy the book. And Audible has it, all that sort of stuff too.