A marred vacation: City attorney spends Sept. 11 near New York

Through the prism of history, the image that for years has adorned Eric Cunningham's computer screen at work is quite eerie.

It's a video capture of his wife, Janet, and one of their two daughters, their hair billowing in the wind as they gaze across New York Harbor toward the city from the southern tip of Manhattan Island.

Dominating the picture is the Twin Towers.

The scene itself isn't eerie, but the date and time that are forever stamped at the bottom of the screen beg for attention.

Time: 6:21 p.m.

Date: Sept. 9, 2001.

Cunningham, Cape Girardeau's longtime city attorney, and his family were visiting friends on Long Island during the late summer of 2001. So when they learned that terrorists had attacked the World Trade Center less than 36 hours after the video was taken, they were floored.

"My first thought was 'We were just there,'" Cunningham said recently from his office at City Hall.

On Sept. 9, they had spent the day in New York City, attending a religious service at Times Square Church, where the church leaders had canceled meetings and other events because they felt "something big was about to happen," he said.

After some sightseeing, they drove to Battery Park and shot video of the city, which just happened to include the ill-fated Twin Towers.

His family was still with friends the morning of Sept. 11 on Long Island, about 30 miles from the terrorist attacks. Like their neighbors back in Cape Girardeau, they watched the horror unfold on television and prayed for their friends' son, who was taking culinary classes in the city a few blocks from the World Trade Center.

There were a few tense hours until the son was able to contact his parents by phone in the afternoon.

"It wasn't what we had in mind for a vacation," Cunningham said. "But we'll never forget it. My mind is often drawn right back to that moment and how close we were. There were people who were closer and people who had friends in danger, but it was strange because we were from Missouri. We weren't New Yorkers," he said.

His colleagues back at city hall in Cape Girardeau were dealing with a whole other set of problems.

Al Spradling III, who was mayor at the time, got into his car on that bright Sept. 11 morning thinking it would be just another day at the office.

Perspective clients, maybe. But nothing out of the ordinary -- and then he turned on his radio.

As Spradling drove to his law office on Broadway, there were bizarre reports of a plane that had hit one of the World Trade Center towers in New York. There were few other details.

He arrived at his office, turned on his television and saw that a tragedy of historic proportions was unfolding.

A second plane had hit the World Trade Center. The towers were falling. People were dying. It became clear very quickly that this was an intentional attack on the United States.

"We had no idea, not really," Spradling recalled. "Everybody was just sitting there, glued to their TV, watching what was going on. I don't think any of us understood, not totally."

But Spradling was not just a resident. He was Cape Girardeau's mayor, a year away from finishing his second term. He soon received a call from city hall. He was told that planes were being ordered from the sky and had an hour to do it.

The Cape Girardeau Regional Airport was one that was being looked at for landings as flights made their way to metropolitan airports in St. Louis or Memphis. He heard from department heads about the safety of the public buildings, safeguards in place to protect the water supply and additional security at the airport.

"It was just a surreal circumstance," Spradling said. "I didn't realize how vulnerable everybody and everything is. We had to become more diligent. We had to pay attention to people and places. We knew that life as we knew it was going to change."

Sept. 11, 2001, found Doug Leslie as the man in charge. Normally the city's public works director, on this day he was acting city manager because the man who held the job, Michael Miller, was at an out-of-town meeting.

Leslie remembers a flurry of activity surrounding city hall that day.

"It's one of those things you don't forget very quickly," said Leslie, who was later appointed city manager before retiring in 2009.

The city convened a staff meeting immediately, Leslie said. He admits in hindsight it may sound silly, but they had no idea how widespread the attacks were going to be and it was their job to consider the possibility that Cape Girardeau may be a target.

"Up until the afternoon, there were concerns about missing airliners and concerns that it was going to be much wider spread," Leslie said. "There were a lot of unknowns."

City staff studied parts of the city that were vulnerable to attack and looked at security plans for public buildings, Leslie said. They looked at the water supply and evaluated sabotage.

"There were just an array of things that all came to mind that everybody else in the country was thinking at the same time," Leslie said. "We worked through all those. Not to mention the sense of grief that everybody was feeling. It was an emotional time as well."

Not to mention they were worried about one of their own. Cunningham was still in New York.

"A part of it was trying to figure out where were all of our critical people," Leslie said. "It's hard to believe it's been 10 years. It's something we're not going to forget."

smoyers@semissourian.com

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