Tom Henry: Here's to the unsung heroes down the street from us

Sep. 11—She was there that day, witnessing the fireballs, the screaming, the wailing, the crying, the suffocating blanket of smoke, and — oh, God — the heartbreaking sight of people jumping to their deaths after being trapped on the upper floors of New York's World Trade Center.

But the first thing that former Maumee resident Beth Miller remembered from Sept. 11, 2001, was the thud.

An unmistakable thud, unlike anything she'd ever felt before.

She could feel it in her bones.

Even though Ms. Miller didn't know what had just happened to the World Trade Center's North Tower when she felt that thud at precisely 8:45 a.m., she sensed danger was imminent.

As a 31-year-old marketing communications associate for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter back then, Ms. Miller felt a responsibility for the lives of about 20 trainees who'd met her in her company's office on the 61st floor of the South Tower early that morning.

She began leading them down a stairway. The elevators weren't working.

As they got down to the 44th floor, they heard an announcement about a fire in the North Tower.

Return to your offices, they were told.

Ms. Miller didn't.

"We could smell smoke and did not heed that announcement," she told me back then.

A moment later, as Ms. Miller was passing the 29th or 30th floor with her trainees, she said they felt "two extremely violent shakes of the building, especially the staircase."

"I thought the floors above us were starting to come down," she told me. "People started screaming."

A second plane had struck the World Trade Center, this time bisecting the 110-story South Tower where Ms. Miller worked. She is convinced she and others with her would have been killed if she'd heeded instructions and gone back.

"We just picked up the pace and got out of there," Ms. Miller said.

I'm one of the few journalists left at The Blade who was around when the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, occurred 20 years ago. I remember the pride I had when this company made the highly unusual decision to publish an EXTRA print edition at noon with this banner headline emblazoned across the top: DAY OF HELL.

Our regular morning print edition, of course, had been delivered before the attacks.

We scrambled to tell stories that needed to be told. A thought that kept racing through my mind was how this must have been similar to what journalists across America experienced when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

I spent the first couple of hours on the University of Toledo campus getting live reactions from students, faculty, and staff.

Then, I raced back and helped with newsroom calls to public officials and others.

One of my many interviews was with then-U.S. Rep. Mike Oxley (R., Findlay), who told me what he saw as he was driving away from a Georgetown hotel where he'd just given a breakfast speech.

"I looked in my rear-view mirror and I could see the Pentagon on fire," Mr. Oxley said.

Many area residents had some sort of ties to the tragedies in New York, Washington, and rural Pennsylvania.

My editors put me on kind of a mini-beat focused on anecdotes for a few weeks.

For example:

—Jazz singer Aria Hendricks, daughter of Toledo jazz legend Jon Hendricks, told me she narrowly escaped debris that crashed through windows of a high-rise apartment her parents owned across from the World Trade Center. Ms. Hendricks, who was staying there at the time, said she jumped on a bed and pulled covers over herself for protection.

—Sylvania hairstylist Madonna Fong told me she just happened to be in New York for a convention when the attacks occurred. Her first instinct wasn't to run but to immerse herself in the crowd and offer any comfort she could to strangers in need — something for which I've long respected her.

Heck, I even interviewed a team of Toledo-area massage therapists that rubbed aching shoulders and backs of New York City firefighters as rescue efforts began. They told me how much of an honor it was for them, even if it resulted in only a few minutes of relief for those working the scene.

But few stories touched me as much as Ms. Miller's.

She acted on instinct.

That's life: You pick a direction, based on the best available information at the time, and you go with it.

Though I've never had the opportunity to meet Ms. Miller in person, I've looked at her old house in Maumee many times.

It's a mile down the street from my family's home — a small house across from Maumee United Methodist Church, where my wife and I once taught Sunday School for seven years.

It's a middle-class house, nothing fancy.

Ms. Miller and those with her survived that day. That's all that matters.

She's never sought glory or fame.

Ms. Miller quietly became one of the many forgotten, unsung heroes on one of the darkest days in America's history.

Her mother, Bev Miller, told me how relieved she was to hear her voice at noon that day.

Her father, the Rev. Melvin "Bud" Miller, thought she was dead.

"I just went hysterical," he said at the time. "I saw where that plane hit and knew if she hadn't gotten out there was no way she could have survived."

I still think of Ms. Miller when I pass her old house in Maumee on a near-daily basis.

I smile when I go by it, comforted by the thought that — in these cynical and restless times — there are unsung heroes who once lived down the street from many of us.