The following is a commentary I wrote two years ago about the day I spent at the Wellington Daily News office on Sept. 11, 2001.

Commentary from 2011 by Tracy McCue, Sumner Newscow — Granted you all are probably tiring of yet another rehash of 9/11 — that terrible day 10 years ago.

But we do all have a story to tell. Here’s mine.

On that morning I was a news editor for the Wellington Daily News working beside Linda Stinnett, Brady Walker, and a slew of hard working Wellington people putting out the news of the day. The paper – still a five days a week publication – had just been bought out by corporate and our printing press had just been disassembled and our paper was printed in El Dorado. Our deadline was at 9:30 a.m.

For some reason, the front page was done that morning which was a miracle in itself. Making deadlines was not a WDN strength and corporate was not too shy in telling us about this fault and how it needed to be rectified quickly. 

We were featuring a story on a military type exercise that was being conducted in Sumner County, I can’t remember the specifics. It was our usual day of mayhem. It was football season and the Wellington paper had just finished celebrating its 100th anniversary the week before.

I was quite pleased with my deadline making that morning.

We were still on the Associated Press wire service and it made this ring every time a big story came in. Like the WDN, AP hadn’t quite gotten the hang of this nifty little tool called the Internet. The bell rang just as I was about to print the front page. Linda looked over the piece of paper AP was churning out and she told me a plane had just hit the twin towers.

My first reaction? Whatever. We decided to print more pages. New York was not Wellington. Nobody here cares.

It was about 15 minutes later, and we were about to hit the road to El Dorado, when we heard the AP bell ring again. Linda looked at it again and said, there was a second plane hitting the twin towers. I looked at her, gave her the middle finger and went back to doing what I was doing. Linda always liked to joke and push my buttons.

“No, I’m serious,” she said. About that time managing editor Terry Craig ran into the building with a newly purchased television from the nearby downtown Radio Shack. That was unusual, because for the last couple of years we had been pleading with Craig to get a TV for this office. Suddenly we had one.

“We’ve got to redo the front page,” Craig said and proceeded upstairs.

Now the A.P. wire was going nuts and suddenly I was in a panic. This was big. But we needed to send the paper out. Do we wait or do we go?

With each A.P. ring, there was more news that seemed incredibly surreal. The next story had something about a plane hitting the Pentagon. Another came a bit later that said a plane was down in Pennsylvania. My first urge was to just leave and watch what the hell was happening on Terry’s newly purchased television.

The dilemma now wasn’t whether to redo the front page, but when to do it. The news was changing by the second. Yet, even in this chaos, we still had a deadline.

Linda and I finally decided we would run the next A.P. story coming off the wire and move all local content down to the bottom of the fold. Had I known then that we had free access to photos, we’d have thrown out the local content completely. I wrote the biggest headline of my career with the one word, “Attack!” The story contained bits and pieces of the 9/11 attack. The towers hadn’t fallen yet.

We sent our paper up around 10:30, an hour late. I knew I was going to be in trouble. I was wrong. All of our sister papers were late as well. This wasn’t a normal day.

Then the A.P. wire, which had been going nuts all morning, suddenly went silent. A.P. was stationed in New York City. Noise is a by-product of the newspaper business. Ironically, silence is the loudest sound of all.

At that moment, it hit me. This was, perhaps, the news story of my lifetime.

I’d like to say I was scared and heartbroken and mad and all those emotions that you are supposed to have.

But truthfully, I’m a journalist. Big stories get your heart pumping. I couldn’t wait to see what would happen next and how the town of Wellington was going to react.

The rest of the day was interesting. I remember doing an interview with local financial expert J.P. Buellesfeld and how he was already accurately forecasting what was going to happen to the economy thereafter.

The panic didn’t really set in Wellington until later in the day when suddenly people were rushing to the local gas stations to fill up their cars and auxiliary gas cans over fear that the town itself was under a nuclear attack. I’ll never forget how long the line to Speedy’s gas station was: going clear back to Penny’s Diner. I have one picture of an old man with 10 5-gallon gas cans he was filling and putting in the trunk of his car. His facial expression was that of: “The Nazis were coming and he needed to get out, now!”

Like everyone around me, I didn’t know what to expect next over the coming weeks. Corporate sent us a memo that we could break deadline if another attack was coming. But only because of that!

To this day, I wonder if I’ll ever witness such an event that affected so many lives in so many ways.

I sincerely hope not. But if I have to, I hope I’m still in journalism.