September 11 was to be another day in the continuing progress of the precious-to-me PeeWee Reese–Jackie Robinson statue.

The project to erect a statue honoring the great Dodgers, Reese and Robinson, stemmed from a suggestion I had made when I spoke at a memorial to Reese in Brooklyn shortly after he died two years ago. I suggested commemorating the great moment before a game when Robinson, the first black man in baseball, was being vilified by Cincinnati players and fans, and Reese, a southerner, walked over to Robinson and put his arm around him, quelling the vitriol. Reese is remembered for this as much as his career as an outstanding shortstop and Dodger leader. It says so on his Hall of Fame plaque at Cooperstown.

The statue idea took hold with the help of the urging of columnist Jack Newfield and became part of Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s project to renovate Coney Island. Money has been raised and sculptors were selected to compete for the assignment of creating the statue that will stand outside the new Steeplechase Park minor league stadium in Brooklyn. This led to the Sept. 11 early morning meeting at City Hall where judges were getting their first look at the five maquettes (small versions of statues) submitted by sculptors.

City Hall is six blocks from the World Trade Center, After some 25 people had been looking at the maquettes, Tamra Lhota, the woman spearheading the selection process, suddenly stopped the proceedings and haltingly relayed a report about a plane hitting the World Trade Center. She was so moved about it that we didn’t quite understand what she was saying and asked her to repeat herself. At that point about 9 a.m. we heard, and the building shook from a loud boom. That, we soon enough found out, was the sound of the second plane smashing into the other World Trade Center tower.

Mrs. Jackie Robinson, who had just arrived at the meeting said, "I heard an earlier boom when the car bringing me here was going under the trestle at the World Trade Center."

We were told to remain at City Hall because it is one of the most secure buildings in the city; security entrances screen arrivals. We moved into an office and watched the re-runs of the plane crashes on a small television set. After awhile my wife and I went out to the front steps of City Hall and saw the smoke gushing from the towers six blocks away and watched people, some in a panic, rushing north past City Hall away from the World Trade Center.

I could not help but recall a time some 29 years earlier when I was a sports reporter for Newsday covering the 1972 Olympics in Munich. In the early morning of Sept. 4, 1972, when Arab terrorists invaded the athletes’ village and took hostages at the Israeli compound, I was asleep in one of the large apartment complexes lodging the press. It was only a few hundred yards from the Israeli compound. I was told about the terrorists while walking down for breakfast. I headed to press headquarters where we were informed that some Israelis had been killed and nine were being held hostage.

I had chatted with some Israeli athletes and officials on a visit to the athletes village two days earlier. I wondered if one of them was one of the wrestlers who were among the hostages. I spent the rest of the day shuttling between press headquarters and a gate outside the compound interviewing bystanders and athletes coming out of the village. At press headquarters I watched like the rest of the world, the hooded terrorist on the Israeli compound balcony peeking out at the world.

It all ended, of course, with the botched rescue attempt at an airport outside of Munich and the death of eleven Israelis and some of the terrorists. A few of the terrorists were captured, soon given their freedom in exchange for German hostages. The Israeli hit squad then hunted down and murdered all but one of them. He is living in Africa and recently gave inside details of the Olympic hostage operation in a documentary released two years ago.

On Tuesday, after waiting at City Hall for almost an hour, my wife and I made our way over to a subway two blocks west on Chambers Street. On the way we walked among crowds at corners looking up at the twin towers. On the north tower we saw a ribbon of fire several yards across and a huge hole high up in the building. We never dreamed those towers would collapse. We rode one of the last subway trains uptown, and when Penn Station was shut down, spent the next hour in the garment center offices of a friend on West 34th Street. We were stunned to hear on a radio report the collapse of the buildings.

On that subway ride uptown from lower Manhattan strangers talked to each other, relating where they had been, what they had seen. In the street people listened to radios from newsstands and parked trucks. There was a oneness among people not unlike what we heard about Londoners during World War II bombing.

At the end of Awful Tuesday I was struck by an odd thought. At the time of the first plane hitting a tower and then when we heard the huge boom of the second plane crash into a tower, I was talking to one of the people who would help select the winning entry for the Reese-Robinson statue: he was Ralph Branca, the man who had thrown the pitch that Bobby Thomson hit for a home run in the 1951 playoffs that has since been known as "The Shot Heard ‘Round the World."