9 11 Flashback The Toronto Sun newsroom knew what it had to do, Lorrie Goldstein recalls

The Toronto Sun ^ | Sept. 10 2021 | Lorrie Goldstein

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Of all the news events I’ve experienced in my life, I remember precisely where I was for two.

The first was the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, when I was 11 years old in Grade 6 at Cedarvale Public School and they sent all of us home.

The second was the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 — at the moment the second plane hit New York’s World Trade Center and the entire world realized, in that second, that this was a terrorist attack, not a terrible accident.

I was heading into work, listening on my car radio, driving south on Mount Pleasant Rd., south of St. Clair Ave., just entering the dip where it heads down into the valley, when word of the second plane crash came.

I almost drove off the road because I immediately started thinking about what I’d be doing at the Sun when I got to work, instead of paying attention to where I was going.

I remember in the days after 9/11 my friends who aren’t in journalism asking with genuine concern how I was holding up, expressing sympathy that Sept. 11, “must have been very hard for you.”

I was embarrassed to tell them the truth — that it wasn’t.

That the one advantage of being in the media and working at the Toronto Sun on 9/11 was that I and my colleagues knew exactly what we had to do. We had to tell our readers the story.

My immediate responsibility was to write the editorial for the special edition of the newspaper we put out that afternoon, handing it out for free on the streets of Toronto in the great traditions of public service journalism.

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The wraparound front page of the special edition of the Toronto Sun. The San Francisco Examiner also had this headline.