By Michael Miner
At midday on Monday, September 11, storm systems from the north and northwest wrapped themselves around Chicago, paralyzing O’Hare and disrupting air operations across the country. Six thousand stranded passengers spent the night at O’Hare because they had no way to get where they were going. They were victims of what the Federal Aviation Administration might describe as a perfect storm–though if you weren’t flying you’ll remember it, if you remember it at all, as just a good hard rain.
Since the paper’s well-laid plans had been predicated on a normal day, the staff perfunctorily cursed the weather. “We were not hoping for a catastrophic storm like we got,” says Gratteau. Schmeltzer says, “It was awful. It destroyed what we were trying to do.” What it destroyed, of course, was a worthy account of small-bore exasperations, which was replaced with an epic tale of human misery–a deal journalists will take any day of the week. Gratteau says that the morning of September 11, chief of photography Bill Parker glanced at a radar screen mounted in the newsroom and noted the storm systems approaching Chicago. “He looked at me and smiled and said, ‘Did you spend yesterday in church?’”
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Moghadam was traveling from Portland, Oregon, with her baby son and two-year-old daughter Macey to see her mother in Buffalo. She’d arrived at O’Hare on the red-eye Monday expecting to change planes and be gone, but she and her kids didn’t get out until Tuesday at three in the afternoon. While she waited at O’Hare her husband flew from Portland to London, attended a six-hour meeting, got a night’s sleep, and had breakfast the next morning.
United gave her taxi money and a food voucher. The only restaurant still open was a McDonald’s she and her kids had eaten at twice already, and which, she observed, “was trying to close, but the people were rioting.” So she and her two kids headed out to the taxi stand. “It was like a Disneyland line around the corner, and it was pouring rain and thundering. And my daughter was screaming, and my son was crying he wanted to be fed.”
The pictures Trafelet took of the Moghadams at O’Hare and in the air, and of Moghadam bursting into tears on seeing her mother in Buffalo filled almost the entire back page of “The Longest Day.”
