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V4 2001 INDEX       E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 4, Number 38, September 16, 2001, Article 2 SEPTEMBER 11 A firsthand account of Tuesday's tragic events was posted to the internet (and copied to the Colonial Coins mailing list) as the day unfolded by E-Sylum subscriber Eric Cheung. Some excerpts: "I haven't yet gone off to Stanford yet but I will be doing just that in a week and a half. I live down around City Hall in Manhattan and it's a pretty commercial area; at this time in the morning there's normally quite some commotion down here particularly since everyone is trying to get to work. I just heard a rumble that was about twenty seconds long. ... A couple minutes later, my mom came into my room and told me a plane just crashed into the World Trade Center. In utter disbelief, I kicked out of my bedsheets and looked out the window and saw lots of people running around in the streets heading up Broadway away from the explosion. I also checked out the living room and saw CNN extensively covering this disaster. About eight or ten minutes later, ... I heard a huge explosion as the legs of my bed and the floor of my 9th floor apartment shook. The first world trade center collapsed down to the bottom... I walked not ten feet from my neighbor's apartment when I heard an even louder rumble. My neighbors summoned me to return to the apartment, and in the last second as I dashed to the window, I saw the final section of World Trade Center 2 tumble straight down into the ground. My neighbors and mother were hysterical. Moments later the debris and ash of the aftermath rose into the blazingly sunny sky. I returned to my apartment about 10:28, the hallways in my building filling with smoke. I continued down the hallway where there are windows every ten feet or so, four or five in all down about a hundred feet corridor. There was white dust atop every roof I could see, and it looked like a snowstorm had just hit us, or radioactive waste from a nuclear explosion had just rained down upon us. After a while, the two look the same, and are both frightening and frustrating in equal magnitude." Eric's full journal may be found at this address: http://www.livejournal.com/~chopin The journal entries appear in reverse chronological order. To follow events as they progressed, first scroll down to the [11 Sep 2001|11:02am] entry. Be warned that portions are disturbing, though not graphic. Electricity and phone service to their apartment was lost later in the day, and his family split up to stay with friends elsewhere in the city. Eric walked 20 minutes to a friend's place. As of Friday the 14th there was still no word of when his family would be able to return home. Eric recently won the ANA's Outstanding Young Numismatist of the Year Award. We wish him and his family all the best, as he heads off to Stanford amid this tragic backdrop.

Wayne Homren, Editor

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