Your Iconic Image : Tower One. 78th Floor. Sept 11.

Michael (Mike) Hingson. I am president of The Michael Hingson Group, Inc. and the chief vision officer for accessiBe

Blind since birth, Michael Hingson was born to sighted parents who raised him with a can-do attitude. Always a high achiever, Michael learned how to ride a bike, and was able to do advanced math in his head! He received a Master’s Degree in Physics, and a Secondary Teaching Credential. 

Michael worked for high-tech companies in management until September 11, 2001 when he and his guide dog Roselle escaped from the 78th floor of Tower One in the WTC. Thrust into the international limelight, Michael began to share lessons of trust, courage, and teamwork based on this experience. 

Mike is the author of the #1 NY Times Bestseller “Thunder dog,” selling over 2.5 million copies, and his 2nd book “Running with Roselle, A story for Our Youth.” 

An international public speaker, Mike delivers inspiring and thought-provoking messages to the world’s elite, including President George W. Bush, and has appeared on hundreds of TV and Radio programs, including Larry King. Hired by major organizations, Michael speaks on perseverance, the importance of trust and teamwork, and moving from diversity to inclusion. 

www.michaelhingson.com

www.marlanasemenza.com

Audio : Ariza Music Productions

Transcription : Vision In Word

Marlana:

Blind since birth, Michael Hingson is a high achiever whose parents raised him with a can-do attitude. He worked for high-tech companies and management until September 11th, 2001, when he and his guide dog Roselle escaped from the 78th floor of Tower one of the World Trade Center thrust into the international limelight, Michael began to share lessons of trust, courage, and teamwork based on his experience. Welcome Michael.

Michael:

Thank you. Good to be here.

Marlana:

So, I know that the events of 9/11 were a little bit ago. However, I know that any one of us that is old enough to remember them, they will be forever etched in our memory. So, walk us through a little bit of what it was like from your perspective.

Michael:

It's really interesting the way you phrased that because one of the things that we have experienced for me is that, as you say, we all remember it. And over the past 10 years especially, I've realized that we now have a whole generation of children now going into young adults who have no personal knowledge of September 11th at all. So, I think that it is absolutely important that we remember it. We still remember Pearl Harbor and rightly so. Some of us remember when JFK was shot, and all the things around that. I think it's important that we remember September 11th because there were a lot of lessons to be taken from that. Again, actually since September 11th, people have asked me if I will come and talk about September 11th, my experience and the lessons that we should learn.

I hope that continues cuz I'm glad to travel and speak and be keynote speakers and all that stuff. So anyway, for me, it was a day of validation because as a person who happens to be blind, the typical response for me and for other blind people who try to get a job is, well, you're blind. How could you do this job? Or you're blind, how could you get to work? I could go to a job interview and clearly get there on my own. And somebody says, well how you gonna get to work? Well, I got here, didn't I? Right. And you said you were interested in my resume. My resume demonstrates that I constantly overachieved goals and so on. What's the issue? The problem is we haven't taught people that blindness isn't the problem. It's our attitudes about blindness. 

And the reason I say that is because in reality I was very fortunate in one way because what I was fortunate to be able to do is to get a job out of college and went from one job to another. At one point when I couldn't get a job, when a company was acquired by Xerox and phased all of us out, I had to start my own company just to get a job. Well, I did that and did that for four years and then went back into the workforce and I was able to get a job. And that's a story I'm gonna save for a little bit later. But the, the bottom line is I got a job and eventually that led me to being relocated to New Jersey and working in New York. And eventually that led to opening the office in the World Trade Center.

One of the things that I have always felt in my life is it's all about teamwork. People don't necessarily do things alone. Part of my team always is a guide dog. I've been using a guide dog since 1964. I'm currently on my eighth guide dog (Alamo.) And what I learned, and it took a while, even after September 11th to put it into real words, is it's a team. I am the team leader. It's up to me to give the dog commands. Well, how do you know when to turn? Why is that relevant? How do you know when to turn? You can see, but how do you know you read signs and other things? I have techniques and ways to do the same things that you do as a cited person. And a lot of those techniques are getting better because we now have G P s systems that talk or even using Google Maps, it talks and other kinds of things that give me the information that you get.

It's all about information. But in any case, I can move about from place to place. And working in the World Trade Center, one of the first things that I did was to decide as the team leader, the person who opened an office for a company, I needed to be able to do what anyone else would do to open that office. So I needed to know how to get around the World Trade Center. I didn't get the luxury of looking at signs and so on. So I did what I think everyone should do and most people don't. I learned the center, I learned the emergency evacuation procedures. I learned where the emergency exits were. I learned where a lot of offices were in the World Trade Center. Places that we might go visit, uh, that I might go to with one of my sales employees to sell products.

I learned how to do whatever a leader of an office had to do in order to function appropriately cuz how would it look if we had customers up visiting us and we decided we'd go to lunch, and then I said, well, I don't know how to get anywhere? Someone's gonna have to lead me around two hours later. We're back negotiating contracts. How is it gonna be for me? I'm behind the eight ball. It would be better if I could say, oh, you want to go to lunch? What kind of food do you want? Do you wanna say how much? Great, let's go to Finance Shapiro. It's a deli down in the lobby of the World Trade Center, I'll take you there. I needed to be able to do that stuff as well as anyone else. As I said, that also meant learning emergency evacuation procedures and so on.

And what I realized long after September 11th was by learning all of that, I developed a mindset that said, you know what to do. If there's ever a problem, it'll kick in. And every day I went to the World Trade Center, even before September 11th, I thought regularly about anything else I need to learn today. I met with fire prevention or fire authorities and police and so on so that I knew everything there was to know and so that they knew me. And the mindset kicked in on September 11th, we got to the office about seven 40. We were gonna be doing some sales meetings. When I got there, there was a guy outside with a food cart because we had ordered breakfast for the early arrivals best ham and cheese croissants in New York City. I will point out from the Port Authority cafeteria .

And we took him in and told him where to set things up. And then I went and got a laptop projector that we were gonna use cuz I was gonna do a PowerPoint show. Yes. Blind people can do PowerPoint presentations. You don't have to see to do that stuff. You use slightly different techniques, but you could still do it. And the bottom line is we were all set up. Some people arrived about eight o'clock, including David Frank, who was a colleague from my corporate office. He was there to represent the marketing and sales department that was responsible for pricing for distributors or well, and for resellers. And we were going to be training resellers that day how to sell our products. So, David was there to talk about the pricing. I was going to be their technical and their onsite liaison that is the liaison between the resellers and Quantum, a TL that I worked for.

So, David and some other people arrived and while most of them were having breakfast, David and I completed a final list of all the people who were coming to the seminars that day. Because the only ways to get into the World Trade Center was either you were authorized in advance on a list that was faxed to the Port Authority security desk downstairs, or they would call up every time someone came and said, so-and-so says they're here to come to your seminar. Do we let them up? So, it was important for me to not have to take lots of phone calls. So we created the list and literally at 8 45 in the morning, I was reaching for stationary when suddenly the building lurched. And we heard a kind of a muffled thud and that's all we heard. And then the building started to tip as I'm now tipping my hand toward the camera.

And the reason the building tip was the airplane hit the building. Tall buildings like that are springs. That 110-story building was a big spring. It was made to be able to be buffeted in the breeze or literally hit by an airplane. It was not made however, to be hit by an airplane intentionally. One that had 26,000 pounds of jet fuel on board that exploded on impact. And that's what really took the building down. But nevertheless, the building tipped. I went over and stood in the doorway. I grew up in Southern California and at that time we were living on the San Andreas fault in Southern California. And I learned early on building shakes and moves, ghost stand in doorway. It's a little different now for earthquake stuff. But anyway, I, went and stood in the doorway a lot of good that does your 78 floors up if the building collapses.

But hey, still what you learn, what you know is what you do David. And how would you have known at that point what really happened? Well, it wouldn't have mattered. The building was moving anyway. And there was nothing you could do other than go for me, stand in the doorway. David was holding onto my desk and my guide dog Roselle was asleep under the desk. And the building tip so far that David and I literally said goodbye to each other because we thought we were about to take a 78 floor plunge to the street. Then the building slowed down, it stopped and it started coming back the other way. And it finally became vertical again. As soon as it did, I went into the office, I met Roselle coming out from under the desk. I told Roselle to heal, which meant to come around on my left side and sit.

I mentioned that working with a guy dog is a team. Each of us has a job on the team. And the total job combination of the two of us is to make sure that we walk safely. It is not never should be and never will be the job of the dog to know where I want to go. That's my job. And I give the dog directions as to where I want to go. When we get to a turn, I have to know which way to go. Again, I learned that like you do using different techniques, but I learned to know the buildings. Everyone who was cited looks for signs that works until you're in a smoke fill building, by the way. Now, we didn't have a smoke fill building at the time that we were going down and so on. But, nevertheless, the point still is anyone who really wants to make sure they're gonna stay safe needs to really know in advance what to do. Because that helps develop a mindset that says, I know what to do and it kicks in. And that's what kicked in for me. 

So, I told Roselle to sit about the time she sat, the building dropped straight down about six feet. That's because the spring, if you will, went back to its normal configuration. And as soon as it stopped, David looked out the window and started shouting. Oh my God, Mike, there's fire and smoke above us. There are millions of pieces of burning paper falling outside the window. We gotta get outta here right now. And I said, slow down David. No, no, no. We gotta get outta here right now. And I heard noise outside the window. And when he said, there are millions of pieces of burning paper falling outside the window that told me what it was, our guests began to scream.

They started moving toward our exits. And I kept saying, slow down. So, they stopped. They were waiting to see what David and I were gonna do. And then finally David used, as I describe it, the big line, you don't understand, you can't see it. Oh, the problem wasn't what I couldn't see, the problem was what David wasn't seeing, Namely a dog sitting next to me wagging her tail, yawning going, who the heck woke me up and what's going on? I knew what Roselle was like when she was afraid and she wasn't indicating any fear. And her senses are much sharper than mine. And what she told me by her reactions was, okay, right now we can try to evacuate in an orderly way. So, I got David to focus. I said, get our guests to the stairs. You're seeing fire. Don't let them take the elevators because if fire gets into the elevator shafts, which it did, anyone in the cars could be burned and killed.

So, David got our guest to the stairs. I called my wife and told her that something had happened, an explosion or something we didn't know and we're gonna be evacuating. And this was before the news even got the story. So when we hung up and I hung up with her, David returned, we checked the office and then went to the stairs and started down. We smelled an odor. It took me about four floors to realize I was smelling burning jet fuel like you smell whenever you go to an airport. So I observed it to other people around us and they said, yeah, we were trying to figure out what that is. And I didn't figure it out right away cuz who would've thought we would've smelled burning jet fuel in the World Trade Center. But the bottom line is that's what I smelled.

I observed that to others and we all agreed an airplane must have hit the building. But we didn't know. And we didn't know what happened until we were all the way down and out. But we went down the stairs and there were times that people started to panic on the stairs. And several of us worked to keep people calm. We got to the bottom. It was now about 9 35. We went through the complex and finally got outside at 9 45 an hour after the plane hit Tower one. When we got outside, David saw that Tower two was on fire again, we didn't know, we didn't feel anything from Tower two being hit because we were in our own little cave or cocoon, if you will. That is the stairs going down. So, we were told to leave the complex. We went over to Broadway and walked north on Broadway and finally got to Vessy Street.

And David said, I see the fire really clearly up in Tower two. I wanna take some pictures. And you know, for our, for us we thought maybe Well's Tower one, when it was tipping tip toward Tower two, maybe it caught the building on fire. Who knew? So, we stopped. David took pictures. I tried to call my wife. The circuits were busy because as we learned later, people were saying goodbye to loved ones. I had just put my phone away and David was putting his camera away when a police officer yelled, get out of here, it's coming down right now. And suddenly we heard this rumble that became this deafening roar that I describe as kind of a combination of a freight train in a waterfall. You could hear glass breaking and metal clattering and so on. And the bottom line is, what was happening is the tower two was collapsing.

We were like a hundred yards away from it. Everyone turned and ran. David ran, he was gone. I turned Roselle around 180 degrees and we started running back the way we came. Then we got to the next street going now south on Broadway, Fulton Street. I turned right on Fulton, caught up to David. As it turns out he had gone the same way. And it stopped cuz he realized he had just run off and left me. And he was gonna come back and try to find me. And I said, look, when he saw me and all that, I'm sorry. He said, I'm sorry. I said, David, don't worry about it. Let's keep going. It's coming down. Right. So, we kept running. We got in the dust cloud that was so thick that David said he couldn't see his hand six inches in front of his nose.

It was so thick that with every breath I took, I could feel dirt and dust going down my throat into my lungs. We knew we had to get out of that, that wretched cloud. And I kept telling Roselle, go. Right, right, right. I don't know whether she could hear me or see my hand signals since I was just doing hand signals. But obviously she did because suddenly I heard an opening on the right and she obviously saw it cuz she turned right. Took one step and stopped and wouldn't move. Come on Roselle, keep going. She wouldn't move. And I realized, hey, maybe she's doing what she's supposed to do. Why is she stopped? So I stuck a hand out along the wall, felt a stair rail and I stuck a foot out, found the top of a flight of stairs. She did exactly what she was supposed to do.

She stopped at the stairs, and she was waiting for the command. So when I said, good girl, Roselle actually stooped down and gave her a hug and then said forward. And we went down the stairs into the subway system and a person came up the stairs and we were in a little arcade and found David and me and several other people. He introduced himself as Lou, an employee of the subway system. And then he took us down to an employee locker room where we stayed until a police officer came and said, the airs clearer up above, you gotta get outta here now. And we went upstairs and we started walking away from the complex more. And David said, oh my god, Mike, there's no tower too anymore. And I said, what are you seeing? And he said, oh, I see your pillars of smoke, hundreds of feet tall. Who would've thought? Yeah. So we kept walking away, we were going west on Fulton and we walked for a number of minutes, 10, 15 minutes. And then we heard that freight train, waterfall sound again. That's the best way I describe it. Cuz as I said, you hear the glass clattering and metal clashing and crashing. And then this, this white noise sound of the building collapsing. And we figured it was our tower coming down.

And so we, David just looked back and said, it's coming down and there's a dust cloud coming our way. We were able to get behind a, a low wall and hunkered down and waited until everything passed. And it got silent again and then stood up and David said, oh my God, there's no world trade center anymore. And I said, what do you see? And he said, all I see are fingers of fire in flame, hundreds of feet, tall pillars of smoke, hundreds of feet tall. It's gone. And it was only after that that I called my wife again and this time got through, it was now about 10 30, 10 31 in the morning. David and I were just standing there and I got through to her and she's the one who told us that terrorist attacked tower one and then tower two. And then it was those towers that collapsed because of hijacked aircraft.

Marlana:

Did that seem incredible to you? 

Michael:

Absolutely,...