Over the past thirty years, we’ve celebrated some incredible moments at CTP, personal and professional. Days that will stick with us forever. But one day stands apart from all of them. It was far from wonderful. It will never be forgotten.
We were a small agency then. Six or seven people, working out of a small office in a Lynnfield office park — 50 Salem Street. It was the morning of September 11, 2001.
Tarrah Curtis was in her second week working at the agency.
“I was meeting with Chip Tuttle when Brian Heffron burst in and said, ‘You need to see this.’ Chip got up and walked out. I stayed behind and then Brian came back and said, ‘No, you too.’”
We gathered around the TV in our small conference room. At first we just watched, not sure what we were looking at. It didn’t take long to understand.
Brian remembers the moment just before that. “As a PR guy and a news junkie, I had WBZ news radio on in my office,” he said. “The anchor said they’d just gotten a report that a plane crashed into a building in New York. They thought it was a small plane — an accident. Fifteen minutes later, we learned that wasn’t the case.”
For Tarrah, the day kept closing in.
“I was just out of college, with a bunch of friends serving out ROTC commitments. I called a friend who was stationed in Georgia and his wife was hysterical. He’d gotten orders to report and didn’t know when he’d be back. I woke up my college roommate in San Diego. Her boyfriend, a fighter pilot, had been called out too. She reminded me the friends we’d visited just a couple weeks earlier were the ones who worked in the towers. We couldn’t get a hold of them. But by sheer, unimaginable luck, one had the day off from his internship. The other had a doctor’s appointment and was going in late.”
“I can still picture our UPS driver — I wish I remembered his name — standing with us in that conference room as we watched the second tower fall.”
Brian excused himself not long after. He had a client meeting he wasn’t going to miss. Everything else had shut down for the day, but his client was a defense contractor with people at the Pentagon and he wanted to be there with his friends as they monitored the situation.
“I drove down to General Dynamics to be with my clients in Needham,” he said. “We watched the news unfold in what felt like a giant war room, screens everywhere. It was surreal, and it hit even harder knowing these people — my friends — had colleagues in one of the buildings that had just been attacked.”
“As far as my immediate circle goes, I was insanely lucky,” said Tarrah. “Everyone was safe.”
Everything changed that day.