We Will Never Forget
Every Oklahoman has a story about today. I am no different.
Thirty years ago today, around 9:20 am, I emerged from my little interior, windowless office in an elementary school to return a preschool student to his parent. She hurried him out the door without a goodbye, his daddy was an Oklahoma City firefighter. I wandered into the school office.
I twisted the knob of a closed workroom door and opened it to a sea of teachers gathered around a TV in the corner. The scene on the tube was a war zone, half destroyed buildings, burning cars, emergency personnel running in every direction, and news reporters in a small square in the right hand upper corner. I edged in closer to see that this “war” was fourteen miles away in downtown Oklahoma City.
The Murrah Federal Building had sustained a bomb. The chaos in downtown and the devastation made identifying the damaged and destroyed buildings impossible.
As a speech pathologist with a pull-out schedule, my classes were immediately cancelled and I was pulled into the office for triage. Our first job was to list teachers and staff whose spouses worked in the affected area. We found three. Two from the Water Resources building and one from the nearby OG&E building. On the other hand, three husbands were firefighters on the scene. M’s husband managed to get a message to her that he was safe. C would catch a glimpse of her walking, bleeding husband passing a reporter in a news shot. For Kasey* and the firefighter’s wives, the day would be much longer.
The second job was much harder. Before digital student info, there were 6X8 cards filed alphabetically with student information. The card included the parent’s place of employment. The six story federal building housed many government agencies and employed hundreds of Oklahomans. Our principal was determined we would not send a student home to an empty house to await horrible news.
I was grateful thinking that I didn’t know anyone who worked in the building or would have been there. I would later learn that no one in our little bedroom community less than 20 miles from the building would escape the loss of, at the least, an acquaintance.
I remember:
Rev. Gilberto Martinez and I met when I asked to tour his church, El Tabernaclo del Fey. My uncle built the inner city church and my daddy was saved in that sanctuary. Gilberto happily showed me around the dilapidated building. His love for his Hispanic community and reaching them with love of Christ was unparalleled. His wife gave birth to their fifth child ten days before the bombing. Gilberto’s body was among the first found. He had accompanied a parishioner to the Social Security office to translate for the man who knew no English.
A former student and her parents who I had remained close to had a father and grandmother who worked in the Murrah building. Matt had left the building around 8:30 for a meeting outside the city. He ran into his mom in the lobby as she headed upstairs. He heard the blast and watched the smoke in his rear view mirror as he took an entrance ramp to the highway. His mom’s body was one of the last recovered.
The most famous picture to be taken that day would be of a firefighter holding a lifeless infant from the federal building’s day care. Fifteen children from the day care would die that day. The big, burly firefighter dressed in full gear cradled the bloodied, battered body his arms. He was the husband of the office aide who had pointed me to the workroom. Their lives were never the same.
From the earliest days, the mantra in the press, around town was “We will never forget”. I certainly have not.
