I was Statehouse bureau chief for The Record in Hackensack, New Jersey, and remember driving down Route 1 to my office in Trenton listening to CBS Radio reporting that the first plane, and then the second one, had hit the towers.

I had a reporter covering an event in Atlantic City with the attorney general and head of the state police, and I told her, “At some point they’re going to get up and have to leave — follow them and find out whatever they know.”

At the Statehouse, the only sign something was wrong was an orange cone in the passholders lane of the driveway. Everyone had to go up to the guard booth.

My newspaper in North Jersey was dealing with the story of a lifetime. Some staffers lived in New York City and wrote first-hand about being engulfed in dust fleeing the collapsing towers. We covered the madness of people trying to get home when the tunnels were closed. Families started to learn the awful news that someone who went to work wasn’t coming home. Photographer Tom Franklin went to the Hudson River waterfront and got someone with a boat to take him over to Ground Zero and got the iconic photo of firemen raising a U.S. flag from a crumpled ship’s mast, with the wreckage of the towers behind them.

In Trenton, we were mostly manning the phones until news broke that a plane had crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. That was hours away, but we were closer to Pennsylvania than anyone, and I handed one of my reporters all the petty cash we had (and some of my own) and told him to just start driving there.

I remember leaving that night, I had to drive across the state to my dad’s house on the Jersey Shore, so I took I-195, which cuts across the middle of the state. As I approached the Shore, the sky was still crystal blue, but there was a weird, thin straight cloud out over the ocean: The smoke from the wreckage in Manhattan.

Herb Jackson is a newsletter editor working with the Bloomberg Industry Group.

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