Vivid scenes from Sept. 11, 2001 are forever burned into Gilroyan Charlie Hamik’s memory. Full story
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Local events commemorating Sept. 11, 2001
Vivid scenes from Sept. 11, 2001 are forever burned into Gilroyan Charlie Hamik’s memory.
Not because 9/11 is his birthday, but because he watched, alongside thousands of horrified spectators, footage of the disaster playing live on the big screen in Times Square.
With his wife Stephanie, Hamik was visiting New York that entire week. The surprise trip for his 43rd birthday would, from that point on, mark his day of birth with a somber connotation of life-altering proportions.
“All of a sudden there was this huge fireball, and it was plane number two,” recalls Hamik about waking up in the Gorham Hotel the morning of 9/11 and turning on the TV. “I thought, ‘Oh my God. That’s right down the street.'”
As Hamik recounts the seven days he spent in the Big Apple beginning Sept. 7, 2001, his dialogue is packed with memories so crisp, the 10-year time lapse between then and now might as well be one day.
“Certain images from that trip are seared into my brain, and I can pull them up in a heartbeat,” he said over the phone Tuesday.
After coming to grips that fateful morning with the attack on the World Trade Center towers happening a 14-minute drive from their hotel on West 55th Street., Hamik and his wife ventured outside “to see what the world looked like.”
As the pair walked from Midtown toward Downtown New York City, the 53-year-old father of two describes people gathering around cars and listening to radios, shop owners setting up televisions on milk crates as bystanders crowded around to witness events unfold.
Even from far away, “this big cloud was emanating from that area,” said Hamik.
The public was cut off from Ground Zero by police barricades, Hamik said. Every few minutes, he recalls a steady stream of people covered in ash would wander out of the haze, including “one lady who only had one shoe on.”
He’ll never forget one woman with dark hair and a green shirt who paced frantically back and forth at the police line.
“All of a sudden this man emerged,” said Hamik. “That’s who she had been waiting for. He was covered in ash, and she ran to him, and they embraced. It still chokes me up when I talk about it. They grabbed each other in the deepest embrace. They just hugged, and hugged, and hugged.”
Only three days prior, the Hamiks took an elevator ride 1,360 feet skyward to Top of the World Observatory on the south tower – the second building struck by a hijacked airplane, but the first building to collapse.
On the ride up, the couple laughed and made small talk with the elevator attendant, a “personable” African-American man around 19 years old “with a great smile” who was going to school in the area, Hamik said.
“What struck me was how nice that kid was,” remembered Hamik. “We got off the elevator, and he said, ‘have a great time in New York, and have a happy birthday.'”
On the observation deck, a youthful Hispanic girl in her 20s “with a bright smile and bright eyes” was working in a souvenir photo booth.
The Hamiks didn’t purchase the picture she snapped of them, “I do not know why, but again, I noticed what a great smile she had,” said Hamik.
As he witnessed on TV the towers burn, collapse and disappear from New York’s skyline, “my mind went instantly to the young man in the elevator, and the young woman in the photo booth,” said Hamik. “Were they at work? Were they OK? Had those smiles turned to fear and anguish? To this day, I have no idea, but those smiles are frozen in my memory, and I hope against all odds that they some how survived that terrible day.”
One live shot captured by a New York TV news crew still plays in Hamik’s head “like it’s happening right now.”
When the south tower began to cave in on itself, hundreds of people ran up the sidewalk towards the camera, Hamik said.
He recalls a fireman in the group reaching a safe point, taking off his helmet, slamming it down on the curb, sitting down and sobbing uncontrollably.
“I’ve never seen that clip played anywhere else,” Hamik noted.
The couple was supposed to fly home Sept. 12, but ended up renting a car the next day and driving to the Denver airport in Colorado.
Boarding the plane for home, Hamik said he had never been so afraid to fly in his life.
When the Hamiks finally arrived in Gilroy, they were greeted by a large banner taped on their garage by neighbors. It read, “Welcome Home Stephanie and Charlie, God Bless America.”
The Hamik’s oldest child, 21-year-old Megan, was just 11 at the time and attending Brownell Middle School. Turning on the television and seeing the city under attack where her parents were vacationing had been devastating, she said.
Megan was tasked with breaking the news to her 9-year-old brother Greg, who was “so scared and asking so many questions that I couldn’t answer,” she recalled.
Now, Megan said her father’s birthday always reminds the family to take a step back, and reflect.
“We are so lucky and blessed that our parents were able to get home, when so many other people’s parents were not,” she said, calling in from Fresno where she now attends college.
When he hugged his children for the first time after arriving in Gilroy, Charlie reminisced, “there are times when you hug your kids and it’s just a hug, and there are times when you hug your kids, and it’s like that moment (in New York) I had witnessed. You don’t want to let them go.”
He woke up a few days later, and remembers thinking “did all that really happen?”
“It’s an experience not many people can say they lived through, that close to it,” he said. “We woke up, and the world had changed.”
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