Aug 31, 2006 2:39 pm US/Eastern
9/11 Ads Ask Where You Heard The News
NEW YORK (CBS) ―
-
-
The foundation has raised $132.8 million privately, and needs to raise a total of $300 million to build the memorial, which is under construction and set to open in 2009. (File)
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
No matter how or when they heard, just about everyone can still answer the question quickly: Where were you on Sept. 11?
Fire Dept. Lt. Mickey Kross got word at Engine Company 16, before he responded to the World Trade Center and survived the north tower's collapse. Kiara Bradley was driving a bus. Gary Robertson was on his farm in California.
A national ad campaign launching on Thursday features the Sept. 11 stories of people around the world who still remember every detail of how they first heard of the 2001 terrorist attacks. The campaign seeks donations to build the Sept. 11 memorial.
"I was in the shower. ... I was in a dentist's office in Bulgaria. ... I was on the Q train," reads a radio spot for the campaign.
The event will be remembered for life by the people who experienced it in the same way as people think of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., a historian says.
"In these instances there's a sense that something out there has really gotten deep inside," said Michael Frisch, a University
of Buffalo history professor. "It's that expression of a connection between the historical and personal. You need to locate a personal relationship to that history."
Gerry Graf, executive creative director of the TBWA/Chiat/Day ad agency, was in a Los Angeles hotel room when his wife called to tell him that a plane had hit the trade center.
"The first thing I thought was this was our Pearl Harbor," said Graf, who conceived the ads for the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation.
"When they think about 9/11, what we're trying to do is make the connection that the permanent memorial to 9/11 is here at the site," said Joseph Daniels, acting foundation president.
The foundation has raised $132.8 million privately, and needs to raise a total of $300 million to build the memorial, which is under construction and set to open in 2009.
Since the first set of national ads, focusing on personal, homemade memorials, launched in July, the number of donors rose by 450 percent, Daniels said. He wouldn't specify how much had been raised.
TBWA/Chiat/Day and national media outlets have donated their time and ad space, at a cost of over $11 million so far. They include television commercials, silently showing people standing in the places where they heard the horrific news: a living room, an ice rink, a school hallway.
Print ads show empty locker rooms, train platforms, bedrooms and highways, where Graf said many people were likely to have been when they heard of the attacks.
This is not the first attempt to collect "where were you" Sept. 11 stories.
The foundation has compiled about 250 oral histories. College students founded the Web site, http://wherewereyou.org, on Sept. 15, 2001, collecting more than 2,500 stories in the first year after the attacks.
"It is important to remember how time stopped," said Marie Pelkey, who was an 18-year-old college student in Vermont when she co-founded the site. "No matter what we were doing, being in class, driving to work, arguing with family, alone overseas, at the airport ... it was in essence a human event that connected us all."
(© 2006 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
Click to enlarge
Stumble It!
