Michael Hingson - Blind 9/11 Survivor

good morning um thank you for joining us today um i have the distinct pleasure of being the uh they call me the president and ceo of the lighthouse for the blind but really i've just worked with some really great people and it makes it a lot of fun to go to work so while they're giving that moniker it really is everyone that works for us that makes the lighthouse such a successful place my name is platt allen and with me today are nancy fisher who most of you all know who runs our community development organization and has been extremely instrumental along with molly johnson in the back taking photographs with getting our whole week of uh celebrating michael and his story and sharing him and his his dog africa with our community i think today marks the 22nd event and i think we've been in front of somewhere between 3 500 and 4 000 people so we've had an extraordinary opportunity to share michael and and really bring a gift to our community so michael we appreciate you coming we appreciate you being part of our community today and certainly we appreciate you uh sharing your story with the fine folks here at first methodist so without any further ado i think we have one copy of his book remaining so if you're the last one then we'll raffle that off at the end or something michael it's all yours and since it's the last one the price goes up tremendously i just thought i'd let you know well thank you for coming to our latest course in physics in the universe today it's does god have a sense of humor and um i think he does but or she i don't care what gender you choose but there you go it's really fun to be here and speak at a methodist church i've had opportunities to speak in nashville at the upper room during some prayer services and we need to do this anybody here ever participated in the walk to emmaus day coloris i if you have not it is it is something that is absolutely worth doing it's called a short course in christianity it's not for newbies to the church but it's to help develop leadership and it is a once-in-a-lifetime experience then when you get to be a lay director it's even more fun because it's all about service and i won't give it away so you've got some people up here in the front who have you ought to find out about it and you want to do it it's run by the methodist church but it's ecumenical and that's not intended to be a commercial but i had to since i'm in the methodist church and we're members of the methodist church so there you go but you know um churches are interesting places and i know that the that the theme for lent is brokenness to to wholeness and healing and i think that going back and and thinking about jesus going back and looking at jesus's teachings excuse me i would think that jesus really rejects the idea that we're broken i think that what jesus would tell us is we have the right because god gave it to us it's the greatest gift god gave us we have the right to choose we have free will and we can choose to be broken or we can choose to be whole but i think that when it comes down to it we have in the bible and in so many ways the teachings that we really need to be whole the problem is we just don't choose to use them we really don't totally buy in oftentimes to a lot of the things that we learned so jesus was resurrected and went into heaven we have created a distance between him and us because of that i think that distance is only as much as we allow it to be i think that god's voice is as loud as we want it to be case in point and i don't recall the name of the person or the details i heard this on a walk to emmaus walk from one of the clergy in the few talks that we allowed them to do no for the clergy gets theirs you know those clergy guys they can get going when they're when they're rolling they're rolling so i heard a story from andy one of the my favorite ministers on the on the walks and he was telling the story about a gentleman from england who was traveling to africa to be a missionary back in the 1800s there was a place where the ship stopped before going on into the main part of africa or wherever it was they were going the pastor got off of the ship and when the ship sailed he didn't get back on and three days later it was reported that the ship was lost at sea with all hands and all passengers all the other people were gone and somebody said to him well why weren't you on the ship and he said well god told me and inspired me not to stay on the ship and the person said why were you selected why didn't god tell everybody and what he said was everyone could have heard the same voice but no one else was listening and i think that's the problem for most of us we don't listen for the voice we're busy praying we're busy telling god what we want but we don't listen to the voice i've heard it and i will tell you about that i know that god can talk to us just as clearly as you hear me i know that that is something that people find difficult or will rationalize away but it happened and i think it happens to all of us in one way or another but it can only be allowed clear ongoing communication if we choose to let it be so god is always out there waiting for us it's the whole story of the prodigal son all over again but god is always ready to accept us back but it's our choice and if we don't truly emotionally in our hearts absolutely physically make that choice and then do what we need to do to make it happen then we'll not quite get there now as i love to tell the story at some point we'll probably die and we'll go to heaven and we'll get to heaven and probably will sit up in a cloud somewhere with harps playing in the background and we'll start to study and the more we study the more we'll progress and the more we progress the more we'll study and we're going to study and study and study and progress and progress and progress and as mark twain says if that isn't hell i don't know what is but god's gonna get me for that but he knows i'm only fun but you know the the fact is it really is all about choice my life like everyone's life has been a series of choices some of the early choices were not mine but they were made for me and set the pattern of how i was to live when i was born i was put in an incubator i was born two months early only two pounds 13 ounces and i really haven't gained too much since then i've been working at losing i've lost 60 pounds in the last year and a half so don't talk to me about losing weight yeah so i was put in an incubator and my retinas did not develop properly and so i lost my eyesight now even back in february of 1950 there were rumors beginning that putting a child in an incubator in a pure oxygen-rich environment for several days could cause blindness and even introducing air and not a pure oxygen environment for just a few minutes every day would be sufficient to prevent blindness a gentleman named arnold papps from johns hopkins university wilmer eye institute discovered that he had proven it by subjecting several children to a not pure oxygen environment looking at other cases around the country where children were not put in a pure oxygen environment he discovered out of 75 children who did not receive pure oxygen for the entire time and i mean literally maybe minutes a day for the entire time they were in an incubator the results of blindness dropped to zero but when he submitted a grant to the national science foundation and the national institutes of health they said you're crazy that's not good science how can anybody get poisoned from oxygen we know that's not totally true today and so as a result medical science even then wasn't listening it wasn't until a little bit later that they finally recognized that they didn't need to use the treatments they were but by that time it was too late and i'd gone blind when it was discovered that i had gone blind my parents were told by the after by the ophthalmologist by all the doctors put him in a home there is no way that a blind person could ever amount to anything and all he's going to do is be a drain and a burden on your entire family and we know that that's not going to be good so you really should just send him away now my father with an eighth grade education my mother with a high school diploma rejected that they rejected the thinking of the best minds of the day because they knew in their hearts that wasn't right that was their choice they taught me that i could do whatever i wanted to do as long as it was right as long as it was morally okay as long as the ethics were good and they gave me i think as good a grounding in that as as any kid could have so we grew up occasionally washed the dishes and did all those things that kids have to do even tried to mow the lawn a little bit and did some of that but when i moved from chicago when i was five to southern california i was in a pretty rural area in chicago i got to play with the other kids and i also had one of those little pedal cars you know that you kind of ride around if you're a kid and wrote it around the house and whizzed from room to room got through the doors and all that okay and so on but one day i was pedaling around not paying attention like i should the car hood went under a coffee table my chin found the coffee table and i still little bump from the scar because i had to put three stitches in to close it and all my mother said was you got to watch where you're going but think about that think about what would you do if you had a blind kid and that happened think about what most people would do oh my god we can't let this kid get hurt we can't let this happen they take the car away my mother didn't do that she said you got to watch where you're going of course in the dictionary to see is to perceived it's not just seeing with your eyes you cited bigoted to you you don't think that way it's all about perception and so i in fact learn to watch where i was going i learned to listen better and not ignore the signs so when we moved to palmdale california out in san andreas fault country i learned to ride a bike and rode a bike around the neighborhood the sounds of the tires making noise on the road all the other echoes around allowed me to know just as well as anyone if there were parked cars in front of me so i could avoid them or stop or if i was getting too close to the curb or any of the kinds of things that people do when they're riding a bike because i learned that there were alternatives to using eyesight in fact i never even thought about it i just did it it was as natural to me as it was for you when you were riding bikes and maybe you still do ride bikes but the fact is that it was a natural kind of progression because i grew up thinking that if i wanted to ride a bike i could ride a bike i walked to school i rode a bike to school the school was a few blocks away i rode myself sometimes i rode with my brother sometimes i didn't i know how to get to the school i knew how to get to the bike rack and then i knew how to get from there to wherever i needed to go in the school because i learned that i could travel independently and do that now at the time the one thing that i didn't do was use a cane or a dog dog too young to get a dog kane didn't know it and a cane or a dog only is going to help you find and avoid geography things that get in your way a dog or a cane will help you walk safely but they don't know where you want to go and in fact with dogs who have the brains and can figure out if you go somewhere all the time oh well we need to go this way i don't want that because i want the dog to be working just to keep me safe it's my job to know where i want to go and how to get there how do i do that there are technologies and ways that i make that happen today it's a lot better we have talking gps systems and all sorts of stuff back then it was even more memorization than now i personally still like to memorize as much as possible and verify or do new things with the gps but still prefer to memorize things so anyway i went to school went to high school in my freshman year in high school after having gotten my first guide dog squire before going into high school i ran into my first real problem where i was told i was different and not as good as everyone else i've gotten squire in june and july of 1964 and as i describe it now what i really learned when i got a guide dog was not all the footwork and not the commands but i learned how to build a team and i learned back when i was 14 in 1964 so that means i'm how old do the math carry it over 50 63. okay um gotta think faster there'll be another math problem later so i learned about building a team and i learned i was the team leader i had to be in control of the team i had to tell the dog where to go forward left right and so on but i also learned that the other member of the team had a responsibility we walk up to a street corner we stop the dog will stop at a curb then i have to listen to hear the way the traffic's going if the traffic is going the way i'm facing and want to go it's probably safe to cross although i'll probably wait for a light cycle just to make sure i didn't get there at the end if the traffic is going across in front of me i learned even before high school physics two pieces of matter don't occupy the same space at the same time in a classical mechanics world we're not going to deal with quantum physics today but in a classical mechanics simple slow world two pieces of matter don't occupy the same space at the same time now the thing that they don't tell you in physics they expect you to know you know it's the one of those the rest is left as an exercise for the student kind of thing what i what i didn't learn from them but i figured out on my own without getting killed was there there's a corollary to that law which goes the bigger piece of matter usually wins so if it's a car i'm probably going to get smushed so it's really not a good idea to walk out in front of one of those things because it's going to occupy my space and then there won't be much left of me so i wait until the traffic is going the way i want to go i tell the dog to go forward we step down off the curb we start walking across the street and suddenly the dog jerks back i have to let her or him do their job and my responsibility as the team leader is to recognize and respect the job the other the other person is doing it's going to say the other dog but the other person or team member is doing that's what teamwork is about on any team in any level it's all about knowing that every member of the team has a job to do don't discourage them from doing their job by the way i think that's what works with god too now there's always the point zero zero zero zero zero one chance that the dog was jerking back because uh he saw a duck and wanted to go play but mostly when they see ducks they don't want to go play because they take their jobs really seriously you can't imagine how seriously these dogs take their job and wanting to keep us safe and i suppose at the most basic level wanting to please they actually can stress out because they take it so seriously and that's why they respond so well to praise when they do a good job listening she's sleeping i don't expect anything else so it's a team relationship when we got to high school as i said and i learned that i was really not considered as good as anyone else because it came to be late february early march of 1965 i had just gotten my star scout award actually the the year before went to this uh scouting court of honor a guy named george kartosian who was a lawyer actually presented the awards and led the court of honor anyway i was called into the vice principal's office one day and mr fisher said we've got a word from our superintendent in the manual the student manual for the antelope valley high school district there is a rule that says that no live animals are allowed on the bus and our superintendent says because of that you have to ride another way to get to school you cannot be on a school bus so think about that what he's saying is i'm blind and i can't ride on the school bus because i choose to use guide dog now their solution was they were going to hire a car to take me to school they were going to pay somebody to do that well under the law what do you think that makes that car but you know they weren't thinking about facts at the time now that law that that high school ruling by the way also flew in the face of california state penal law which said that a blind person accompanied by a guide dog had the right to take that dog anywhere they go well my father hit the roof of course when we learned about it but i was off the bus we demanded a meeting with the school board we got a meeting with the school board the chair of the school board was our friend mr cartosian the superintendent was there they went through some other business and finally called us and the superintendent got up and he said this is really simple we have a rule no live animals allowed on the school bus that's all there is to it he can't ride the bus that's it my dad got up and said well if that's the case then somebody's going to spend a year in the penitentiary because there is a law that says section 643.5 of the state penal code that says that blind people can take their dog on any public transportation into any public place any public lodging restaurants and so on including use and common carriers my father spent a saturday in the library not knowing anything about the law but knowing enough to read and think and use his head and discovered in black's law dictionary that a common carrier was by case law and by legislation included in the class of vehicles known as common carriers and my dad said all of that to the board and said so who's it going to be the superintendent turned to mr cartosian in this very flip way and said is he right mr cartosian with a little smile on his face said yep i remember it but the board voted three to two to support the superintendent my father not one to give up knowing when he's right wrote the governor of the state of california and laid it all out we don't know what happened i would have loved to have been a fly on the wall but what we did hear later was that the superintendent was summoned to sacramento he went up there and was there on a thursday and all we know is that he came back battered and bloodied and the next week i was back on the school bus now the superintendent is a bully anyway but the messages i got from that were two one i really am different people don't necessarily care to do the right thing and clearly they don't necessarily think i'm as good as anyone else because i can't see the other message though was you can fight city hall and win and i think the second somewhat more cancelled out the first so i don't think it was a break-even situation but at the same time the message was clear well over the next several years i had various situations and instances where i learned in one way or another that i was really regarded as different mostly we worked through those things and i also learned that there were other blind people who thought as i did those people are part of an organization called the national federation of the blind which was started by dr jacobus timbrook in 1940 dr tembrick is one of the foremost constitutional law scholars of the 20th century his case law treatises are still used today dr timber in one of the most profound articles he ever wrote entitled the law of torts let's see i want to make sure i say it right the right to live in the world the disabled and the law of tours and what he said was i think extremely beautiful that all of us disabled or able-bodied alike do have the same right to live in the world god gave us all the same right to live in the world and if we have bridges and if we have beliefs that we're not as equal as anyone else that's our doing yes society may have made it so but there are a whole lot of uninformed people in the world about one thing or another the fact of the matter is god's laws are really clear and we do have the right to live in the world we were given the right to choose well now jump forward many years i had gotten a job working for a company actually first working for the national federation of the blind by the way after graduating from the university of california at irvine with a master's degree in physics and i want to acknowledge someone who just found an old long time friend from uc irvine who lives here in dallas greg and peggy maxwell greg is a captain for american airlines go american greg and i went to school together and we've just reconnected in the back of the room um use the irvine go anteaters all the way although i must say go frogs you know so i try and got my horns so the fact of the matter is um i went through school went through college got a master's degree in physics worked at the campus radio station and and held my own for many years against mike wallace in 60 minutes we played old radio shows on sunday night and we learned how popular our show was one day when a deputy from the orange county jail called and said we want you to know that the the jail is divided half of them want to watch 60 minutes in television but half of them want to listen to your show on sunday night so we do special tv arrangements and we get half of them to one floor and half of them to another floor half watch wallace and half watch you and so i figured that we did pretty good at smush and wallace you know wallace wallace associated with criminals anyway we ever hear a radio show called the green hornet he narrated it for years so you know he's associated with crooks himself so but anyway i graduated i worked for the national federation of the blind on some projects and then was hired by a company that later was bought by xerox while working for that company i had to fly from la to san francisco i had actually flown out from boston to la and then going on from la to san francisco i stepped on the airplane to fly from melee to san francisco with an airline called psa a bunch of sleaze balls and um greg you never worked for psa did you good just checking and i was told i couldn't fly on that airplane because i had a guide dog and i couldn't sit anywhere but the very front row of the airplane because uh that was the only place the pilot was gonna let me sit even though i knew that the airline policy said that i could sit where i wanted to sit i was literally thrown off the airplane by the police well we sued with the help of the national federation of the blind now think about it the reason i don't like to sit in the bulkhead is if there are turbulence and planes bounces because it happened to me there's nothing to restrain the dog if i sit in a non-bulkhead row the dog goes under the seat in front of me and her head comes down back and between my legs and she's secure and even if she panics she's very much under control in that environment the pilot didn't care it was his way or the highway so we went to court we eventually settled the court but more important psa went out of business so i think i won anyway so i worked in the workforce for a long time and eventually was hired by a company called quantum corporation to open an office in new york city quantum did a lot of sales in the city through distribution and through other means but didn't have a sales presence well i was asked to open an office by that time i'd owned my own company for a while i sold it went back into the workforce and so on and i knew a lot about management because i learned how to do that with dogs and people so on august 1st 2000 we opened our office on the 78th floor of tower 1 of the world trade center on september 11 2001 i was in my office because we were going to be conducting some special seminars to teach resellers how to sell our products i was the only resident of the office who was in that day my sales force was out working supporting their manager by selling they didn't need to come to the seminar the only other quantum person who was there besides my fifth guide dog roselle and me was a gentleman named david frank david was from our corporate office in california david was born in the bronx he relocated to california what do you want i went to was born in chicago lived in california now living in new york so we traded coasts but he was there that day at 8 45 in the morning we had some guests in our conference room david and i were in my office doing some final preparations so that we could give security information about who was attending the seminar suddenly we heard a muffled explosion the building shuttered and then if you imagine my hand as the tower literally the tower began to lean it started to move it kept going sort of southwest right toward tower two it kept tipping and tipping we moved about 20 feet we learned later that buildings are made to be flexible like that i had participated in all the emergency evacuation preparedness drills fire drills and so on i learned how to get around the world trade center because i needed to do that to be able to function i can't rely on other people for that because i'm not going to take people away from other things just to lead me around and i don't need to have people just lead me around especially in an area that i know well i learned the geography i learned where everything is i knew where the estee lauder 2nd store was on the 46th floor of tower 2. made my wife very happy and i knew how to get anywhere that i needed to go not only in the world trade center but elsewhere but the building as i said was tipping and i had been prepared as much as i could be for an emergency and you know what the more i think about it something else was happening that i think was god telling me something every day i went in i kept thinking what are you going to do if there is an emergency because there had been embalming of course in 1993 we weren't there at the time but i thought about that every day and i always kept thinking what are you going to do so that prepared me as much as anything i think for 9 11 although i didn't realize it until much later but as the building tip i went over to the doorway you know we grew up in palmdale building moves go to doorway roselle was asleep under my desk that was the name of my fifth guide dog david was just holding on to my desk and he wanted to stay there so he did the building tipped we finally said goodbye to each other because we had no idea what was going on we thought we were about to take a 78 floor plunge to the street then the building stopped and it slowly started coming back the other way slowly slowly it tipped up up and finally it got to be vertical again as soon as it did i went into my office and i met my guide dog roselle coming out from under my desk africa wake up sit i met met rozelle coming out from under my desk i told her to heal which meant to come around on my left side and to sit which she did yawning and wagging her tail obviously sleep disturbed and then suddenly the building dropped straight down about six feet now today we know that that's because the expansion joints were going back into their normal configuration roselle just sat there wagging her tail yawning giving me an occasional nudge what's going on here as soon as the building dropped david turned and looked out the window and started shouting oh my god mike there's fire and smoke and there millions of pieces of burning paper falling outside the window we can't stay here we got to get out of here right now and i said slow down david he said no no we got to get out of here right now i could hear debris falling outside the window we didn't smell smoke because the airplane hit 18 floors above us on the other side of the building none of us knew what had happened we knew something did but we didn't know what now the press oftentimes later said well of course you didn't know you couldn't see it and i said wait a minute you guys start using your heads do any of you have x-ray vision if you were in my office could you see up 18 floors and through the walls to the other side of the building uh no well of course nobody knew it wasn't me the problem with most of society is that they think that blindness is the end-all it's it's a tragedy it's felt because people believe eyesight is the only game in town it's not the reality is that you guys have your own disability you're light dependent you rely on eye on lights and eyesight and you don't know how to do it any other way thomas edison fixed it for you by inventing the electric light bulb but the fact of the matter is that's only a band-aid covering up your disability and if you think that's not true just go stand in penn station during a power failure and try to find the train track you want no lights no windows nothing to tell you for a fee i'll get you where you need to go and the longer the power fair goes on the fee goes up but the fact is that blindness isn't the handicap it's attitudes and perceptions that are the handicap the unemployment rate among blind people is over 70 shouldn't be that way but it is because it's not that we can't see it that people think that because we can't see we can't do the job it happens all the time in the world today there are in the united states there are blind people who make as low as three cents an hour because there is a special government exemption in certain situations that allows certain organizations to pay blind people less and other physically disabled people less than minimum wage because we're not viewed as equal and competitive fact so everybody go get your congress people to support h.r 831 to get rid of that exemption because there is no reason that i or anyone should ever be in a position to be paid less than minimum wage just like everyone else period in any case david is shouting we got to get out of here our guests began to scream they started moving toward our exit and i said david slowed down he said no we got to get out of here right now we can't stay here i said slow down no we got to get out of here and then the big line you can't see it you don't understand excuse me building moved 20 feet building came back building dropped you're seeing fire and smoke and debris and i'm hearing the debris no question about getting out but i was observing something that david wasn't that made all the difference for me namely i was experiencing the fact that a dog was sitting next to me not in any way indicating that she felt nervous or concerned you've read stories about animals that got their humans out of buildings and so on just because they detected fire and smoke before the people did roselle wasn't detecting anything that indicated she was bothered you can go to sleep again that told me that whatever was going on we could work to get out at that moment without panicking i said finally when i got david to focus take our guests to the stairs get them started down the stairs and then we will leave the building he did i called my wife karen while that was going on karen was at our home in westfield new jersey and i said there was an explosion or something that happened and we're going to have to leave the the world trade center said what's going on i said i don't know we really don't know was long before the media got the story i said i just don't know now i should tell you by the way karen has physical disability karen uses a wheelchair she reads i push great marriage when i was growing up in the 60s it was you know the hippie culture and the drug stuff and all that and people would ask me what i wanted to be and you know i don't have any kind of sense of humor you understand so i said to people well you know when i grow up i want to be a pusher man you know i will so i married karen and i'm a pusher and it's legal just try to arrest me for it what are you i'm a pusher man oh you're on her own no no no no no actually now she uses a power chair because her shoulders are starting to give out a little bit so now i have to run for my life and watch my toes but it's okay she's run over him a few times and it's always my fault it usually is that's okay and i don't mind if it's her it's okay anyway so i told her we were leaving i hung up david came back we swept the office we made sure nobody else was there we powered down some equipment because we knew we weren't going to be back for a while there was some stuff that we couldn't power down although i would have liked to but we didn't know we were never coming back we left we went to the stairs and we started down by 8 50 in the morning we were at the stairs and started down immediately i began smelling an odor and i and i recognized it but i couldn't place it i knew it was familiar and finally after a couple of floors i realized i was smelling kind of the the burning kerosene propane and all that of burning jet fuel the fumes from burning jet fuel and i observed to other people i did a lot of traveling even back then for for my jobs i'm always at airports selling that stuff so i said to people around me on the stairs i'm smelling their funes for burning jet fuel and they went oh you're right that's what we're smelling we try to figure it out we must have been hit by an airplane so we assumed we were hit by an airplane as we went down the stairs but we didn't know and nobody was telling us anything i like information i don't care when or what i would rather know all there is to know but i know why they didn't tell people on the stairs they didn't want more panic it would have been helpful for me but that's me in any case we went down the stairs we got down about 10 floors when suddenly we heard from up above there's a burn victim coming through moved to the side of the stairs we moved to the side of the stairs and then some people passed us surrounding a woman who was very badly burned over the upper part of her body probably from the fuel vapors that ignited around her somewhere we went a few floors more and then heard it again burn victim coming through please move to the side another person more badly burned even than the first passed us i think we all realized how bad it had to be above after that second person passed because a woman near us on this air suddenly stopped and said i can't breathe i can't go on we're not going to make it out of here and all of us on the stairs stopped and surrounded her all of us in our little group we didn't all know each other but we stopped and worked together and surrounded her and literally had a group hug and said look we're in this together come on you can do it roselle was giving her kisses and i just said you can do it come on other people said yeah come on you can do it we're all together we're gonna help you we're all in this you help us we help you we're working together she was able to keep going teamwork a few floors after that my friend david said mike we're gonna die we're not gonna make it out of here and i just said stop it david if roselle and i can go down these stairs so can you he told me later that snapping at him like that which was deliberate brought him back he said i brought him out of his funk he then walked ahead of us a floor below us down the stairs and did something that he said was really to take his mind off of everything he was worried about he started shouting up everything that he saw oh i'm at the 48th floor everything is good here he took the responsibility to do that because he thought that he would be helping me which he was but he was also helping the hundreds of people above and even below i guess who could hear his voice he gave people something to focus on i think it's one of the most incredible memories i have of 911 that he did that 47th floor everything is good everything is clear hey i'm at the 46th floor the 45th floor i'm at the 44th floor this is where the port authority cafeteria is not stopping 43 keeping on going down the stairs we were a floor above him we kept going i kept focusing on africa that was my job and my crutch if you will good girl i was led to just really praise her even more and i just kept getting this thought keep praising her so will you keep her calm keep praising her i knew it but it's always good to have those extra voices telling me that good girl africa forward down 10 steps i kind of counted just to find out how many steps there were between floors forward down this 10 stairs left left 180 degrees forward down 9 steps next floor down 42 everything is good forward down ten steps left left good girl forward good girl down nine steps good job left left and continuing down the stairs i started thinking i wonder how many stairs we're going to go down here you know that's the bizarre strange mind looking for the factoid of the day never heard factoid until later but anyway so i said well okay here it is right we're going down 19 stairs between floors going down from 78 to 72 to 1 that's 77 floors 77 times 19 is math exercise come on nobody yeah yeah get your iphones out 1463 stairs and i didn't even have a calculator so and i figured it out and i went oh that's interesting god do we got to do all that um and i said i'm not going to think about that that's going to get me tired good girl roselle keep going and we kept going down the stairs but i did have a fear and by about the 39th of the 38th floor i finally had to deal with it now all y'all have flown on airplanes catch that all y'all have flown on airplanes and you know at the beginning the flight attendants come out and they say we have a briefing and we're gonna we're gonna make sure that you're aware of what to do so fasten your seat belts and the way you fasten your seat belts is you put the metal end into the buckle and so on and so on and so on as if we don't know how to fasten seat belt but it's probably good because i'm amazed that some people never do figure it out but anyway the flight attendants give their briefing why do they do that they do that yeah because the faa tells them to do that but they also do it because they want to do their best to make sure that people know and they're also looking around to see who's paying attention to the briefing because they might need those people later on now it's interesting when they give me a briefing for the longest time and it still happens every so often i'll get on an airplane i like to sit as close to the front as possible not bulkhead so i got on an airplane find my seat and the flight attendant comes back and they said oh we have to give you a briefing i said great you know i fly a lot i really understand it but go ahead and they say whatever they're going to say or they say oh you really know and i said yeah there's only one question i have tell me the seat numbers of the overwing emergency exit rows because i never know when the flight seat configuration is going to change and so on so i always want to make sure i know those row numbers the flight attendants usually come back and say oh you don't need to worry about that because you came in through the front door of the aircraft i didn't know that you came in through the front door of the aircraft and if there's emergency you're near the front you go out that door and i said no no no no i want to know where the over wing exits are but you don't need to know that i said can you assure me with 100 absolute positiveness that that door won't be jammed when we land and crash uh no good what are the overwing exit numbers well i don't know that's the real issue they don't never ever memorize it which is extremely unfortunate i've heard now some flight attendants work it into their briefing the over wing exits are located on this aircraft at rose 20 and 21 or at row 15 and and that's great because we all should know it you don't know what the cabin conditions will be like in an emergency you don't know when this cabin might be full of smoke i've heard of it happening and the bottom line is we ought to be doing anything we can to make sure that everybody is prepared as we could be on a flight and so they should be saying those row numbers as part of their briefing but they don't but i make them go back and get it and then they come back and they say okay the exit row numbers on this plane are 20 and 21 or whatever but you don't need to worry about that because well here's what's going to happen we're going to get the passengers off then we'll come back and get you and i said excuse me oh we're going to get the passengers off and we'll come back and get you i said i want to refund because if you don't consider me a passenger then why am i paying for this seat oh we didn't mean it that way but that's what she said here's the bottom line i'll be waiting at the bottom of that slide to catch you when you come down i'm not waiting for anyone and neither do i need to i walked on this airplane all by myself i walk down the jet bridge i am now executive platinum on american i think i know something about how to deal with airplanes my advantage number is so old that there aren't any letters in it it goes back to 1980 when the program started oh but it's the perception that people have some are better than others and now i've made friends with lots of flight attendants on american over the years so more of them than no than not so they'll come back okay the exit row numbers are yep great appreciate that hi connie what's happening so anyway um it people are are amazing in any case my fear going down the stairs was that we might lose power in lighting and then i'd be stuck on the stairs with thousands of functionally blind people who couldn't find their way out of a paper bag remember i said i had this fear that i really had to deal with so i shouted to people because i thought maybe some people would pay attention if it became necessary hey everybody if the power and lights go out i don't want you to worry i happen to be blind i've got my guide dog roselle here my name's mike and we're offering a half price special to get you out today only and i did that partly to be humorous because conversation was kind of dying down and i really didn't want people getting more bitter or going in themselves and being like david and so i simply said that but i also wanted people who might be further along to think about it and if we really did lose power i might have some aids that i could quickly teach how to help people get down the stairs and then we could all get everybody out just as safely as before it was intentional so we continued down the stairs 35 34 33 i was noticing conversation was getting quiet again so at one point i just said hey everybody you know they're not going to allow us back into the tower for a while but on the first day back why don't we all meet on the 78th floor at 8 45 in the morning and walk down the stairs together what a great way to lose weight huh i didn't ever suggest that we meet at the bottom and walk up i'm not dumb i took physics and got a master's degree i know about that gravity stuff 32 31 hey i'm at the 30th floor everybody i see firemen coming up the stairs be sure to let them buy well i went on down to where david was because david stopped um and he said i see the firemen i said well what are you seeing you said well they're all dressed in their heavy protective clothing they got a bunch of stuff on their backs they might have 100 pounds on their backs i think it was like 40 or 50 pounds but who knew he said they're carrying oxygen cylinders fire axes shovels all their breathing stuff all the things they needed to fight the fire and then the first guy gets to us and he stops in front of me he goes hey buddy you okay you know how you talk back there in new york they talk funny just like sonny corleone you know anyway and i i said yeah we're really good well that's really nice we're gonna send somebody down the stairs with you to make sure you get out okay i said you don't need to do that well yeah but we're going to do that anyway i said look you really don't need to do that i walked all the way down from the 78th floor here we are on 4 30. you can't get lost on stairs sort of like jet bridge is going down to airplanes you know you really can't get too lost and you know you can't get lost walking up and down the aisle of an airplane either but anyway so i just said look we're really okay well that's really nice but we're gonna help you get out i really didn't want help because i didn't need somebody grabbing on to me and every time i stepped down he'd lift me up to make sure that i didn't hit the stairs too hard and that happens all too often or just not letting me go at my own pace or not letting me do what the dog and i needed to do to function that's what it's all about i said to him look i've got a guide dog roselle here she and i are great well what a nice guy dog and he starts petting roselle it wasn't time to give him a lecture don't pet a guide dog in harness because the dog is working it also wasn't time to give him a lecture about the fact that blindness wasn't the handicap it's society's attitudes that are handicapped i just said look we really are okay i've got a friend over here david who can see he looked at david he says you with him and david said yeah look he's really good don't worry about it okay well all right in that case then we'll let you go he gave roselle some last pats roselle gave him some more kisses probably the last unconditional love he ever got his he then walked upstairs now why do i tell you that i tell you that because i want you to understand that i recognize that the firefighters were a team i didn't want to be responsible for somebody to be out of position especially when i didn't need it i didn't want somebody to not be where they were supposed to be and then somebody else get injured and i hear about it later and know that it was only because they were quote helping me and not doing what they really needed to do i didn't need that assistance and it was not good for the team i don't care how prepared they are they're going up to fight that fire all that equipment is important they have to carry it up i knew that already so i wanted that team to stay together all those responders truly were heroes and i want to ask you to do me a favor and help me honor them and i never do that by asking people to have a moment of silence for them i think they would want us to remember them for the strength and courage that they showed and for the job that they were doing and respect that would you just please give a round of applause for all the heroes we lost on 9 11. we continued walking down the stairs david reassumed his scouting position on the 26th floor somebody started passing up water bottles they um they said opened a water vending machine i always wondered what open mint but anyway they opened a water vending machine and they passed up bottles of water roselle was panting we gave her some water we kind of made our hands into cups david and i we gave her water we took some water and we continued on down roselle was doing great i should tell you that that morning at 12 30 she woke me up because there was a thunderstorm that was approaching the house and roselle was afraid of thunder roselle shivers and shakes whenever there's thunderstorms and she detects them in advance so we went down to my office and stayed there for an hour and a half messed up my sleep but you know that's okay for roselle we'd do it but then we went back to bed and the rest happened as i'm telling you she just did great but she was thirsty so we gave her water and we continued down we finally made it down to the first floor david was a floor ahead when he got there he said hey the water sprinklers are running there's a curtain of water that's coming down that's blocking the exit and figured out later it must be to keep fire in or out if it happened to come on the stairs or come into the first floor lobby so we went through that water burst out into tower one's lobby which typically would be a quiet office lobby but now it was ankle deep in water and there were a lot of people shouting go this way don't go that way don't go outside go this way a guy comes up to me and he says i'm with the fbi and sitting there going i didn't do it um i i just said well what's going on he said well we don't have time i'm just telling you i'm with the fbi well who's here well the fbi the new york police the port authority police the fire department we're getting people out we're taking care of everything come this way and he got us to the revolving doors that took us out into the central part of the complex he said follow these people go through the complex and leave by the far exits david and i ran through the central part of the world trade center which on the first floor was a shopping mall and it had all the usual sorts of things that you would find there and we just ran through could hear your footfalls as you ran normally there were thousands of people in that place but now it was just empty as it had been evacuated we finally went up an escalator and at 9 45 an hour after the plane hit the building we were outside we were told to leave the complex but first david looked around and said mike i see fire in tower too so what are you talking about he said there's fire in the second tower we didn't know so we walked over to broadway and we turned north and started walking north on the west side of broadway so there was a building right to our left and broadway was to our right we crossed several streets finally got to ann street which put us right diagonally across from tower 2 of the world trade center david wanted to stop and take pictures i wanted to try to call karen and let her know we got outside so i took out my phone i called and the circuits were busy i couldn't get through we didn't know that people were saying goodbye to their loved ones who were up in the towers and who weren't going to come down alive we didn't know any of that i had just put my phone away and david was putting his camera away when a police officer yelled get out of here it's coming down right now we heard this rumble that became this deafening roar i describe it as kind of a combination of a freight train and a waterfall you could hear debris falling metal clattering glass clinking and breaking and crashing and this white noise of the whole towers collapsing david turned and ran he was gone everybody was running literally i bodily lifted rozelle turned 180 degrees and started running back the way i came now going south on broadway with the building right on my right hand side and as soon as i started to run i thought god i can't believe that you got us out of a building just to have it fall on us that was probably the time that i was losing it as much as anything but the next thing that happened is really for me the crux of the story i heard a voice in my head as clearly as you hear me and the voice said don't worry about what you can't control focus on running with rosella and the rest will take care of itself and i'm telling you i heard that as clearly as you hear me god talks to us do we listen yeah it was loud that day but i must have been listening and i think that we can hear that voice anytime we want if we really learn to listen well that's why i think that we're not broken we let ourselves be and we don't listen for the guidance to make us whole we try to take control over things over which we don't have control we don't focus on the things over which we do have control and that's the issue i also when i heard that voice had this sudden conviction and peace that if roselle and i worked together we truly would be okay and that was nothing new for a guide dog team but what a reminder and what a feeling to get it right then is we ran and i knew we'd be okay we got to the corner of fulton street and broadway turned right now going west on fulton street ran a little bit caught up to david david stopped realizing that he had just run off in fear and he was going to come back and try to find me i said david don't worry about it as he apologized i said we're we're okay let's keep going the building's coming down and we ran and then suddenly we were engulfed in the dust cloud all the dirt and debris and dust the fine particles of tower two as it collapsed the dust cloud was so thick david said you couldn't see your hand six inches in front of your nose i can tell you it was so thick that i felt the debris as it went down my throat with every breath i took we were breathing in more of that stuff than we were breathing in air as we ran we knew we had to get out of it or we would be dead we would suffocate so i as we as we ran i told rozelle right right i don't know whether she could hear me or see my hand signals right right good girl keep going but right right suddenly i heard an opening on my right hand side i turned but roselle had beat me to it she turned as she was supposed to do she turned she took one step and she stopped and she wouldn't move focus on running with roselle i knew that if she stopped there had to be a reason so i kind of reached out a hand along the wall i stuck a foot out thinking what i might expect and in fact it was what i thought she stopped at the top of a flight of stairs she did her job perfectly everything i could ask her to do even in all that thundering noise she knew the difference it wasn't a thunderstorm she focused that was what i asked for when i was getting rosella i said i wanted a dog that when she's working who knows how to focus and when she's not she can be a dog and play and be silly and she is very was very silly she liked to steal socks and hide them not chew them up just seal them and hide them here's a game so we walk down the stairs we find ourselves in the lobby entrance to the fulton street subway station at the bottom of the stairs there was a woman crying saying help help my eyes are filled with dirt somebody please help i happened to be close to her i reached out i took her arm and i said hey my name is mike i'm blind i've got my guide dog roselle here she'll make sure that neither of us fall down the stairs you're not anywhere near them you're okay i knew the station she wasn't anywhere near them but i understood her fear i said what's your name she said her name was carol and i introduced myself and i said you're okay go ahead and clean out your eyes and we stood there and she was working on that when a gentleman came up the stairs he said his name was lou he was an employee of the subway station he took all of us who were there at the moment down the stairs into the subway system to an employee locker room where there was a water fountain we could kind of clear our lungs and sit on benches there was a fan and we just sat there trying to make sense of it all not a lot of talking we were there about 10 minutes and a police officer came and said the air is clear up above you need to leave right now we followed him because he just turned and left we went up the stairs we walked through the lobby of the little arcade went upstairs outside and discovered as david looked around and said oh my god tower 2 is gone the air was a little clearer i said david what do you mean what do you see and he said all i see your pillars is smoke the tower's gone you sure yeah it's gone we stood there for a couple of seconds maybe a minute or so and then just turned and continued to walk west on fulton street not even talking much what could you say we walked for about 10 minutes we were well past the world trade center and then we heard that freight train waterfall sound again we knew it was our tower coming down we thought we were safe from debris but david looked back and he said there is another dust cloud coming let's move over here to the side out of the dust cloud and we did covered our faces hunkered down closed our eyes and waited for everything to pass and for the noise to subside and after it did we opened our eyes and looked around and david said oh my god mike there's no world trade center anymore i said what do you mean he said it's gone well what do you see david all i see are fingers of fire and flame hundreds of feet tall and pillars of smoke the towers are gone it's gone we had gone into that complex three hours before just to do work and then the blink of an eye it was gone we stood there for a minute or so and then i said i gotta try to call karen this time i got through and she was the one who told us for the first time that two airplanes had deliberately been crashed into the towers one into the pentagon and a fourth was still missing at that time over pennsylvania i had employees who were supposed to be coming in as i said my sales team was out one of them was to be supposed to be going to canter fitzgerald at 10 o'clock which was up on about the 99th floor of tower 1. he was pulling into the subway station the path station under new york city and under the world trade center when tower 2 was hit there was this awful vibration and shaking of the train he told me later the engineer wouldn't even let anyone off they just sped back around and out to hoboken new jersey so he stood there and watched the towers coming down not knowing about his colleague in the office me and what what happened we spent the rest of the day moving toward midtown manhattan and later that night when i learned that the trains were running i was able to get on a train and go home meanwhile a long time close friend of karen's who was now also living in new jersey tom painter had come down tom was a frequent visitor and we would visit him good friend and karen had known him since high school in california he came to be with her and with me if i were home because he didn't know where i was and it was some time after he got there that i called and said that we were okay he drove karen to the train station and at seven o'clock that night as i was getting off the train i heard our van arrive i walk down the stairs across the sidewalk up the ramp into our fan and finally got to hug karen for the first time later we were comparing notes and we both realized we were thinking the same thing what might else they be doing that would keep us apart but we got back together the next day i called guide dogs for the blind where i got roselle and all of my guide dogs i did that in order to tell them that we had survived because some of them had visited us and i knew that they would be wondering if we were okay if they thought about us and suddenly remember that that they had been to the world trade center and seen us there from that a media story was released about us and that went viral on the media on the 14th of september i made my first visit to larry king live first of five visits was on a lot of tv after that even before 9 11 we wanted to move back to california but guide dogs for the blind offered me a position as national public affairs director spokesperson for the organization and in february i moved back to california to take that job karen joined me and we stayed in a hotel for a few months while we were getting a house modified for our use um and then we stayed there and we still live in novato california it's about 27 miles north of san francisco we've actually lived there longer than we lived anywhere else we've lived there since officially june of 2002 so we've we've been in the same house now for 10 years in eight months and almost nine months so it's kind of cool to be in one place but in any case in 2008 guide dogs ended the job that that i was doing for them they decided that they didn't really need that anymore so i started my own company to continue the same work educating people talking about change talk about making choices discussing the idea of teamwork and god in our lives and telling people about blindness and blind people saying it's time that we all become inclusive and that we truly learn from each other and that we recognize we're all god's children and that our job is to learn to listen to that voice and our job is to recognize that we truly don't need to be broken but it's up to us to fix that we can't wait for god to do it because god is waiting for us to do it and god already i believe perceives us as whole people and if we're not it's our choice not god's i don't even think god is disappointed god doesn't work that way god just stands ready to help bring wholeness back we have to decide to fix it we have to learn to hear that voice and we have to learn to recognize that each and every one of us can do it no matter who we are no matter what we do i want to end by leaving you with some guide dog wisdom from thunderdog the book that we wrote in 2010 it was published in 2011 it went right to the new york times bestseller list and i know we're basically out of books so if you want more you can go to my website www.michaelhingson.com and buy them they'll come autographed and photographed with roselle's paw print we got it six days before she died in 2011. also rosella is a winner of the american hero dog awards for 2011 the first award of its kind so she was given it posthumously but she won that which is really pretty cool and if you belong to any organization that needs a speaker i'd love to chat with you so you can find us at michaelhingson.com and would love to work with you and i've got cards and we can give you those as well but i want to leave you with something from thunderdog guide dog wisdom lessons i learned from roselle on 911 and it goes like this number one there's a time to work and a time to play know the difference when the harness goes on it's time to work work hard others are depending on you number two focus in and use all of your senses learn to tell the difference between a harmless thunderstorm and a true emergency don't let your sight get in the way of your vision number three sometimes the way is hard but if you work together someone will pass along a water bottle when you need it number four i'm sure this is roselle's favorite always but always kiss firefighters number five ignore distractions there's more to life than playing fetch or chasing tennis balls number six listen carefully to those who are older and more experienced than you they'll help you find the way number seven don't stop until work is over sometimes being a hero is just doing your job number eight the dust cloud won't last forever keep going and look for the way out it will come number nine shake off the dust and move on remember the first guide dog command forward we make mistakes folks we can dwell on the mistakes or we can learn lessons from the mistakes that we make that's why i think god waits for us so we blow it one particular time or another do we learn from it and get closer to god that's the issue number 10 when work is over play hard with your friends and don't forget to share your favorite bowdabone everyone thanks very much help the good guys win stay firm in your faith and we'll all really do well together thanks very much questions

Channel: First United Methodist Church of Fort Worth

Views: 37,792

Rating: 4.8847456 out of 5

Keywords: Michael Hingson, Blind 9/11 Survivor, Lighthouse for the Blind, guide dog, FUMC Fort Worth

Id: PL0_Dhu9tpM

Length: 67min 53sec (4073 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 04 2013