Community Corner
9/11 Reflection: Business Trip to D.C. Goes Haywire
Lake Forest man close to where plane crashed into Pentagon.
Editor's note: As we approach the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on Sunday, this story continues a series of reflections this week from Lake Forest, Lake Bluff residents on that day, or how that day has affected their lives in the past decade. We invite our readers to add their own reflections in the Comment section at the end of the story, or email editor Jim Powers at james.powers@patch.com.
Every year on the anniversary of 9/11, Greg Longoria of Lake Forest sits down at his computer and writes a thank you e-mail to Leo and Lynn Subler, who opened their home on a day no one wanted to be alone.
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Longoria was in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 11, 2001, to conduct a series of business meetings. Despite the calamity erupting around them both in New York City and closer at the Pentagon, Longoria and his business partner, Michael Herzberg, went ahead and conducted the meeting they had scheduled.
“It was the weirdest thing,” he said. “We had a perfectly reasonable meeting. But when we looked outside the windows, we saw F-16 fighters flying over and everyone running out of the city.”
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Where is my partner?
The building that Longoria was in was evacuated and he remembered that Herzberg was flying in to meet him at about the same time that the planes hit the World Trade Center.
“I didn’t know what my partner’s situation was and how we were going to meet,” Longoria said. “I was really worried about him and even thought that it could have been his plane that flew into one of the buildings.”
Since he didn’t have any friends in the city and wasn’t sure what the day would bring, Longoria went to an ATM and took out a few hundred dollars and then went into a pharmacy and bought a map, just in case he had to walk out of the nation’s capital.
“It was crazy,” he recalled. “There were big black Cadillac Escalades screaming down the streets with their lights on and people running all over the place. The rumor was that a plane was heading toward the White House.”
At this point Longoria decided that he needed to find Herzberg, so he walked to the building where the second meeting of the morning was to take place. The security guards stopped him at the door and told him that they weren’t letting anyone in the building, but Longoria persisted and was allowed in. To his relief, his partner was in the conference room waiting for him, as was the gentleman who had set up the meeting.
Get out of town
After their meeting and lunch, Longoria and the two men headed out the restaurant, only to be confronted by National Guardsmen.
“They looked at us in disbelief and told us that they were evacuating the city, closing the bridges, and we had to get out of here,” Longoria said. “At that point we were nervous because we didn’t know anybody, and where were we going to go?”
They got a lift out of Washington into Virginia, where the Subler's let them stay for the night. That night at their Virginia farmhouse, Longoria had the chance to watch the day’s events unfold on television. “When it was all taking place it was difficult to really get a grasp on the gravity of the situation,” he said.
What struck him that night was the silence. He remembered walking outside and looking at the sky. The stars were vivid, but there wasn’t an airplane in the sky and it was so quiet.
A change in perspective
The next morning Longoria and his partner picked up a rental car at Dulles International Airport that his assistant had booked for them from her office in Chicago, just before her building was evacuated. They made the 13-hour drive back to Lake Forest, but if not for the fast action of his assistant, it would have been days before they got back home.
On the drive home and in the days, weeks, and months after the tragic events of Sept. 11 took place, Longoria had a lot of time to reflect on what it all meant to him, his family, and the world.
“I really understood that life is short, so I changed my line of work some and now do something more entrepreneurial, where I can control my own destiny. I spend more time with my family and I’m not on the road as much. I also leaned into my faith more and drew closer to God,” said Longoria.