Zack Florent was in high school stage-craft class listening to morning shock jocks on the radio when he heard the news. He thought it was a joke.

Laura Steele awoke to find her husband and 6-year-old daughter glued to the TV. Like millions of others, she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

Say “nine-eleven” today, and events of 10 years ago that would have made Sept. 11, 2001, just another gorgeous late-summer day dissolve. Before the horror, it was the International Day of Peace and national 911 Day, honoring emergency dispatchers.

But so it was on a Tuesday set aside for those who try to make sense out of chaos that two jetliners traveling in excess of 400 mph under clear skies slammed into New York City’s World Trade Center in a deadly act of terrorism. We know it now as simply “9/11.”

Fort Wayne and northeast Indiana responded as other communities responded nationwide. Here is some of what happened locally that day a decade ago.

Sept. 11, 2001, promises to be mostly sunny in northeast Indiana, with a high in the mid-70s. Overnight lows are dipping into the 50s, and the outlook calls for partly cloudy skies to end the week. The 27th annual Johnny Appleseed Festival starts Saturday.

Not yet embracing daylight saving time, Indiana is an hour behind the East Coast. As 8 a.m. approaches in Fort Wayne, the temperature nears 60 degrees.

Among the morning headlines is Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s plan to drastically trim the $300 billion-plus defense budget. “Today, we declare war on bureaucracy,” he claims.

Indiana news includes a state hiring freeze announced by Gov. Frank O’Bannon in reaction to continued state revenue shortfalls.

At IPFW, then-Fort Wayne Mayor Graham Richard meets with others to discuss economic development. As events unfold that morning, his thoughts return to a tornado that ripped through the city four months earlier.

American Olympic gold-medal wrestler Rulon Gardner, with an inspiring story of personal triumph and impossible victory at the 2000 Games, is scheduled to speak at the college later in the day.

A 30-day petition drive to expand the Allen County Public Library begins. Among other events, local officials plan to gather on the Allen County Courthouse lawn to honor emergency dispatchers.

In schools, third-, sixth-, eighth- and 10th-graders will take the ISTEP+, the state’s yearly proficiency exam.

As yellow buses and parents drop students off in the routine morning rush, hijackers in New York City aim American Airlines Flight 11 at the World Trade Center’s north tower. Plane and tower merge in a fireball at 7:46 a.m. local time.

Zack Florent, then a Snider High School senior, is working with classmates on the set for “To Kill a Mockingbird.” It’s first period and events in New York start to unfold. Radio DJs briefly mention the attack and then break.

“We all just sort of heard it, and we’re like, ‘That was weird. I wonder if that was a joke,’ ” Florent recalls. Back on air seconds later, the radio personalities encourage listeners to turn on their TVs.

In their teacher’s classroom, the students stare “in shock and horror” at what the TV shows them.

“There were people in my class crying. People just sitting down. It was just complete silence,” Florent said.

The north tower is smoldering, and as they watch, the second plane strikes the south tower at 8:03 a.m. local time.

“I remember actually seeing that little speck, that other plane, coming in and striking that other building and thinking I was watching some poorly produced movie,” he said.

In the next hour-and-a-half, other hijacked planes crash into the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field and both towers collapse.

At IPFW, Mayor Richard’s meeting abruptly ends when city police Chief Rusty York calls a Richard staff member about the attacks. City and county officials gather at police headquarters and field media questions. While he never believes the city is targeted, “There was some concern this was a nationwide, coordinated attack against assets across the country,” Richard recalls. He urges calm.

Passengers waiting to board flights at Fort Wayne International Airport are instructed about 9 a.m. to return to the ticket counter, where they are told their flights are canceled. The airport remains shut for two days.

Watching the news in their Lake Avenue home, Laura Steele and her family are appalled.

“When I came down those stairs and saw that TV, it was just shell-shock. I could imagine it was similar to Pearl Harbor,” she said.

When she hears that some air passengers might be stranded, Steele calls the airport offering her home.

“It’s the right thing to do,” she said. “We were raised in a Christian home, both my husband and I and our daughter also. And we are our brothers’ keepers. Even though they’re traveling across the country, they’re still our neighbors. The whole golden rule kind of thing.”

Fort Wayne emergency workers are placed on heightened awareness. At the City-County Building, doors on the east and west sides are locked to focus security on the principal entrances. The building’s American flag is lowered to half-staff about 10:30 a.m.

The Federal Building in Fort Wayne is closed, and security patrols the grounds.

Indiana State Police are told to prepare for deployment anywhere in the state.

Fort Wayne hospitals coordinate to take in additional patients if needed. Parkview Hospital’s Samaritan helicopter is grounded with other air traffic. After noon, it must get approval for flights through Fort Wayne International Airport and FAA officials, a time-consuming process.

At the airport and across the world, people stop to watch TVs locked on scenes of the burning towers and their smoldering rubble. In courthouses, restaurants, retail shops – anywhere there is a TV – the tragedy is repeated over and over.

About 40 area residents keep plans to gather downtown for a local observation of the previously planned International Day of Peace. “It shouldn’t take something in our backyard to motivate us for peace,” one participant says.

Local gasoline prices spike as much as 24 cents a gallon just a few hours after the terrorist attacks. While the average price is $1.65 for unleaded, most stations are charging about $1.89 a gallon, according to reporter observations. The state attorney general launches an investigation that a year later finds 58 gas stations statewide had charged excessive prices.

At Snider High School, the principal tells teachers to turn off TVs. Students and many teachers are upset, Florent recalls.

“The next thing I remember is proceeding through the day wondering, you know, what the heck was going on,” he said. “Obviously, no one was able to focus on any school-related work that day.”

It’s a different story at Carroll High School. After administering an ISTEP+ exam, a teacher fighting back tears explains to Whitney Moore and other sophomores what’s going on. The rest of the school day is spent watching TV coverage of the tragedy.

“It’s a moment that’s pretty much frozen in history,” Moore says now. “A lot of people went and called their parents and their churches, talked to their priests. Luckily, Carroll was very relaxed and kind of gave us the time to deal with it ourselves but also deal with it amongst everybody.”

Some schools postpone athletic events as churches open their doors to grieving residents. Some local Christians see the destruction as a sign of the “end times,” while others are more measured in their response and pray for a better world.

With Muslim extremists blamed for the attacks, there is an immediate concern about people who might resemble or be confused with those who practice Islam. “We called together rather quickly a collaborative effort of faith-based community leaders, again to urge some calm,” former Mayor Richard recalls.

There are a few incidents “of anger being displaced,” Richard said. One person of Indian descent is threatened. “There was some concern about the safety of that family and their home.”

Area gun stores report an increase in sales.

Laura Steele’s call to the airport offering stranded travelers a place to stay is met with gratitude.

“They said they’d write our name down and if they needed anyone – it was like the person was just flabbergasted. ‘We’ll write it down, and if we have anybody, we’ll certainly let you know.’ So I gave them our phone number.” She also offers to pick travelers up, but no one calls or comes to the house.

For two days, Steele leaves home only to go to work at a fabric store and buy an American flag. She also gets fabric to fashion a black flag for her car in respect for those who died.

“My husband and I, boy, we were ready to go sign up in the Army,” she said.

With the attacks consuming his day, Richard’s mind drifts back to May 26 when a tornado hit the city’s north side and heavily damaged The Towne House retirement home on St. Joe Center Road. Maintenance workers with weather radios had ushered residents to the basement before the storm hit.

“It looked like a doll house with the back out,” Richard recalls. “What struck me about that was how close we were to losing literally hundreds of lives.” It is that kind of disaster, he reasons, that is more likely to strike his city.

At the end of the school day, with studying nearly impossible, one of Florent’s teachers relents and turns on a TV with the sound off as students work on an assignment.

“I very distinctly remember the frustration when they turned off the TVs and told us to ‘go about your day as normal,’ ” Florent said. “It was just so disrespectful to us as human beings. This massive event is happening and it’s going to shape the entire future, and we weren’t allowed to participate in that.

“It was like an experience was robbed from us. It was a horrible experience, but it was also a unifying experience.”

Later at IPFW, wrestler Rulon Gardner tells reporters that “Americans have to be strong. There have been so many tragedies that have happened now, and I think we have to support each other,” he says. “We think it is a big world, but we are all connected. We are all together here on this Earth.”

In the days that follow, several local memorial services are held for the victims of the attacks.

Fire, police and emergency medical services vehicles display black ribbons. American flags sprout from car windows and antennas.

The Salvation Army, United Way of Allen County and other local service agencies set up special funds for disaster relief.

Some semblance of normalcy appears when a decision is made to proceed with Friday high school football games.

Now a 27-year-old investigator for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Chicago, Florent graduated high school to become a theater major at Ball State University.

After college, he joined the Peace Corps in the Philippines for two years.

Though living abroad and seeing how other cultures view the U.S. influenced his career in public service, he has no doubt that 9/11 also played a role.

But the war on terror that followed 9/11 has frustrated the Steele family, who still live in the same house on Lake Avenue.

“The way the government is handling it. The way it has drug out this long. The way they cover it,” Laura Steele said. “They deal with it diplomatically now as opposed to WWII,” when the U.S. “kicked butt” in four years. “And this has taken 10. They have bound the military’s hands.”

Richard, now a consultant and speaker through his company Graham Richard Associates LLC, views 9/11 as a turning point in efforts to combine city and county emergency communications, at least to the point of having common equipment and agreeing on a single homeland security director.

Local, state and federal officials became less territorial in crime-fighting efforts, Richard said.

“If there was a sense of innocence about living in peace and prosperity,” Richard said, “I would say that was the day that it became very clear that we’re in a different era.”

rshawgo@jg.net