By Kalin Krohe, Panhandle Post
The events on Sept. 11, 2001, shook America and world. This year marks its 20th anniversary.
As the 20th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, former KCOW News Director Kevin Horn shares his memories of that day as it unfolded on the air and behind the scenes.
Horn was KCOW News Director with Eagle Communications from 1999 through 2014.
"It was an interesting day because I woke up at 5:15 a.m. and turned KCOW on," Horn said. "Jason [Wentworth] was the morning show host back then, even 20 years ago. He broke in [on-air] around 5:30 a.m. to offer an announcement from the sheriff that a couple of young people had ran away from this youth facility that used to be up at the 16-mile corner off Highway 87 and the 62A spur. That was going to be the top story of the day. I said to myself, well this is going to be an interesting news day. An hour and 15, 20 minutes that all changed."
An ABC News hourly update was aired on KCOW at 7 a.m. Doug Limerick was the news correspondent for ABC at the time.
"He was probably one of the best national radio announcers for news that I have ever heard," Horn said. "He even filled in for Paul Harvey when he could. Anyway, he said this airplane had hit the Twin Towers in New York city and he didn't have a lot of details. It had only happened about 15 minutes prior to him being on the air. I'm thinking it must have been someone flying a small airplane that lost their navigation or maybe the airplane died while he was flying it. I'm thinking something like that, never in my wildest dreams did I think it was a huge airliner that was deliberately flown into a building."
Horn said after ABC News he went on air for 12 to 15 minutes to do his newscast.
"Then I turned the TV on I had in my office and then you really saw just how horrible this was," Horn said. "Already the networks had received people who were able to video it. Well then we actually did see what the second plane had done. It became real obvious that this was a deliberate attack and this whole day was going to be focused on New York. We, of course, heard about the flying of the plane into the Pentagon at the state capital in Washington and then the crash in Pennsylvania. Now you're thinking, gosh, are they going to attack the nation's capitol? Are they going to fly something into the White House? I never worried about us in western Nebraska, but then you start thinking the worst. Are they going to hit Los Angeles? Are they going to hit something in Chicago like the Sears Tower? That's how I remember the early, first hour or hour and a half of the day."
Horn said KCOW and Double Q Country stayed with the ABC News coverage the entire day on-air.
"Jason really was on the ball," Horn said. "He immediately hooked up to a full-coverage satellite from ABC. We just switched all of our programming over to ABC for the day. What I do remember on Double Q Country [105.9 FM/97.5 FM] was, since that was a satellite music service, they changed and it was full news. They had totally changed their programming; we couldn't play any commercials. None of the commercials could play because they weren't sending the tones to play the commercials on the automated system on Double Q Country. So I went into the studio after 11 a.m. and started playing the commercials by hand because if you don't play the commercials, you don't bill the client. I only had one person call the station really angry about that, criticizing us for doing so. But, it was a decision I made at the time, whether it was right, wrong or indifferent, I still haven't decided to this day."
Horn said one of the things he remembers most that day was many people in the community went to the gas station for fuel.
"All of the sudden these rumors got started, not only around Alliance, but around the state and probably across the country that gas was going to go up to over $5 a gallon," Horn said. "People bought into that. The gas stations in Alliance had these huge long lines. I took my car out to Martha's gas station at Third and Flack. I was like the fifteenth person in line. The thing too that I remember was not many people were sitting in their cars waiting to get the gas. They were outside their cars talking to each other. I just always viewed that as some sort of intense immediate therapy that people needed to talk to each other. They weren't concerned about getting gas as much as just visiting with each other."
Horn said WESTCO CEO David Briggs came to KCOW the next morning to talk about the gas scare and calm people down.
"All of his communication with his suppliers was that gas was not going to go up to over $5 a gallon," Horn said. "And it never did."
Panhandle Post asked Horn how he felt covering the 9/11 story from a local angle.
"I really didn't do much locally that I recall because the network coverage was so intense," Horn said. "Even 20 years ago, there were a lot of TV networks that took care of all that. We didn't alter our news programming. The next day we did our full 15 minutes of news and 10 minutes of sports at 7 a.m. on KCOW and Double Q Country."
Horn said he interviewed one person about 9/11.
"I interviewed Bob Watt who was always one of my favorite recollection people," Horn said. "He had a great memory. I asked him to compare it to Pearl Harbor. He was a young man when Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941 when that killed over 3,000 people — 9/11 killed well over 2,000 people. Of course, the big difference was the information was so much slower in 1941 than it was in 2001. He's the only person I really remember interviewing about 9/11 and getting some reaction."