There is a television commercial for a hotel chain that shows a leaf twirling and spinning as it falls through the air among tall buildings.

Jane Tedder can’t watch it.

The leaf reminds the Lawrence woman of the people she saw who had jumped from the upper floors of the World Trade Center five years ago on Sept. 11, 2001.

“That is the image that sticks with me and won’t ever leave,” Tedder, 63, said as she recalled standing across the street from the towers after leaving a nearby hotel that day.

Jonathan Morris has a box of newspapers and magazines he collected at the time of the terrorist attacks.

“Just last week I took them out and started looking at them again,” said Morris, 36, a Lawrence resident who at the time lived in Brooklyn and worked at a community mental health agency three blocks from Ground Zero.

Day of terror

Today, as the nation marks the five-year anniversary of the day terrorists hijacked commercial airliners and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, millions of Americans will watch television news accounts and documentaries and reflect on those events.

Morris and his wife, Margaret, will not be among them. Instead, just as they have done on previous 9/11 anniversaries, they will spend time making phone calls to the friends and former co-workers they left behind in New York when they moved to Lawrence.

“I found it significant that I was at work with my staff during the attack,” said Morris, who now is an instructor in Kansas University’s Public Management Center. “It reminds me that we spend a great amount of life at work, so it is imperative we find ways to cultivate meaningful relationships and create pleasant work environments for each other.”

Margaret Morris did not make it to her job at the Children’s Aid Society that day. She spent much of it at home with a friend who had come over after leaving her office. Once the Morrises moved to Kansas, they generally had only themselves to help each other deal with the emotions they had after 9/11. That took about a year.

“It was such a shock,” said Margaret Morris, who now is education director at the Lawrence Arts Center.

Tedder also will not watch 9/11 shows on television.

“I’ve seen it,” she said.

‘Huge, huge clouds’

Tedder was in New York attending a business conference. She was vice president and senior economist for Security Benefit Group in Topeka, and was staying at the Marriott World Trade Center Hotel located at the base of Tower 2. Her sister Roberta Krause of Seattle took a vacation and stayed with her.

Tedder and Krause were in their room on the 16th floor getting ready to go for a walk when the first plane struck. Their hotel shook violently. They didn’t know what had happened but saw debris falling from the sky when they looked out their window. They fled the building dressed in their shorts, T-shirts and walking shoes. Left behind were their purses which contained money, credit cards and identification.

Tedder was outside when she heard the roar of the second plane as it crashed into the second tower. Police directed the crowd to nearby Battery Park where she found a phone and used a toll-free number to call her company in Topeka.

Then the first tower collapsed, followed a short time later by the second tower.

“You see these huge, huge clouds of ash and pulverized concrete and dust come rolling toward you, almost like a living creature,” Tedder said. “You could not see two or three feet in front of you.”

Since that day Tedder doesn’t like to drive through fog because “then I’m back in that cloud and I hate that,” she said.

Tedder and her sister managed to board a ferry and cross into New Jersey then walked six miles to Hoboken. They found a senior center that had been turned into a refugee center where they used phones to call family. They spent the night sleeping on mats in a gym.

The following night they slept in a rectory. Eventually, Tedder was picked up by a daughter in Connecticut. It wasn’t until Sunday, five days after the attack, that she was able to fly home.

Surreal scene

Jonathan Morris was riding the subway to his office when he heard, then saw that the Trade Center was in flames. He did not know exactly what happened. The mental health agency where he worked was on the ground floor and became a refuge for people fleeing the collapsing towers.

“We help people in a crisis, so it just made sense that we suddenly became a triage center,” Morris said. “Our role at that point was just to help people clean up a bit, rest and gather themselves before they went on.”

Morris remembers a woman suffering from an ankle injury asking him to call her mother in Georgia and report that she was OK. He and other staff members then carried her to nearby New York University Downtown Hospital. At the hospital Morris saw ambulances lined up ready to go somewhere, numerous empty gurneys and medical personnel “waiting to care for people who weren’t there,” he said.

Some firefighters and police officers made their way to Morris’ office and used the phones. He later learned there also were people there from the mayor’s office. Other seeking aid ranged from Wall Street types to the homeless, Morris said.

The building was closed early that afternoon. Morris then walked home to Brooklyn.

Healing process

Tedder has several mementos of that day, including a T-shirt and light jacket given to her by strangers. She has the electric toothbrush she held in her hand as she rushed out of the hotel. She also has a copy of the Jersey Journal newspaper with a picture and story about her and her sister at the refugee center. And she has a small Teddy bear dressed in a New York police uniform, which she said serves to remind her of all the emergency personnel working that day.

Because of her experience that day in New York Tedder retired at the end of 2001 to focus on doing volunteer work.

“I decided it was time to turn my life around and do things for other people,” she said. “I had never been in a position before where I had absolutely nothing but the clothes on my back. We were totally at the mercy of others. You see the importance of there being people to step up and to help people when they need it.”

Now Tedder is a volunteer at Kansas Audio-Reader Network and delivers senior meals. She helps low- to moderate-income senior citizens prepare their income taxes, serves on the finance committee at Health Care Access and is president of the Kansas-Oklahoma Conference of United Churches of Christ.

The Morrises had decided before 9/11 that they were going to move to Kansas. A native of McPherson, Jonathan Morris still had relatives here. But the couple still return to New York about once a year to visit old friends and see familiar sites. They remember how their neighborhood fire station lost 12 of the 30 firefighters who worked there, including some who used to help Margaret Morris carry groceries into her apartment building when she was pregnant.

The return visits are part of the healing process, they said.

“We go to the World Trade Center Ground Zero and just sort of have to touch the place and then go on, even if it is just for five minutes,” Margaret Morris said.