Urban legend.

• Author: Kinney, David
• Position: World Trade Center-related story - Brief Article

I was pulling into the parking lot, when Morning Edition anchor Bob Edwards announced there was a report that an airplane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers. Switching off the radio, I thought, "Jesus, that couldn't have been Laura and Ray."

Laura Gosser, our general manager, and her husband, a Bank of America senior vice president, had flown in their Cessna 210 to New York five days earlier. There they planned to see the sights, attend a couple of U.S. Open tennis matches, take in a Yankees game and catch up with Terry Noland, our former managing editor who is now features editor of SmartMoney magazine. That very morning, I knew, they were taking off from the same New Jersey airport JFK Jr. had departed, their destination the one he never reached: Nantucket. That was creepy enough, I thought as I walked into the office to find people gathering around the TV set in the conference room.

It was late that afternoon before Laura called. I didn't get a chance to talk to her, but this is the story, passed from staff member to staff member, that I heard:

Twenty-four hours earlier, at the very time the terrorists struck the following day, she and Ray had been up in the World Trade Center. That night, they had dinner with Terry and his wife, who told them about something they had missed seeing and urged them to go back before they left town. That's what they decided to do. Had they not gotten a late start the next morning, they would have been at the top when the the first 767 hit. Climbing into a taxi, they had told the cabbie where they wanted to go. He turned, sadly shook his head, then announced: "No, not there. You can't go there." Then he told them what: had happened only minutes earlier.

No wonder I experienced a psychic shiver when word first came over the radio. That night, I told my wife the story. "That didn't happen,"...