Jim Wentland flew to New York for a sales meeting. He ended up renting a car to get home to Mobile.
The Mobile man was in the city on Sept. 11, 2001, when he saw smoke rising from the Twin Towers. He was 35 years old. Twenty-five years later, he says the day permanently changed what a single place name means to him.
Chaos, Then a Long Drive
Wentland described the scene in the city as chaotic.
With commercial aviation shut down nationwide — the Federal Aviation Administration grounded every civilian aircraft in U.S. airspace that morning — he and his colleagues did what thousands of stranded travelers did that week. They rented cars and drove.
The drive from New York to Mobile runs well over 1,100 miles. For business travelers caught away from home, the return trip became a multi-day journey across a country that had stopped.
What New York Means Now
Wentland said the association has never loosened.
“You can’t use the word New York without thinking 9/11, ever again, not for me,” he said. “For everybody that lives in New York at that time, you can understand their stress, their angst about all the surroundings of things that have changed in this country since then, and they want people to not forget the same reasons because they don’t want it to happen again.”
He put the conclusion plainly.
“That’s the main thing is that we don’t forget so this doesn’t happen again, and I hope that’s the big message behind 9/11,” Wentland said.
From Witness to Teacher
More than a decade after the attacks, Wentland went on to teach history at Cottage Hill Christian Academy for four years.
He shared his account with students during that time — which put him in an unusual position for a history teacher. The event he was describing was in the textbook, and he had been standing in it.
He said it matters that younger people understand what happened that day.
That view is now widely shared among people who were adults in 2001. Students in high school today were born more than a decade after the attacks. For them, 9/11 arrives entirely secondhand, and the number of classrooms where someone in the room saw the smoke shrinks every year.
Wentland was one of them.