78 Floors to Freedom on 9/11: Michael Hingson, His Guide Dog Roselle, & Their Unforgettable Escape

Well, we're gonna do that.

I said, look, you don't need to do that.

I was trying to make light of it.

Well, we're gonna send somebody with you anyway.

And I said, look, I got my guy dog Roselle here, and we're going down the stairs.

We're fine.

And he says, Oh, what a good dog.

And he starts petting Roselle.

And it wasn't the time to give him a lecture about you don't have a guy dog in higher.

SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Grit, Grace, and Inspiration.

I'm your host, Kevin Lowe, and I'm excited to welcome you inside.

Welcome back to the podcast.

How are you today?

This is episode number 181 here on Grit Race and Inspiration.

I am your host, Kevin Lowe.

And uh, hey, first and foremost, I'm excited you're here today.

Welcome to the podcast.

If this is your first time, well, welcome.

And I want to let you know that this is a place meant to be that inspiration, that motivation, that bit of encouragement, you need to finally realize that this life is worth living, no matter what challenges or obstacles you are faced with.

Those challenges, those obstacles, they're meant to be overcome.

And this podcast is here to inspire you to do it.

So welcome here.

Now, for our loyal listeners, well, welcome back to the show.

Today I am in the studio with a guy who I know is going to entertain you.

And he's also gonna really give you a fresh new perspective on life.

His name is Michael Hingson.

And the title of his story is the captivating part.

It's the part that draws your attention.

It's the part that you think, wow, this might be something to listen to.

And that title, well, that is the fact that Michael Hingson was in the Twin Towers during 9-11.

And here he was, a man who is blind, and yet he was the one who would guide his co-workers down 78 floors of Tower One, escaping just before that tower would collapse.

Now, of course, he had some help, and that was his amazing guide dog Razelle.

But that's the highlight, that's the top-level story.

That's what the people want to focus on.

But in my opinion, there's a deeper kind of symbolism to the story, to Michael's story.

And it's something that I love to focus on with this podcast, and that is flipping the script.

You've heard me talk about it before.

I know you have.

And what Michael's story is doing is flipping the script by flipping the perspective of somebody who is seen as needing help to somebody who is offering help.

Because society has taught us that people who are quote unquote disabled, they need help.

There's something wrong with them.

And so therefore, we need to help them.

So in the incence of 9-11, wouldn't you have thought that it was the blind guy who was the one who needed rescuing?

No, not in this case.

Because in this situation, the quote unquote blind guy, the disabled guy, he was the one leading the way.

Him and his amazing guide dog Rizelle.

The power in that is absolutely incredible.

And I feel like it really radiates throughout Michael Hingson's story.

Changing the perspective, switching up the narrative on what it means to be quote unquote disabled.

My hope is that you come away with a fresh new perspective on life, a fresh new view on the people around you.

And instead of viewing people who have something different about them as being quote unquote disabled, start viewing them as, hey, they might just be the one saving my butt when the stuff goes down.

That's what we're talking about.

Flipping the script on our perspective on the reality of the situation.

And well, the story of Michael Hingson and his guy dog Rosel are doing that in a beautiful, beautiful way.

So, with that said, this is my interview with Michael Hingson.

Before we dive in though, I do want to remind you that if you're a fan of the podcast and want to take it to the next level, I want to invite you to join the brand new Facebook community made just for the fans of this podcast.

It's called the Grit Grace and Inspiration Community.

It's a private Facebook page where we can just hang out and do life together.

I would love to have you join me.

All you have to do is check out the link inside of today's show notes, and that will take you directly to the group where you can request to join, and uh we can start doing life together.

Remember, it's the grit Grace and Inspiration community on Facebook.

Check out the link in the show notes to join today.

With all of that said, here is my interview with Michael Heat.

Michael Hexon, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you.

Pleasure to be here.

Yeah, well, man, I'm so excited to have you here.

I'm excited to dive into your story, what you've done in the past, what you're doing today.

But in order to give a little bit of context to your story, would you mind kind of taking me back to kind of like childhood, growing up?

What was that like for you?

Where did you grow up?

And we'll kind of go from there.

SPEAKER_02: I was born in Chicago in 1950.

And my parents moved to California when I was five.

In 1950, when I was born two months premature, I was given a pure oxygen environment.

And that's a story that's relatively familiar.

And the bottom line is it affected the retina formation and growth, and it caused blindness.

And the doctors told my parents to send me off to a home for handicapped kids because no blind child could ever grow up to amount to anything in society.

Now, I had a brother two years older than me, and they said, besides, you'll mess him up because you'll be using all your love for this blind kid, and you don't want to do that.

You see, you need to protect the older child.

And my parents just said, hogwash essentially to all of that.

They were, in every sense of the words, attitudinally risk takers.

They said, Of course he can grow up to do whatever he chooses to do, and we're going to give him the opportunity to do that.

And they did.

So I, when I was old enough to do it and learned how, I walked around Chicago or parts of it anyway, and did that with brother and cousins and so on, and then grew up the rest of the time in California, learned to ride a bike along the way, learned how to travel around my neighborhood independently.

And my parents let me do all of that because they recognized that I needed to do that in order to be able to function.

And they encouraged me.

They certainly wanted me to go to public school and so on, and I did.

Along the way, I didn't have braille for a while.

I did for the first year of kindergarten in Chicago, but then I moved to California, and California starts a year of kindergarten a year later than in Chicago.

So I had to have a second year of kindergarten, and I say it that way, not sarcastically, but because I shouldn't have had to.

And the other part about it is that I didn't have any access to braille material in California while I did it in Chicago because my parents worked with the school district and other parents of premature blind kids to get a special kindergarten class in Chicago.

So when I was four, I started learning braille, but came out to California and didn't have access to that or other facilities anymore until I went into the fourth grade.

So my parents helped me with studies and so on.

My dad taught me how to do math in my head, and my mom helped with other things, and they would help me with reading assignments and all that stuff.

And and I grew up not even thinking about being blind.

Yeah, I was a little different and I knew that.

But I never thought about being limited.

I just thought about how I gotta do whatever it is I'm gonna do.

And then going into fourth grade, we uh the the school district hired a resource teacher, a teacher who knew Braille and other things, and I and other kids would spend time with her every day.

And Mrs.

Hirschberger would would help me in once again learning Braille and becoming proficient with it and doing other kinds of things and helping with tests and other things like that, that she would read tests and I would answer them and so on.

And I grew up thinking I was as good as any other kid.

I loved science and technology and started playing with little radio kits when I was 10, got my ham radio, amateur radio license at 14, starting with a novice license.

My dad got his at the same time.

He could have done it any time, but he said, I'm gonna wait.

And when you get yours, then I'll get mine, and that way we can play together.

And we did.

Joined the Boy Scouts along the way and became an Eagle Scout and vigilant in the Order of the Arrow, the Scouting Honor Society.

And always had an interest in science and eventually decided I wanted to go into that.

And when it came time to start considering college, looked at a number of schools and learned about this organization, this school, the University of California at Irvine, which in 1967, when we were looking at colleges, was three years old.

It was a brand new UC campus, like only 2,500 or so students.

And the year I joined, and I and I went down and visited with the chair of the physics department, he said after an hour or hour and a half of talking, yeah, you ought to come here.

And so I I did.

And the year I matured, well, the year I started, 1968 in the fall, was the first year that the campus had a graduating class.

So that's how new and how small it was.

It was a lot of fun.

Yeah.

Went to college, worked at the radio station uh all the time I was there, loved to do radio, played old radio shows for most of the time that I was on campus from six to nine on Sunday with the Radio Hall of Fame on KUCI 89.9, started at 88.9, then moved up a uh megahertz or megacycle and went to 89.9.

And um grew up at campus not even knowing what 60 minutes was because I was competing with Wallace, you know, and and those other 60 minute people, and and had a show that was very well accepted.

And and one of the funny stories about that is I got a call one day, and this guy says, I am Deputy Sheriff Delhagen at the uh Orange County Jail.

And I was just wanting you to know that every Sunday night we have a crisis at the jail that we figured out how to address, and that is that there are a bunch of people who want to watch 60 minutes on TV, but at least half the jail also wants to listen to your show instead of 60 minutes.

So we we put the 60 minutes people in front of a TV in one room, and then on a different floor, we put all the people who want to listen to the Radio Hall of Fame.

And so that was kind of cool.

So I I submit that we we did Wallace, uh, you know, we we were good with Mike Wallace and all those guys.

But did that, uh, graduated with a bachelor's in physics and then went on at UC Irvine to get a master's degree in physics and a secondary teaching credential.

And along the way, I had joined the National Federation of the Blind.

And in 1974, early in 75, the president said, there's this new guy that we're working with.

Uh, we heard about this machine from him that would read print, a guy named Ray Kurzweil, and we're gonna do a project with him to get him funding to finish developing his prototype into a production model.

And our project is gonna be that we're raising foundation funding to buy a bunch of the machines, five of these huge washing machine size pieces of technology.

And we're gonna put them in various places, and we're gonna hire somebody to literally travel around the country for 18 months to set up the machines, work the machines, teach people how to use the machines, write recommendations, write training curriculum, basically do the project.

And we'd like you to do that because you've got the science background.

And so in October of 1976, after college was all over and so on, I flew one Sunday afternoon to Boston where I'd never been before and started working and did that until the project was over and then went to work for Ray.

Wow.

So that was I was very fortunate.

I realized that.

I was able to get a job right out of college without too much grief.

The problem is that after the project ended, Ray Kurzweil said, we're gonna hire you, and he did, and he brought me in.

That was now 1978.

And in like May of 1979 or June of 79, I got called into the office of the VP of marketing and they said we're laying you off.

And I said, What?

And he said, Oh, no, don't under, don't misunderstand.

You're doing a great job.

We love what you're doing, but engineering companies often make the mistake of hiring too many non-revenue producing people, and you're one of those because you're not selling, you're doing human factory studies and other things that we need.

But more important is that we need revenue producers.

And so we have to lay off people who aren't doing things that earn us money directly.

So we have to lay you off.

Then he kind of paused and he said, unless you want to go into sales.

But we don't want you to sell the reading machine, we want you to sell a new technology that we developed.

It's a commercial version of the machine that would allow companies to scan hundreds and thousands of pages a day to convert them to electronic forms to go into databases and so on.

And as I tell people, I took a micro-nanosecond and decided, yeah, I'll go into sales.

I'll lower my standards, lower my standards from science to sales.

And and I did, and they sent me to a Dale Carnegie sales course where I learned all about that.

And I've been selling professionally, if you will, ever since.

What I learned in that course was I've been selling all my life just to convince people that as a blind person I could do the same things that everyone else can do.

I may not do them the same way, but I can do it.

And that message is one that I've used more than once to get other jobs because in 1984, Xerox bought Kurzweil.

I had relocated back to California from the Massachusetts area because Kurzweil was joining forces with Xerox, and they wanted me to help integrate Kurzweil technologically into the technology center for Xerox on the West Coast and also to sell on the West Coast.

And so I did that.

But my thanks for that was in late June 1984, I got a FedEx letter on a Saturday saying your services are no longer needed, so you're you're no longer employed by us.

I was the last salesperson as I learned to be let go, but Xerox didn't want salespeople, they wanted the technology, which was too bad because they made the mistake of losing all the tribal knowledge they could have had from continuing to keep people employed.

But then I couldn't find a job.

No matter that I had been very successful at selling, always overachieving goal and so on, except for the time that we had a recession and nobody was doing really well.

But the bottom line is I eventually started my own company and I helped other people sell products, specifically computer-aided design systems, very graphic-intense systems that people could use, like architects, to draw houses and develop all the stuff that would normally be done on paper over months and months.

A CAD system could do in a matter of days.

And so I formed this company with a couple of other people.

And what I recognized is I don't need to work the system, but I can learn how to work the system so I can describe it to other people so that if they want to build a house online or on the computer, I can walk them through the process.

So the bottom line is that it worked out really well.

And I did that for four years, and then I went into the workforce again rather than owning my own company.

I decided I had enough of owning my own company and I went back to work for people.

Wow.

So that brings you up into the 90s.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

Wow, wow, wow.

So wow, okay.

So I gotta back up all the way to the beginning because what I wanted to say was is applaud mom and dad for for stepping up and realizing that their knowledge as parents sometimes is a little bit greater than the quote unquote professionals.

SPEAKER_02: Well, and the other side of it is that their knowledge as parents and their understanding was they didn't know, but they also felt that the only way to learn was to try.

Yes.

Yes.

Which is exactly what they did and what they allowed me to do.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

And I mean, that is so powerful.

And I mean, I literally I just had to go back and say that.

I mean, that's literally where where it started because what if the parents didn't stand up for what they believed, what they thought?

Your life could have looked drastically different.

SPEAKER_02: Sure.

And I have seen it with any number of other people who were blind from birth because of premature birth, or other kids who became blind along the way fairly young.

And parents sheltered them and didn't push them to step out and explore, and assumed that they knew all there was to know about blindness when in fact they didn't know much of anything, but they were too afraid to learn.

And the reality is that what my parents essentially inherently understood is that blindness wasn't the problem.

It's our perception of blindness that's the problem.

It's our attitude about it rather than it being blindness.

Blindness is a characteristic.

Um, in our modern parlance today, disabilities do not mean a lack of ability.

Disabilities are characteristics.

And every person on this planet has a disability.

Most people are sighted.

They're light dependent.

Lights go out, power failure happens.

First thing they do is run for a phone or a flashlight or a candle to get light back in because they can't function without light.

The bottom line is Thomas Edison and the people who invented the electric light bulb invented it as a reasonable accommodation for light-dependent people who can't get along without light.

Don't tell me that isn't as much of a disability as what I have.

The only difference is that technology covers it up.

It doesn't change the fact that the characteristic is there.

So we really need to start getting the world to recognize that disability doesn't mean a lack of ability.

Disability is a characteristic.

And we all have characteristics, disabilities or whatever of one sort or another.

And we should not judge other people just because we might not have a characteristic that they have.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I love it.

I love it.

And it makes me think of my own life and in situations where I'm with family and I will point out something, you know.

Oh my goodness, wasn't this amazing?

No, no, no.

And they're like, oh, I didn't even notice that.

And I'm like, exactly what I'm talking about.

You guys with your little working eyes, sometimes I think see less than I do.

So well, it's true.

Yeah, it is.

It's totally true.

SPEAKER_02: Eyesight by no means is the only game in town.

SPEAKER_00: Yep.

SPEAKER_02: Hearing isn't the only game in town.

Uh, people always ask me, well, which is worse not being able to see or not being able to hear?

And I won't make that value judgment.

I will, however, say we actually get more information overall from what we hear than what we see, because hearing is much more of a multidimensional thing than eyesight without working at it.

But that doesn't mean it's better and that we should say one is superior to the other.

That is not a judgment I can make or anyone should make.

But the reality is everyone has characteristics that make them different than other people.

SPEAKER_00: Yep.

It's so true.

So true.

So now, were you born completely blind, or did you have some degree of sight?

SPEAKER_02: I had some light perception and that was it.

Okay.

And over time that kind of went away because cataracts developed on my eyes since I don't use them.

But you know, the ophthalmologists have said there's no real sense in removing them because you can't see.

Well, I I don't know.

But the the bottom line is maybe the light perception would have still been there, but it's okay.

Yeah.

I can go.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So essentially I was born and became blind very quickly and totally blind, other than a little light perception.

SPEAKER_00: Yes.

Okay.

Okay.

Now, growing up as far as getting around mobility, did you always just use a cane or did you go the route of getting a uh guide dog?

SPEAKER_02: I didn't use anything for the first 14 years of my life, or almost 14 years.

Okay.

Well, actually the first 14 years, because no one taught me to use a cane, but I learned how to get around my neighborhood and I learned how to be aware of my surroundings.

So I could walk to school, I could go around my elementary schools and uh hear people and either stop and wait for them to pass or walk around them or whatever, as well as anyone, really.

And we had walkways around like Yucca School, where I went from kindergarten through third grade, and all of the walkways were covered, although they were outside.

But I could hear all the polls and avoid them and so on.

Yep.

But going into high school, we wanted to find something a little bit better because it was a much bigger and more intricate campus.

We had made a friend of someone who was using a guide dog, and my parents decided, let's try, because the normal age to get a guide dog was 16, but with support, applied.

And I got a guide dog, my first guide, squire, at the age of 14, when I went into high school.

But even from the outset, again I learned guide dogs don't lead, they guide.

And my relationship with the dog is best when I give the dog commands as to where I want the dog to go, left, right, and so on.

And I have always kept that discipline.

I don't want my dog to know where to go, no matter how often we travel the same route.

And when I see a dog getting into too much of a habit, I'll try to figure out a way to keep the dog from developing a habit of always going to the same place.

And sometimes I don't have more than one way to get there.

But what I'll do is when I know we're going to be passing something where or we're going somewhere where I want to go, and the dog gets in the habit of going there.

When the dog tries to go where I want to go, I'll pass it.

And I'll walk around for a few minutes so that the dog gets the message.

You don't just go where you think I want to go.

I have to tell you when to turn.

And so it's all about being aware of surroundings.

And anyone who gets a guide dog who really uses the dog well should learn that discipline.

You're the one that has to be aware of your surroundings.

Don't rely on the dog alone to do it.

Because the time's going to come when you're going to want to go somewhere and the dog gets in the habit of going where you want to go, but you can't go the way you think you can.

Or you're going to be confronted with an emergency and you're going to have to go a different way and to a different place.

And the dog normally thinks that you want to go, like in a building.

Hello, World Trade Center.

But the point is that I always have worked with my dogs that way.

As I said, guide dogs don't lead, they guide.

And so the first time I picked up a cane was I went to a six-week course between high school and college that was offered to incoming blind college students.

And we were given this course, in our case, it was at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

And the purpose of the course was to acquaint us with what college was going to be like.

And they asked that since I used a guide dog and there were a couple of other guide dog users, don't bring your guide dog.

We want you to use a cane.

And I think there was value in that because what I learned is with a cane, geographically, I found things that I wouldn't find with the dog because the dog would just go around them.

The only problem for the mobility instructors were they thought they had a real live one when I said I never used a cane, and I'd bought a cane to go with me.

And I started using the cane and realized within five minutes I was using the cane quite well.

Thank you very much.

And I tell people today, I can teach you how to use a cane in five minutes.

Teaching you to have the confidence to use a cane takes months.

SPEAKER_00: Yes.

SPEAKER_02: But the cane is the most basic tool.

And so when I'm going to be going somewhere on a regular basis and working somewhere, I will walk around with a cane to discover as much as I can.

And then I can use the dog and be aware of all the things that I'm passing because the cane found them and I now know about them and go on.

So a white cane is the most basic tool that we all can use and ought to use.

At the same time, I can't regret the upbringing that I had and didn't have access to a cane.

But I learned how to be aware of my surroundings.

And if I can do it, I know other people can be aware of their surroundings.

And a cane can be an extra advantage for them to do that.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's really, really interesting.

And I think even for myself, it's a totally different way of looking at uh a guide dog, is is you are in control, you know, and um I think that's really fascinating.

SPEAKER_02: Well, you should be in control, and I know people who aren't.

SPEAKER_00: Yes.

SPEAKER_02: And um, and they'll have had arguments with their dogs and they've yelled at their dogs and so on.

And I that is not the way to interact with this creature who wants to be open to trusting you.

If you get stressed out and you don't know what you're doing or where you're going, and we all can get lost, but I've learned not to show stress when I'm not sure where I am.

I have to go back and figure it out.

Now, today, of course, we have other technologies like talking GPS systems and things like Google Maps on iPhones and so on that can help me figure out where I am.

But still, my job is to not panic, not to be stressed, especially when using a guide dog, because I don't want the dog to be stressed.

I want the dog to know that I have the confidence that we're going to figure this out.

And that's part of the relationship building that we have.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I love that.

And that actually ties in perfectly with another question I wanted to ask you in regards to the guide dog is what is that type of relationship between you and the dog in comparison to, say, somebody's pet at home?

SPEAKER_02: It's an enhanced relationship.

If people really interacted with their pets properly, well, let's say with their dogs, they would truly understand interacting with this creature who is looking to them to be the pack leader.

The problem is most people don't.

They let their animals get away with stuff, be on couches, bark all the time, and other stuff.

And the dogs do that only because they haven't been told that's unacceptable.

And then people get mad when they do it, right?

SPEAKER_01: Yep.

SPEAKER_02: Rather than setting the tone right from the outset, I'm the pack leader, you're part of our family, we love you, we're going to work with you, but there are rules.

And anyone who owns a dog needs to be the one to set and consistently keep the rules.

And if they do, the relationship is so much better.

Dogs do love unconditionally, but they don't trust unconditionally.

And what we learn is how to develop a trusting relationship with guide dogs, which is something that anyone with a pet can learn to do with their own dogs and cats.

But the bottom line is it's developing that trust and being open to trust.

While dogs don't trust unconditionally unless they've been incredibly abused, they're open to trust, which ought to teach us something about how to be more open to trust.

But the problem is that we grow up in a world where we think that most all humans want to uh deal with their own agenda and we can't really trust them, which isn't necessarily true.

And again, we become more closed to trust.

And so we go down this rabbit hole of not trusting.

But the reality is that these dogs want to trust us if we set the rules right and if we develop a relationship that says, I'm willing to trust you as well.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I love it.

So powerful.

Now, kind of speeding along through life here, kind of getting back up.

Quick question is at the time of 9-11, how many guide dogs had you had at that time?

SPEAKER_02: I had on September 11th my fifth guy dog, Roselle.

I got my first guide dog in 1964, the second in 73, the third in 86.

Holland worked for 13 years, but a lot of that time later was mostly at home, so there was no need to retire him.

Klondike in um 86 to 96.

Then I got Linny, who became ill in 1999, and that's when I got Roselle.

And Linny lasted three more years, but not as a guide.

Yeah.

Um, so I had uh I got Roselle in 1999.

SPEAKER_00: Okay.

Okay.

SPEAKER_02: Now, what kind of dog was Roselle?

A yellow lab.

Okay.

My first three guides were all male golden retrievers, and then the next four guides were female yellow labs, and now I have Alamo, who I got in February of 2018, who is my first black lab and a male.

SPEAKER_00: Any difference in the breeds in terms of how well they work work with you?

SPEAKER_02: I think from a standpoint of how well they work, no, because we set the rules and they're very bright animals.

Again, it comes down to me recognizing, to put it in the way humans would look at it, I'm a dog trainer and I'm gonna learn to be a dog trainer, and I learn to be a dog pack leader and a teammate.

It is as much a teaming relationship as anything else.

And labs and golden's can work well.

They're not flighty, at least the ones from from the the guide dog schools, because they breed to get certain temperaments and so on.

So I've done fine with both of them, and I think that I expect that to continue.

So, no, but it is a matter of I have to set the pattern in the tone.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I love it.

I love it.

So interesting, so interesting.

So, kind of going back to where you left off on this, the story of your career path growing up, going into all these different careers.

I'm going to assume that your career path is what's going to kind of segue us into 9-11.

Because I assume that's what had you at the World Trade Center.

SPEAKER_02: I joined Quantum and I opened an office for Quantum on the 78th floor of Tower One of the World Trade Center.

And in August of 2001, one of our, well, our major distributor, Ingram Micro, said, Can you set up some seminars in New York to teach our reseller partners, our reseller accounts, how to sell products because we want to increase ATL sales as opposed to other kinds of things.

And our partners want to learn how to sell your products.

So we arranged to do four seminars on September 11th with a total of 50 people coming between all four seminars.

So 12 or 13 with each seminar that would be done in the course of the day.

And so we had arranged for that.

And I was going to be the ongoing point of contact.

So I did the technical aspects or was going to do the technical aspects of the seminars.

David Frank, a colleague from our corporate office, came back for the seminars because he was responsible for the distribution reseller pricing.

So he was there to handle pricing questions.

And of course, I would be dealing with doing a PowerPoint presentation showing people how our products work.

We were going to have an engineer in later to do a real demo of our products because we had a full demo facility set up in our offices.

And so I was going to do a PowerPoint show first for several reasons.

One, it was best to give pictorial graphic information like that, because that's what most people are, visual learners.

Two, I wanted to impress them with the fact that a blind guy is going to do the PowerPoint presentation.

But the reason I wanted to do that was I wanted them to know that they were going to get everything from me that they would get from anyone else.

And it was important to do that.

And then David was going to talk about pricing and all that.

Well, it was about 8 46 in the morning.

David and I were in my office doing the last minute preparations for the seminar.

And the last preparation to do was to send a list on letterhead of all the people who were coming to the seminars and send that to the Port Authority people because there was only one way you could get into the World Trade Center since there had been a bombing in 1993 in the parking lot, the fourth sublevel.

And that way was you had to go to security, prove who you were, and you had to be authorized to go in.

And the authorization came in one of two ways.

They would call up and say, so-and-so was here, and they say they're supposed to be coming up to see you, or you could fax a list of people on letterhead to Port Authority Security.

So when someone came and said, I'm going to a seminar at uh quantum ATL on the 78th floor, they could look and make sure that the name was there, compare it with photo ID that someone had to show, and then you'd be given a badge and you'd be sent up, and they didn't have to call every time.

And so we were just getting paper to print the list when the plane hit the building.

SPEAKER_00: Wow, wow, wow, wow.

Now, now that day, kind of backing up on the day a little bit, just an ordinary day, anything different?

You know, sometimes people talk about having some type of sixth sense about maybe something gonna happen that day.

SPEAKER_02: Anything out of the ordinary?

No, other than we had a thunderstorm at about 12:30 that morning, and the thunderstorm came right over our house in in New Jersey.

Roselle was afraid of thunder, so she woke me up sensing the storm coming, and she and I went down to my to our basement, and uh my wife stayed upstairs in bed with Linny, my uh now retired guy dog.

Linny loved to be on the bed, and well, she had an illness, and so we cheated with her, but she never took advantage of it.

Anyway, so they were in the upstairs, and we were in my office, and the thunderclaps were so close and so loud because they came right over our house, they literally sounded like explosions.

Should that have told me that something was happening and that I shouldn't go in?

I never got that message.

Yeah.

But that's about the only unusual thing that happened, other than I was going in early.

So normally I would take like about a 645 train out of Westfield, but I wanted to get there early, and so I arrived to take the 618 train, and an announcement came over the speaker that that train had been broken, it was uh there was some sort of failure, and it was going to be late.

So, again, thought about that as a as a problem.

No, because that happened from time to time.

But anyway, I ended up getting there about the usual time.

SPEAKER_00: Wow.

So, question about, you know, when we're talking about, you know, you working with with a guide dog and you directing them, you're kind of in charge.

A place like the World Trade Center.

I would have never was never visited there before, but it sounds massive.

It sounds bustling.

How was it for you and Roselle getting around the buildings?

SPEAKER_02: Oh, it was no problem.

Again, in some senses, it was easy, in some senses, just as hard to keep Roselle from developing a habit.

So we came in on the train from Newark, New Jersey, what's called the Path Train.

Path stands for Port Authority Trans Hudson.

We would come in to the PATH station.

There were two basic ways to get to tower one.

So we came in on the fourth sublevel, and we could walk through a door through the parking lot to the lobby of tower, well, to the sub-lobby of tower one, which is really just the elevator entrance, get an elevator up to the to the ground floor, and then go through and into the to the tower.

Or we could take escalators up and find ourselves in the concourse, the plaza between the towers, and there we could go across the system and into tower one from a different way.

There were still only two real ways to do it, but the value for me was that I made sure Roselle never knew which way I was going to take it.

And even if she figured out, well, you're going through the parking lots, that's fine.

But still, there was nowhere else to go, right?

Yes.

Um, other than I could have gone the other way and go to Tower Two and come across, which was another option.

But I could work with what I had to make sure that she stayed disciplined.

And look, the other advantage of making sure that the dogs don't just know where you're gonna go and and so they can't second guess you is it keeps them more alert too.

Yes.

And Roselle loved it that it was always an adventure.

So we had no problem walking around, and I didn't have a real problem inside the complex walking around either.

When Linny got sick in 1999 before I got Roselle, there were times I'd be walking down a sidewalk in the streets of New York and so on, and people weren't watching where they were going, and they'd step on my cane and break it.

And so then I'm suddenly stuck with a situation where I have a much shorter cane, if you will.

And the bottom line, and the bottom line, and they wouldn't even stop and they wouldn't offer to pay for the cane they broke, right?

Yes.

So I love to say that I spent more money buying canes that summer than I would have spent on dog for food for um a guy dog.

Yes.

But but you know, that's kind of the way it was.

And so we did okay.

And and the real issue is don't get stressed out.

You know, things happen, things happen.

Even when the cane got broken and was too short to use, don't stress out.

So I didn't.

Yeah, it's always a way to figure things out.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, interesting.

I love it.

So now take me back.

It's it's the morning of 9-11.

You're you're getting ready for this big meeting.

The the PowerPoint presentation is is on your shoulders.

So walk me through what happens next.

SPEAKER_02: So it's 8 45, and David and I are reaching, or well, where I was reaching for letterhead to put in the printer, and suddenly we heard kind of a muffled explosion.

The building kind of shuddered, and then literally it started to tip.

Now, tall buildings like that are literally springs.

They're made to be flexible and flex in windstorms and so on.

And so the building literally started to tip in one direction, and it kept tipping.

We moved probably about 20 feet.

Wow.

That's how far it tipped.

Wow.

Did we know what happened?

Nope.

Had no clue what happened.

I didn't know, nor anyone else knew around where we were, and I'll I'll explain that in a minute.

But the bottom line is that we just stood there.

We had some guests already.

They were in our conference room, and David was by my desk and I was reaching for letterhead.

The building was tipping, and David said, Is this an earthquake?

He didn't really ever experience earthquakes.

I grew up in California by the San Andreas Fault, so I experienced earthquakes a lot.

But what happened was that um I said to David, no, not an earthquake because the building's not shaking and going a lot of different directions.

It's going one way and that's it.

And I said, Maybe it's an explosion.

He said, Well, I didn't really hear an explosion, but you know, so we didn't know.

And a lot of people, of course, say all the time, well, of course you didn't know, you're blind.

And excuse me, Superman and X-ray vision are fictitious.

And the bottom line is that no one knew.

We were 18 floors below where the plane hit, and on the other side of the building.

How are we gonna know?

SPEAKER_00: Exactly.

SPEAKER_02: So, anyway, I was standing in my doorway, David was holding onto my desk, Roselle was asleep under my desk, and David and I finally said goodbye to each other because we thought we were about to take a 78-floor plunge to the street.

Then the building stopped and it started moving back the other way, and I didn't even realize I was holding my breath, but I was.

I remember letting out my breath, and the building eventually got vertical again, and I walked back into my office because the first thing I wanted to do was to get to Roselle because I wanted to make sure that we stayed together.

And so we did.

I went back into the office and I met her coming out from under my desk.

And I took her leash and I said, heal, which is the command to come around on my left side and sit, which she did.

And so she sat down on my left side, and about that time the building dropped straight down about six feet.

Why did it drop?

Because the spring expansion joints went back to their normal configuration.

And so we again, that's all information that I kind of learned later.

Yeah.

But anyway, then David turned and looked out the window and started shouting, Oh my God, Mike, there's fire and smoke and millions of pieces of burning paper falling outside our window.

And I could hear debris outside the window.

Well, I could hear something outside the window, but I didn't know what it was.

But I did when he started.

Started telling me millions of pieces of burning paper falling outside the window, right?

And so the result was that I knew that there was fire, and he kept saying that there was fire and we got to get out of here.

We can't get out of here right now.

And I said, slow down.

No, no, no, we got to get out of here.

The building's on fire.

There are millions of pieces of burning paper falling outside the window.

And I said, just slow down.

Our guests began to scream because they were seeing it.

And they came out of the conference room where they were having breakfast and they kind of waited to see what we were going to do.

But I kept saying, slow down.

And finally, David used what I call the big line.

You don't understand.

You can't see it.

And immediately I realized that the problem wasn't what David, what I wasn't seeing, it was what David wasn't seeing.

That is that I had a Labrador Retriever guide dog sitting next to me, wagging her tail and yawning, going, who woke me up, not indicating any fear at all.

Yep.

And when I observed that, I went, okay, so whatever's happening is serious, but it isn't so urgent that we can't try to evacuate in an orderly way.

So I finally got David to focus and said, get our guests to the stairs.

Don't let them take the elevators because you've seen fire.

And since you've seen fire, that means that it could get into the elevator shafts, which we didn't know at the time, but it did.

And anybody in elevator cars would die.

So I said, get them to the stairs because I had spent a lot of time learning all I could about the World Trade Center.

Remember what I mentioned earlier?

That is, that I needed to know what to do.

I couldn't rely, for example, on going to lunch with people and them saying, we'd like to let's go get lunch and you know, you're the selling company, you're buying, but and then I say, Well, I'm blind, I don't know how to get to the restaurants downstairs or whatever, and then we're going to come back upstairs and negotiate a multi-million dollar contract.

I needed to do the same sorts of things that anyone else in my position would do.

And that's why I spent a lot of time initially walking around the World Trade Center with a cane, learning everything that I could, meeting with the Port Authority, emergency preparedness people, the fire people, the police, and others, and learning all I could about the World Trade Center so that I could do the same thing that any leader in any office building or any office in the World Trade Center should be able to do.

Now, the problem is with most sighted people, they rely on signs.

Problem with that, when the signs aren't necessarily available to you because the building is full of smoke or whatever.

We didn't have much of that on September 11th, but that's not the point.

That is, we didn't wear where I was.

But I needed to know what to do.

What I didn't realize at the time is that was developing a mindset in my head that said, this is what you do in an emergency.

And that mindset kicked in on September 11th.

So that what I did was finally tell David, get our guests to the stairs, then come back and we'll leave.

And so he did.

I called my wife.

The media hadn't even gotten the story yet.

I told her there had been an explosion or something.

And then we would be evacuating, and David came back.

We swept the office, making sure there was nobody else in our facility.

And then we went out, went to the stairs, and we started down.

SPEAKER_00: Wow, wow, wow, wow.

So uh what I what I love about this is uh getting uh in tune with with again with your guide dog with Rosel.

You sat there and you thought, if anybody's gonna know something bad's going on, it's gonna be her.

And she's she's wagging her tail, she's cool.

So that helped to calm you down and help you to think clearly and and you know take the necessary action.

Now, at the time that you guys are starting to actually go down the stairs, were the lights obviously you couldn't tell, but from other people's perspective, were the lights still on or had electricity gone out?

SPEAKER_02: No, we had power, okay, unfortunately all the way down.

That that brings up a story I'll tell in a minute.

Okay.

But we we had power all the way down.

But as soon as we got into the stairwell, I began smelling an odor, and it took me a few floors to realize I was smelling what I smelled every time I went to airports because I did a lot of flying for my company and I was smelling burning kerosene.

And I observed that to other people, and they said, Yeah, you're right.

That's burning jet fuel.

We must have been hit by an airplane.

Remember what I said before?

No one knew.

Yep.

No one did because we were on the other side of the building.

We were 18 floors below.

No one knew.

And so we had no clue what was going on, but we got down about 10 floors, and then we heard from above somebody saying, Burn victim coming through, move to the side of the stairs, and this group of people surrounding this woman who was very badly burned over the upper part of her body came past us.

I think she was one of the people who was outside of one of the elevator shafts when, well, outside one of the elevators on an upper floor, when vapor droplets from fuel were in the elevator shaft and ignited and shot out through the doors and burned her.

There were a few cases of that.

SPEAKER_00: Yes.

SPEAKER_02: So I think that was one of those people.

But we had a couple of incidents of that.

And then a woman near us on the stairs stopped and said, I can't go on, I can't breathe.

We're not going to be able to make it out of here.

And I and other people just surrounded her instinctively and said, Sure, we are.

Just keep with us.

We're okay.

Let's keep going.

Roselle gave her kisses and so on.

We knew that we had to work together to keep everybody calm and focused to get out.

Later, as I was walking down the stairs, David said, Mike, we're going to die.

We're not going to make it out of here.

And I just said to David, Stop it, David.

If Roselle and I can go down these stairs, so can you.

I took, I took, I took that course when I was taking my teacher training at UC Irvine, you know, that secret course, Voice 101, How to Yell at Student Show.

I love to say that.

But seriously, he told me that that brought him out of his funk.

And then David did what I think is one of the best things I experienced that day.

He said, I'm going to walk down the stairs, a floor below you, and shout up to you what I see.

And he said, I want to do that because I got to get my mind off of what I'm thinking.

We're going down the stairs.

And I said, Fine, that's that's good.

You know, go ahead.

Yeah.

So I'm on the 49th floor, and David's going, 48th floor, all is good here, going on down.

And he kept doing that.

And eventually I'm on the 45th floor and he goes, 44th floor.

Hey, this is where the Port Authority cafeteria is, not stopping, going on down.

Why was that so great?

It was great because, although I don't think he realized it at the time, what David was doing was shouting up to me that was benefiting him because it gave him something to do, but he became basically a focus point for anyone who could hear him.

SPEAKER_00: Yes.

SPEAKER_02: And anyone who could hear him knew that there was someplace and someone on the stairs above or below them, thousands of people above or below him, who could hear him and who realized there's somebody in the complex on the stairs who's okay.

And we'll just listen to him and we'll go down and and we won't panic.

And they didn't.

He had to help so many people stay focused on the stairs.

And so he did that after the thing with David, though we had gone down a few more floors, and I decided, you know, I realized that David had had gotten very quiet, and that's when he said, Mike, we're gonna die, we're not gonna make it out.

And conversation was starting to die down on the stairs.

So I just said, Okay, everybody, I want you to listen up.

I happen to be blind, and again, I don't know, and not everyone could see me.

I happen to be blind and I've got my guide dog Roselle here.

If the power and lights go out, we're offering a half-price special to get you out today.

And I said, What a great way to lose weight, huh?

Um, because I also said, you know, sometime after they let us back in the building, because we knew that instinctively they weren't going to let us back in.

We had no idea it was gonna collapse.

I said, first day we all get back, let's meet on the 78th floor at 8:45 in the morning morning and walk down the stairs together.

What a great way to lose weight.

You know, I I wanted to bring humor into it.

Yes.

And again, my mindset was staying focused on working with Roselle.

I kept praising Roselle.

I needed her to know I was okay by saying, good girl, what a good dog, all the way down.

That also helped other people who I learned later followed me down the stairs because they they told me later, hey, you're just telling your dog she's a good dog.

And we joined the the group going down about the 54th floor, and you just passed us, and we figured if you can do this, we can do this, and you're not panicking at all, so we're not gonna panic.

And that happened all the way down the stairs.

Wow.

So, you know, those are the kinds of things that occurred.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, now at that point, you know, and I don't even know if if this was too early on, but I would imagine, did you encounter emergency workers, firefighters on the stairs?

SPEAKER_02: We got to encounter firefighters about the 30th floor.

David shouted up.

I was like on about the 32nd floor, and he was at the 31st floor, I think.

And he said, I see firefighters coming up the stairs.

Everybody moved to the side and let them by.

By the time I caught up with David, I was on the 30th floor, and these firefighters got to us, and the first guy stops right in front of me and goes, Hey, buddy, you okay?

You know how they talk back game.

And and I said, Yeah, we're good.

Well, we're gonna send somebody down the stairs with you to make sure you get out okay.

And I said, No, you don't need to do that.

Well, we're gonna do that.

I said, Look, you don't need to do that.

I've grown up, I I'm live, you know, I live with my wife and nobody else.

Uh, I hardly ever feel lonely when I leave home.

We're good.

I was trying to make light of it.

Well, we're gonna send somebody with you anyway.

And I said, Look, I got my guy dog Roselle here, and we're going down the stairs.

We're fine.

And he says, Oh, what a good dog.

And he starts petting Roselle.

And it wasn't the time to give him a lecture about you don't put a guy dog in harness.

And it wasn't, and it wasn't the time to give him a lecture about blindness isn't the problem.

I sight's the problem when you think that it's the only game in town.

So I just said to him, look, I also got my friend David here.

And David and I are going down the stairs, and he turns to David and he goes, You're with him.

And David says, Yeah, leave him alone.

He's good.

Okay.

And so they they left going on up the stairs, petting Roselle, and but then going on up the stairs.

Look, why did I resist?

Because I didn't want to hear on the news later that somebody got injured because one of the firefighters was out of their normal formation or not where they usually would be because they were helping some blind man go down the stairs.

Because I didn't need that.

So it's all about team, you know, because I knew that they were a team.

I knew I had learned a lot about how they operate.

And I knew that they were also a team.

And so it was important for them to be able to continue to do what they did.

And they didn't need to help me down the stairs.

There was nothing they were going to be able to do, especially when I knew that what they'd probably do is grab my arm, and every time I took a step, lift me up, sort of, so that I wouldn't trip on.

It's what people do.

Yes.

Because they don't know how to walk-sided guide.

Yes.

So the bottom line is that you know they went on up the stairs and then we went down the stairs.

SPEAKER_00: Wow.

It's exactly what what you encountered though.

I mean, in the big picture thing, knowing now is exactly what what we hear about is they they go up the stairs when everybody else is going down.

SPEAKER_02: Well, they have to.

And they had to carry, as David described it, on their backs all their equipment.

You know, maybe he said 100 pounds was like 60 pound packs, but they were carrying fire axes, oxygen cylinders, shovels, and other equipment to fight the fire.

And the reason is is because where would you put the fire fighting equipment in the building?

On the 80th floor?

What if the fire was on the 79th floor, right?

Yep.

You still couldn't get to the equipment.

They had to carry the equipment up the stairs with them.

SPEAKER_00: Of course.

And they did.

Of course.

So now, obviously, you guys reach the ground level.

What's that experience like getting out of the building?

SPEAKER_02: So we got to the ground level.

David, of course, had reassumed his scouting position, and so he was a floor below me, firefighters notwithstanding.

And going down the stairs, as they were passing us, several of us, me included, said, Can we help you guys?

And they said, No, you go down and get out.

We'll deal with upstairs.

Anyway, we got down and David suddenly said, I'm on the first floor.

Their water sprinklers creating a curtain across the stairwell, and you got to run through it.

When that was so that they would keep fire either in or out if it happened to be around the stairs.

And then he was gone.

So I got to the first floor.

And then uh I heard this torrential downpour, and I just picked up Roselle's harness.

I said forward and hop up, which is a command to pay attention and speed up.

And we ran through this torrential downpour of water.

Yeah.

And found ourselves then on the other side in the lobby of Tower One of the World Trade Center.

The water was ankle deep because the revolving doors were pretty watertight, not airtight necessarily, but the building was literally somewhat filling up on the first floor with water.

So we had to slog through that, and there were broken ceiling tiles below us because when the building torqued, it dropped tiles and so on.

And this guy came up to David and me, because David was waiting right on the other side of the stairs when I came out.

And he said, I'm with the FBI and I'll get you guys where you need to go.

There were people yelling through bullhorns, go this way, don't go outside.

They didn't want anyone going outside into the outside itself from Tower One, going through their exit doors, because as we learned later, people were jumping because it was right above where where we were, where all the fire was was taking place and so on.

Anyway, this FBI guy ran us through the whole complex and up an escalator and finally out into the sunlight as far away as we could be from tower one.

And when we got outside, we were told to leave the area.

David looked around and said, Mike, there's fire in tower two.

I said, What are you talking about?

He said, There's fire in tower two.

We had no clue.

So we just thought maybe because when our building was tipping, it was tipping toward tower two.

I knew that.

Yes.

Maybe what was going on was that uh the the fire jumped across.

We had no clue.

Uh and no one was telling us.

The firefighters and the stairs weren't telling us.

I love information.

It would not have panicked me to know what was going on.

Yeah.

But they didn't know that, so they wouldn't tell us anything.

Anyway, we were told to leave the area.

We did.

We walked over to Broadway and then we went north on Broadway.

So we were on the west side of the street.

And so there was a building to my left and Broadway to my right.

We walked up several blocks.

We got to Vese Street when David said, You know, I see the fire real clearly in Tower Two now.

We're pretty close to it.

I want to stop and take some pictures.

Well, he did that.

I took out my phone.

I couldn't get through to my wife.

The circuits were busy, and as we learned later, it was because people were saying goodbye to loved ones.

And so I was just putting my phone away, and I had, and David had had finished and was putting his camera away when a police officer yelled, Get out of here, it's coming down now.

And we heard this rumble that became this deafening roar.

The sound I describe as kind of a combination of a freight train and a waterfall.

You could hear glass tinkling and metal clattering and then this white noise as tower two, which was maybe a hundred yards or so away from us, just started to collapse and pancake straight down, which is how it was designed to do.

And everyone turned and ran.

David ran, he was gone.

I literally lifted Roselle by the harness, turned her around 180 degrees, and we started running back the way we came.

We got to Fulton Street, we turned right on Fulton Street, went about 25 yards, and caught up to David, who would stop realizing he had just ran off and left me and was going to try to come back and find me.

But I caught up with him first and he apologized.

I said, don't worry about it, let's keep going.

And we started running together, and then suddenly we were engulfed in all the dirt and debris, the dust cloud from Tower Two's breaking up and collapsing.

And we knew we had to get out of it because, as David said, he couldn't see his hand six inches in front of his face.

And while that was happening, he observed that there's all this dust.

And I knew there was a lot of dirt and dust because with every breath I took, I could feel it going into my throat and down my throat and settling in my lungs.

So as we were running west on Fulton Street, there was a building on our right, and I started telling Roselle, right, right, giving her hand signals and yelling, right, right.

I don't know whether she could hear me over the noise of Tower Two collapsing.

I don't know whether she could see my hand signals.

But I was also listening for an opening.

David, as I said, said he could only see his hand six inches in front of his face and not even that far.

But suddenly I heard an opening on the right, as I know how to do.

And obviously Roselle knew what I wanted.

She turned right, she took one step and she stopped and she wouldn't move.

And I said, Come on, Roselle, keep going.

And she wouldn't move.

And I realized, hey, there's got to be a reason she stopped.

And I investigated and discovered we were at the top of a flight of stairs.

We stopped.

She got praise and a hug for that.

And then we walked down the stairs and found ourselves in the arcade entrance to the Fulton Street subway station.

And we stayed there for a while.

There were a few other people there.

And then a guy from the subway system came up.

He introduced himself as Lou, an employee of the subway system.

And he took all of us down to an employee locker room.

And we stayed there for probably about 10 or 15 minutes when a police officer came and said, um, the air is clear up above.

You can't stay here.

You need to leave now.

And then he turned without waiting for any discussion.

And there were about eight or nine of us.

We followed him back up the stairs and outside where we had gone into the subway system.

And as soon as we got outside, David looked around and said, Oh my God, Mike, there's no tower two anymore.

And I said, Well, what do you see?

And he said, All I see are pillars of smoke hundreds of feet tall.

I said, You sure it's there?

And he said, Yeah, it's it's not.

Well, it's not there.

You sure it's not there?

And he said, Yeah, it's not.

We stood there for a moment and then we just turned and continued west on Fulton Street.

And we walked for about 10 minutes, maybe a quarter of a mile going across town.

Then we heard that freight train waterfall sound again.

We were in this little plaza at the time.

And David looked and he said, I see another dust cloud coming at us.

And we went behind this small retaining wall and hunkered down and just waited till all the noise stopped and the wind stopped and everything else.

And when it did, then we stood up and David looked back and he said, Oh my God, there's no World Trade Center anymore.

And I said, What do you see?

And he said, All I see are fingers of fire and flame, hundreds of feet tall, and pillars of smoke, no towers.

It's all gone.

And we stood there not understanding.

We were there maybe a minute or so, and then I decided I'm gonna try to call my wife again.

And actually, this time I got through, and she's the first one who told us how two aircraft had deliberately been crashed into the towers, one into the Pentagon, and a fourth was still missing over Pennsylvania, which is Flight 93 United, that crashed into Shanksville because people retook control of the plane.

And so that's when we first learned what was going on.

Who would have thought?

We went into the towers, mining our own business, just doing our jobs, and suddenly, in the blink of an eye, if you will, it all changed.

Yeah.

And spent the rest of the day getting back toward home.

Uh, eventually learned the trains were running back to New Jersey, so we went to Penn Station.

We had first gone to the apartment of a friend of David's in the university area, stayed there for a couple of hours, then I learned the trains were running.

And David wanted to go back up to where he was staying with his sister on the Upper East Side.

So we got me to Penn Station, and then David left to go on up to where his sister was, and I took a train to Newark and then another train to Westfield.

Meanwhile, and I tried to stay in touch with Karen as much as I could, my wife, a friend of ours, Tom Painter, who Karen had known since high school in California, who had also moved to New Jersey, not knowing whether I was in the World Trade Center at the time or not, just came down to be with Karen and me, or originally with Karen.

He drove to the her to the train station in our wheelchair accessible van because Karen's been in a chair her whole life.

And they met me at seven o'clock and we went home.

The first thing I did was I took Roselle's harness off and I figured I'd take her outside.

She would have none of it.

She just turned and ran and grabbed her favorite tugbone and started playing Tug of War with Linny.

It was over for her.

It was done.

She wasn't threatened in any way.

She had no fear.

And so it was all done.

She said, I'm I'm done with the day.

It's time to go play.

And then eventually she she went outside, but it was it was over for her.

And, you know, we started making sense or trying to make sense out of it.

And the next day I called Guy Dogs for the Blind, where I've gotten my dogs.

And among other things, I talked to uh and I called because uh Karen reminded me that some of the people at Guy Dogs visited us in New York and came to see our offices in the World Trade Center and they would remember it.

So we called Guy Dogs, and I among others talked to Joanne Ritter, who at the time was their public information officer, and said, Can I put out a story?

And I didn't think much about it.

I said, Okay, sure.

And then she said, You know, you're going to be pretty visible.

Who do you want to be interviewed by first?

And I said, Oh, Larry King.

And two days later, which would have been Friday the 14th, we went on Larry King Live for the first of five interviews.

And we got pretty visible after that.

And then people started calling and saying, you know, we heard about your story.

We saw you on Larry King and other interviews and so on.

We'd like you to come and tell your story, but we want you to tell us the lessons we should learn.

From all of this.

And I started to realize if people want to hear about this and are genuinely interested, it's a lot more rewarding in terms of spiritually, and it could be financially rewarding because they want to hire me to come.

It would be rewarding to switch careers.

And so I did.

I became a keynote speaker.

I also worked at Guide Dogs for the Blind for a while as their public spokesperson while traveling and speaking all over the world.

So I have been doing that ever since the end of uh 2020 or 19, well, no, 2001, beginning of 2002.

And I've been speaking ever since.

So I've been a keynote speaker traveling the world, talking about not just the story, which I know is an evergreen motivational story, but also trying to get people to understand the value of trust and teamwork, trying to talk more about leadership, making better life choices, and really getting people to understand that we're all in this together and we need to learn to work together and having a lot of fun doing it.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

Now, would you say that you were always kind of a natural born leader?

Or was it that day in the Trade Center when that kind of shin through?

SPEAKER_02: Well, I never thought of myself as a naturally born leader, but I thought of myself as being competent.

And I'm sure that sometimes competent to the point of arrogance, and I've tried to learn not to be.

But I've learned that that reality is that everyone can be a leader depending on the circumstances and the time.

And leaders and bosses need to recognize that there are times on the job when somebody else should take the leadership position because they have skills for a particular situation that maybe the leaders don't have.

And the real leaders are the ones who can see that and allow that to occur.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I love it.

Now, so you you kind of make this full career pivot.

You're you're speaking.

At what point does writing a book come into play?

SPEAKER_02: Well, actually, in 2002, we were at the American Kennel Club Canine Yukanuba Championships in Florida because Roselle was going to be honored as the canine hero and the award getting the award for canine excellence as guide dog in 2002.

And I met George Berger, who was the publisher of the AKC American Kennel Club Gazette, and he said, You ought to write a book.

I said, I hadn't thought about it.

And so I went back and he said, I'll help you.

And I started making a lot of notes and looking at options as the way to do it.

But it still took a long time.

And he had an agent who said, You should write a business book.

And I said, No, it needs to be more general.

It needs to be something anybody would be interested in reading.

So it just kind of went slow for a while.

But then in 2010, a woman named Susie Flory called me, and Susie said, I'm writing a book called Dog Tales.

It's 17 stories about dogs, and I want to include Roselle's story.

Would you tell me what happened?

And I did.

And then there was this pause, and she said, You need to write your own book, and I'm glad to help you with it.

She's a professional writer.

So we worked with her, with she and her agent, Chip McGregor, and he said, But I don't want a 9-11 book.

And I said, I don't want a 9-0-11 book either.

I want to teach people about being blind and all that, but the 9-11 story is part of it.

I had started to put a lot of stuff together, and Susie and I created a proposal.

And the result of the proposal was that when Chip got it, he said, This is great.

He was pouncing off the walls.

And literally within a week, we had a contract with Thomas Nelson Publishing, which is now part of HarperCollins.

And we wrote the book and it was published on August, officially released on August 2nd, 2011.

And then the next week, on I think about the 11th of August, I get a call from the Thomas Nelson people saying, Well, we got to tell you something.

And they sounded all horrible and not happy.

And they said, You got to sit down for this one.

And I said, Well, Karen's sitting, does that count?

Because you know, she's a military.

And they said, No, you have to sit.

So I said, Okay, and I was.

So I said, okay, I'm sitting down.

And the next thing I hear is, and it's first week out.

Thunder Dog is on the New York Times bestseller list.

And they're bouncing off the walls back there in Nashville, is what they were doing.

Yeah.

And so we actually were on the New York Times bestseller list for 13 weeks with Thunder Dog, the story of a blind man, his guy dog, and the triumph of trust at ground zero.

And one week it was on number one on the bestseller list with like electronic ePub books and so on.

But it's been very visible.

It is still absolutely available for anyone who is interested.

You can go anywhere and order the book.

It's also on Audible, and it's available in large print.

And for blind people, if they want a braille copy, the easiest way to do it is to get a braille copy through bookshare.org.

But it's available anywhere.

It's also available through the Library of Congress and the Talking Book Bard program.

It's available.

And then we followed it up with another book that I wrote with another person, Jeanette Hanscom.

And that book is Running with Roselle.

It's the children's version, if you will.

It's more about me growing up and Roselle growing up and how we met.

And the result of it basically is that we self-published that one.

But when the pandemic hit and travel stopped for me, I started to realize I've been talking about not being afraid, but I've never taught people how they can learn that skill.

So I started thinking about that.

And so we started working on the idea of a third book and our working title.

We have a publisher for it, but the working title is a guide dog's guide to being brave.

And it'll be a book to try to help people understand how they can learn to not be blinded, if you will, by fear when something unexpected or horrible happens in their lives.

And again, because we are so dog-centric, it's going to have a lot of dog-related kinds of things with it.

That'll probably not come out for a while yet.

We're working on it.

In fact, I have to read a chapter today and do some work on it.

But we're working through it and having a lot of fun with it.

And again, uh, hopefully it will help people better understand not only blindness, but it will understand a little more about themselves and that they can deal with things without being controlled by fear.

SPEAKER_00: Yes.

SPEAKER_02: So we'll see how it goes.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I love it.

I love it.

Real quick question your first book, Thunder Dog.

Where'd the name come from?

SPEAKER_02: I wanted to call it forward.

And the marketing people at Thomas Nelson said no, we want to call it Thunderdog.

And so we let them, we let them win.

And so that's where it came from.

Okay.

They thought it would be, and it's done.

I can't complain.

Well, good.

SPEAKER_00: Well, good.

Well, well, listen, last question for you.

And when people hear your story and they hear the story of your guide dog Rizel, what is the one thing that you hope that they they remember?

The one thing that you hope that they take away from this story?

SPEAKER_02: Don't judge people because they're different than you.

Blindness isn't the problem.

Disability doesn't mean lack of ability, all three ways of saying the same thing.

The reality is accept people for who they are and be open to trying to develop a working relationship.

If a blind person comes to you and applies for a job and you're cited, don't rule them out simply because they're blind.

We live in a world where the unemployment rate among employable blind people is between 65 and 70 percent, and there's no reason for that.

It isn't that we can't work, it's that people think we can't work.

And we've got to get people over that, which is why I chose to and continue to choose to speak and travel and educate and inspire people, because we all have gifts and we should be allowed to use them.

If people want to reach out and if they want me to come and speak, they can email me at speaker at michaelhinkson.com at speaker at M I C H A E L H I N G S O N dot com.

And I'm glad to talk with them.

I also now am the chief vision officer for a company called Accessibility that makes products that help make the internet website world more accessible to persons with a variety of different kinds of disabilities.

They can go to accessibil, a c E S S I B E dot com.

They can email me at Michael H I at accessibility.com, but they can go there and they can actually do a free audit of their websites and they can see what isn't accessible and what is.

And Accessibility can help fix that, or they can go to other places and hire their own people, but accessibility will be cheaper.

But the the bottom line is we all have gifts, we all have challenges, and there is not one single person who doesn't.

And what we need to do is to recognize that we should accept people for who they are and give people the opportunity to enhance our world and help us enhance our own worlds.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I love it.

And I would like to add my own thoughts on it is that when you see the blind guy, don't underestimate him.

He's the one who made the PowerPoint presentation, and his guide dog is the one who's gonna get you out of danger.

SPEAKER_02: So the guy dog is the guy dog is not necessarily the only part of it that's gonna get you out of danger, but the guy dog is a teammate.

Yeah, the guy dog and I work together to get out of danger because I learned what to do and set the expectations for the dog.

And the dog did, in Roselle's case, her job didn't anticipate until there was a need for her to say, Hey, I can't do exactly what you want.

And I realized there's got to be a reason for that because that's the team effort.

So we worked together as a team and survived.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I love it.

I love it, Michael.

In the most sincere way possible, I want to thank you for for being here today, for for being willing to just share your story.

It means a lot to me.

I'm just uh thrilled to get to share your story with my audience.

So thank you.

SPEAKER_02: Well, thank you.

It's my pleasure, and I hope that people will genuinely think about all this about blindness.

And as I said, if people want a speaker, I'm doing it and would love to talk with you about that.

And I hope that they will also recognize there's a need to make websites accessible because 98% of all websites aren't accessible today.

Some may still work somewhat, but the reality is that we need to make the internet an inclusive world for all.

And that's a mindset that we need to establish and make happen.

SPEAKER_00: Absolutely, absolutely.

Well, I love it.

And uh, you know, Michael, again, thank you.

And for you listening today, you know, my hope is that you you took something away that this interview with Michael not only entertained you, but maybe gave you a deeper kind of insight on life and an insight on people with differing abilities and how in the big picture, we're really not all that different from one another.

We're all just have our own unique gifts.

And uh hey, that's what makes this world awesome.

Absolutely.

Yeah, all of the links mentioned today are found inside of the episode show notes.

And hey, again, this is CoverLow with Grace and Inspiration.

Get out there and take on the day.

Hey, real quick before you go, I have one last thought to leave you with.

I of course hope that you've enjoyed today's episode, but more importantly, I want to remind you that I never want you to listen to an episode of this podcast to hear something that I have to say or that my guest has to share and think, wow, I wish I could be like that.

I wish I could overcome my own challenges and do the great things that they are doing.

But I just can't.

Well, friend, that's where you're wrong.

unknown: You're wrong.

SPEAKER_00: You are capable.

You are able to darn sure are deserving of having all that you can imagine in this life.

There's nothing special about me or any guests I have on this podcast.

We are all just normal people trying to make it in this life.

And so I encourage you to take a look at yourself in the mirror and remind yourself that you know what?

I can do it too.

Now, of course, if you would like help along that way, reach out to me.

Whether that's as a listener of this podcast, a friend, or if you'd like to work with me as a coach.

My contact information is inside of every episode of show notes, just like this one.

So go down, check out my contact information, and reach out to me today.

With that said, I encourage you to take on the day every day with Grid and Grid.