This is the third in a series of verbatim excerpts from  interviews with construction workers conducted by actor-activist Richard Masur at Ground Zero in March, 2002. We were one of the first outside film crews allowed on the site, producing a video for the Building and Construction Trades Department, AFL-CIO.  Masur had an affinity for the workers because he’d been organizing other stars to visit the site since shortly after the terrorist attacks.  Greg Noland spoke up near the end of the three-hour session.  Noland: [lightly edited] If I was to speak of a defining moment, probably about maybe seven or eight days into it, I realized we weren’t going to find anybody alive.  Something came over me and I thought we’re not going to find anybody here alive, and I started to detach from the people, from the body bags.

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 This is another excerpt from interviews with Ground Zero construction workers several months after 9/11. Phil Morelli, a laborer, was inside Tower On, beginning his normal workday, when the first plane hit.  After barely escaping with his life, he would return to Ground Zero to work for many months on the recovery and deconstruction efforts.  Phil Morelli (lightly edited excerpts): The building I was in was Tower One and as I walk by 50A into the Secret Service parking lot, that’s when the big impact of whatever hit.  I didn’t know what was going on and the big impact threw me up against a wall in the corridor.

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This is the first in a series of excerpts from interviews with Ground Zero construction workers several months after 9/11. Most of the men, and one woman, had been working on the site since hours after the attacks. Like many construction workers, Bob Bartels, Jr., an ironworker, realized his skills were needed and just showed up ready to work.

Bob Bartels (lightly edited):When we got here, everybody was just in shock. It was just a horrible sight. We had the acetylene tanks that were coming off, and the oxygen tanks were coming off and we just grabbed, put a set together, walked out and asked a fireman: “Where do we need to burn?” We started burning. We stayed on West Street for a few days. We found a Suburban that was probably, maybe no more than 18 inches high, crushed. We worked with Rescue Three from the Bronx, trying to free all the steel from on top of that because they thought one of their firemen was in the truck. Probably about 18 hours a day we did nothing but burn steel and remove steel. I mean the time goes. You think you’re there a couple of hours and it’s 12 to 14 hours that have passed. (More)

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On the last night of the Democratic National Convention, before a crowd of 80,000 at Bronco stadium (still can’t bring myself to write the word INVESCO Field in a positive context), wil.i.am, Michael McDonald, Sheryl Crowe, Stevie Wonder and Barack Obama made some beautiful music, aided by backup singers like Dick Durbin, Tim Kaine, Jan Schakowsky, Mark Udall, Al Gore and VP Nominee Joe Biden. But the man who sang my song was my old friend from Atlanta, Congressman John Lewis, who journeyed us back to Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Street” speech on the Mall in Washington 45 years ago to the day. Too bad John wasn’t also asked to repeat the speech he delivered that day as the fiery Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). As King pepared to speak so movingly about of dreams, Lewis was laying down demands, and his speech got more attention and publicity than King’s. (More)

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In the movie “When Harry Met Sally,” Billy Crystal called it “the white man’s overbite,” the habit of male Aryan rock-and-rollers biting their lower lips when dancing. My grandmother, the one who actually lived in a log cabin after raising nine kids in the North Georgia piney woods, always said that when you saw a man biting his lower lip it was a tipoff he was telling a really big fib. It’s hard to see how Bill Clinton got through two terms as President of the United States because he was a serial lip-biter, chewing his way through GenniferGate, Whitewater, TravelGate and MonicaGate (sometimes, I think, because he was fibbing, other times because he was merely dancing). So I came to the Wells Fargo Theater at the Denver Convention Center last night to watch Clinton plight his troth to Obama, pad and pen in hand to record the many, many times he would reflexively bite his lip whilst boosting Barack. (More)

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I’m sitting here trying to concentrate on the economic experts bantering back and forth at the AFL-CIO/American Prospect economic forum, but my mind keeps flashing back to the incredible speech given by Michelle Obama last night. Her delivery was impeccable and her message from a mother and a wife was heartfelt and moving, but for me it was the style she used. There was no mention, not even an allusion to race. The speech could have been given word for word by any of us, male or female, black or white (less effectively, to be sure) . She used none of the lofty, inspiring rhetoric of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that we all love or the street patios, humor and alliteration of Rev. Jesse Jackson that speech writers like me try so hard (without much success) to emulate. The speech was gender-neutral, non-idealogical and color-blind. It made my spirits soar. (More)

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You couldn’t tell it from reading the New York Times or the Washington Post this morning, but organized labor got its act together in Denver yesterday, and that’s bad news for John McCain, whose been counting on America’s unions to go into the election end game fractured and fussy. Speaking to a rousing rally of 1,000 Democratic Convention labor delegates and a couple of thousand of their friends, AFL-CIO president John Sweeney captured the significance of the moment when he declared: “It’s important to note that we are united in our determination to turn around America. And by united, I mean all of us, all of labor — the AFL-CIO, the NEA, Change to Win, 17 million members, 28 million potential voters from union households — all of us together.” (More)

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