Oklahoma City National Memorial

I know I am doing the two Memorials we visited out of order, but since I showed off the OKC Federal Building yesterday, I thought I would finish the job today.

Sunday was our only real tourist day in Oklahoma City and I definitely wanted to visit the Oklahoma City Federal Building Bombing, while I was there.

Back when it happened, I had written a check and gave it to my company, which they sent over to OETA (our sister station in Oklahoma). We were all just horrified at the time, not knowing that just a few short years later we would witness something even more massive.

The station sent our checks back to us, saying that no one from OETA was involved and so they had no use for the money.

I was hurt and never forgot this situation and so I wanted to pay my respects to those whose death moved me so much in 1995.

We parked about a few feet from the memorial and walked in. The actual museum was closed til noon and so we skipped that.

Trust me, what we saw outside, was plenty depressing.

For those who don't remember, Timothy McVeigh filled a rental truck with fertilizer and explosives and parked it right in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The reason he chose that building was the fact that it was an easy get-away to the Highway and that someone who was part of the Waco TX siege had an office there, among other places. He had actually scoped out other Federal Buildings, before choosing this one.

The truck had two ignition fuses, a 2 minute one and a 5 minute one, to give him time to get away. He wanted it to go off right at the time of the Waco TX fire that burnt the Branch Davidian Compound and ended the siege, exactly 2 years earlier.

You can read the entire story of not only the bombing, but the fact that he got caught within 90 minutes of the explosion...HERE.

Onward to some of what we saw.

2 walls on the east and south side of the building survived the bombing and so they give definition to the area on those sides. They are by the portal called the 901 gate. That gate signified the world 1 minute before the bombing. They have a reflecting pool between the 901 gate and the 903 gate, which basically covers the footprint of the Federal Building. The 903 Gate signifies the world after the bombing. That is what you see in photograph number one.

On the south side of the memorial are 168 chairs, one for each person who was killed on that day. There are 9 rows, signifying the 9 floors of the building. There are 19 little chairs, which are reminders that 19 little children were in the Daycare on the second floor of the building. You see a few of them in the second photo. The larger ones may have been the adults in the daycare center.

All the way at the end of the rows of chairs are 5 chairs in a line alone and separate from the others. They are the poor people who were walking by the building at exactly 902AM. Wrong place, wrong time.

There is also a large semicircular wall that surrounds the Survivor Tree from this bombing. As I mentioned before, we seem to attract Survivor Trees, I guess.

At night the chairs light up and it must be quite a sight to see them all glowing. The baby chairs seem to attract people who add coins to the seat on the chair. Sort of like the Jewish custom of putting a stone on a cemetery grave.

The whole memorial is something that I will never forget.