LITTLE ROCK -- Nancy Ryburn is the woman from Pine Bluff who made it big in New York.
Life took her from her days growing up on Laurel Street through her 1970 graduation from Pine Bluff High School to journalism school at Henderson State University, although she switched her major to theater by her senior year. With a master's degree in communications from Louisiana State University, Ryburn set sail on her career as a teacher, first in high school English and then in community college communications courses in Chicago.
By 1986, she transferred to New York as a salesperson for a scholastic magazine published by Time Inc. But that wouldn't be the last career change. Ryburn earned a doctorate from Yeshiva University's Einstein Medical School in New York and became a psychologist.
Early images of New York from the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, depicted a gorgeous day in America's largest city. By 8:46 a.m. Eastern time, a day that started out picturesque began to turn gloomy.
"I left for work earlier in the day and got on the subway at 40th [Street] and Park [Avenue]," Ryburn said, starting her account of events with little interruption. "I got out at Lex and 42nd (the Grand Central Station at Lexington Avenue and 42nd Street), and I looked down the street, and there was a huge cloud of smoke. I asked, 'what happened?' Someone said, 'the World Trade Center went down.'
"I knew then it was a terrorist attack because anyone could keep a plane from hitting one of those buildings."
Her suspicions were confirmed. American Airlines Flight 11 struck the north tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. At 9:03 a.m., United Airlines Flight 175 hit the south tower.
The impacts were part of a coordinated attack by terrorists of al-Qaida, who hijacked four planes. One of the planes hit the Pentagon in the Washington, D.C., area, and another missed its intended target, crashing instead into a field near Shanksville, Pa.
In all, 2,996 people -- including the 19 terrorists -- died in the attacks, most of them when the twin towers collapsed nearly two hours after the planes' impact.
Killed at the Pentagon was Nehamon Lyons, 30, a Pine Bluff native and operations specialist in the Navy. Lyons enlisted in the Navy in 1997, eight years after graduation from Dollarway High School, and was transferred to the Pentagon in January 2001, according to a Pentagon Memorial biography.
"Nehamon was a self-starter who would pursue a goal and work tirelessly to achieve it," his biography reads in part. "He was a man, not because he was asked to be one, but because someone had to in his situation."
In New York, Ryburn and a registered nurse listened to the latest developments on a radio, since there was not a TV set in her office.
"People started coming in because they didn't know where else to go," said Ryburn, now 69. "They looked like ghosts because they were covered in dust. We tried to see if they had a place to go."
Ryburn's friend, Barbara Samuels, worked as a lawyer in her native New York. She was born in Manhattan, grew up in Long Island and worked in an office about a mile from the World Trade Center.
"The most interesting thing for me is that I heard the first plane go over my office, somewhere that it was close enough for me to hear on the sixth floor of not a very high building, and that doesn't happen," said Samuels, who will turn 80 later this month. "That never happens in Manhattan. You do not hear planes above your head, and I knew there was something wrong.
"I said to myself, 'don't get anxious until you hear the sirens.' Two minutes later, there were plenty of sirens."
Samuels and three others who were at work early went to the front office of their complex, which had windows through which one could see up and down Broadway.
"If you look straight down Broadway, you could see the top of the World Trade Center, the very top," Samuels said. "There was smoke, and that was about it."
Images of the damaged building flashed on a television set that Samuels was watching as the scene unfolded in real life outside the windows.
"As the minutes went on, people were streaming toward us, going north, going away from the site," Samuels said. "Finally, after about 10 minutes, the three of us decided to walk toward the World Trade Center, which was stupid in retrospect, but heck, we couldn't see everything."
When they were within two blocks of the World Trade Center, Samuels said, the second plane hit the south tower from the south.
"My colleagues said, 'I think we're going to go back the other way,'" she said. "We went back to the office and watched television and watched out the front window until we were told to leave."
Ryburn's nurse left her office by 4 p.m. Ryburn, wearing high heels, then walked the 5 miles to her Brooklyn Heights home and discover debris all through her apartment.
"There was dust, debris and God knows what," she said. It took two to three years for the remnants to be cleaned from the apartment, the friends said.
Samuels went to the top of her apartment building to get a better view.
"When I got up to the roof on this clear, cloudless, sunny day, it was absolutely clear that the plume of ash, smoke, whatever it was -- human parts, I guess, too -- went straight up," she said. "It made a square corner, a 90-degree turn, and came down in Brooklyn. Two blocks north of our apartment building, as I was walking home, the cloud began to precipitate down on the street, on the cars, on the people, on everything inside. It was like snow."
Then back in her apartment, Samuels turned on her TV set to see the latest developments.
"It was like O.J. You know, you couldn't help watching that white van go for hours," she said, referring to O.J. Simpson's run from police in 1994. "You couldn't help watching this building steaming with ash and oil and all of that."
Ryburn and Samuels said every firefighter from their neighborhood died, buried in the rubble at ground zero.
The attack had a negative impact on Middle Eastern culture in the United States and abroad because the hijackers were from that part of the world.
"There were lots of Middle Eastern restaurants and a park nearby where a lot of Muslim women would drop off their kids," Ryburn recalled. "They completely disappeared after that. There was a mosque nearby, and I think people were scared the mosque would be bombed. Nothing ever happened."
As day turned to night, New Yorkers just wanted to be home, Samuels said.
In 2007, Ryburn and Samuels moved to Pine Bluff so Ryburn could take care of her mother, who was 90 at the time and had broken her hip. Ryburn taught at Southeast Arkansas College and now works at a neuroscience institute at a Little Rock hospital.
Today marks 20 years since the eventful day in the Big Apple. It's an anniversary the longtime friends say they have no plans to commemorate.
"I don't think we'll take much notice of it," Samuels said. "We lived through it. We have our own memories of it. I have my own memories of it. It was a horrifying experience. It was something you'll never forget, we'll never forget, I'll never forget. And, I don't want to live through it again."