Rescue Dogs of 9/11: Roselle
Reprinted from Cesar’s Way magazine
For guide dog Roselle, 9/11 was just another workday.When the day was finally over and he was home safe again, Michael Hingson remembers, the first thing he did was hug his wife, Karen. Then he let Roselle, his guide dog, out of her harness. Roselle’s retired predecessor, Linnie, ran up to her with a chew toy. “They started tugging on it,” says Hingson, “playing together as if nothing had happened.”
But Hingson and Roselle, a yellow Lab and Hingson’s fifth guide dog since he turned 14, had been through hell that day, September 11, 2001. If they were alive and safe, it was because they both remembered their training and kept calm amid the chaos of the World Trade Center.
Hingson, 61, now a motivational speaker who addresses big companies—AT&T, Exxon, and FedEx have been clients—on the benefits of inclusion, was on the 78th floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower on 9/11. He was preparing for a seminar, and Roselle was napping under his desk.
“Then, just as I stand up and turn to the supply cabinet to get some more letterhead,” he writes in Thunder Dog, his soon-to-be-published memoir, “I hear a tremendous boom! It is 8:46 a.m. The building shudders violently, and then starts to groan and slowly tip to the southwest. In slow motion the tower leans over something like 20 feet.”
Luckily for Hingson and his co-workers, the impact (American Airlines Flight 11 had flown into the building) occurred more than a dozen floors above their office—and on the other side of the building. “Nobody knew what was going on,” says Hingson. “But I had participated in fire drills and I knew what the procedures were. And Roselle came out from under my desk yawning and wagging her tail; she wasn’t nervous. Within five minutes of the impact, we were on our way to safety.”
He and Roselle had already walked through the evacuation procedure several times, so Hingson had no problem directing his assistant to the proper stairwell. “People are under the misconception that a guide dog leads a blind person,” he says. “It’s not true. We work as a team. My job is to know where I want to go, and hers is to get me there. In Cesar’s terms, I’m the pack leader. I command the dog: go left, go right. I knew the building, so I could direct her.”
As they began their descent, Hingson and his co-workers still had no idea what had happened. But then he began to smell something familiar. “I fly more than 100,000 miles a year,” he says, “and I know the smell of aviation fuel. I realized then that we must have been hit by a jet plane.” The descent went quickly enough, until somewhere around the 30th floor, when the evacuees had to share the stairs with firefighters heading up, but eventually they reached the building concourse. By then it was 9:35 a.m. Soon Hingson and Roselle, accompanied by co-worker David Frank, found themselves somewhere on Broadway. That’s where they were when the South Tower collapsed, and a tremendous cloud of dust and -debris enveloped them. Through it all, says Hingson, Roselle continued to do her job as if it were just an ordinary day. “She didn’t seem nervous,” he says. “I kept giving her a lot of praise; she was doing her job well.”
Finally, sensing an opening nearby, Hingson directed Roselle toward it. He reached out and realized it was a subway entrance; they headed downstairs. That’s where Hingson heard a woman calling out, “I can’t see; I can’t see.” Temporarily blinded by the dust cloud, she was stumbling around, lost and terrified. “Don’t worry,” he reassured her. “I have a guide dog.” He and Roselle took her in hand and stayed with her until she could find her way again.
Eventually Hingson and Roselle, still with David Frank, made their way back upstairs, hitched a ride to a friend’s apartment uptown, and finally made their way to Penn Station—and home to New Jersey.
In 2007, Roselle, battling an auto-immune disorder that attacked her muscles, retired as Hingson’s guide dog, settling into retirement like Linnie before her while his new dog, Africa, took over. On June 26, not quite 10 years after the day she survived 9/11, Roselle passed away. Hingson remembers her as “a pixielike personality, energetic and fun-loving. She played whenever she could and worked when she had to.”
On September 11, 2001, she worked. •
