Before sadness, came the days of towering achievements

Buried in the bottom of my jewelry box, the one that holds my microscopic collection of treasures, is an Empire State Building lapel pin, circa 1964.

Made of tin, I think.

I've saved it for years so I'll always remember the day my father bought it for me in the skyscraper's gift shop.

"We're standing on top of the tallest building in the world," he shouted, as we stepped into a gale-force wind on the observation deck. "Did you hear me? The tallest building IN THE WORLD."

He was infinitely more impressed with that fact than I was. I didn't know it at the time, but I was a baby boomer. Even as kids, we were jaded and unmoved by things such as tall buildings, long bridges and even space exploration.

It was different with people my father's age, later dubbed The Greatest Generation. His friends seemed to spend their adult lives in a perpetual state of awe as inventions and engineering feats rained down upon them.

Born before interstate highways had numbers, these folks were left speechless not only by the moon landing but by color TVs and electric can openers.

"Americans can do anything," my dad said often.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, I never heard my father pine for the good old days. As far as he was concerned, there was nothing even vaguely romantic about outdoor plumbing, polio or all-white major league baseball.

Sometime in the late 1960s, the steel mill where my father worked installed a room-size IBM computer. My dad saw the future. He eagerly signed up for data processing classes at night, which ultimately enabled him to swap his blue collar for a white one.

"Wait till you see what computers will be able to do one day," he predicted.

When I bought my iPad last year, I found myself wishing my father was alive to see such a magnificently sleek computer that could do more than the clunky keypunch machine he'd run almost 50 years earlier.

He would have wanted one, I'm sure.

I was in college when the first tower of the World Trade Center opened in 1972, eclipsing the Empire State Building as the world's tallest. My father was there that first week. My mother told me he'd driven to New York City over and over simply to marvel at the construction.

Dad called me from a pay phone to say he'd just seen planes flying beneath the tower.

"Guess where I am?" he asked. "I'm standing on the top of the world's tallest building. Wait till you see it."

I asked him to bring me a pin. He told me I'd have to visit it myself to get one.

This being the anniversary of the attacks of 9/11, it seems everyone is remembering those twin towers, which - for a time - represented the apex of American ingenuity and engineering.

Ten years ago, I had just one thought as I saw those mighty towers slump to the ground, killing thousands in clouds of hideous brown smoke.

For the first time ever, I was glad my father was gone.

Kerry Dougherty, (757) 446-2306, kerry.dougherty@cox.net, PilotOnline.com/dougherty