BY MEGHAN V. MALLOY

Staff Writer

September 11, 2001. Ask anyone, and they will be able to tell you where they were and what they were doing that Tuesday morning.

Considered the day of infamy to people born in the last 25 years, Sept. 11 transformed the lives of Mainers and Americans alike.

It wasn't the only day time stood still for many Americans, however. Many recall exactly they were when President John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas, or when Japanese military forces bombed Pearl Harbor.

As people across the nation remember the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Mainers reflect on the days that changed history and the American people.

SEPT. 11, 2001

Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, was like any other autumn morning in Maine.

Ed Newcombe, now 27, woke up and turned on his television for the morning news.

What he saw was something unbelievable: one of the World Trade Center in New York City smoking and on fire.

"The first building had already been hit, it was smoking," Newcombe said.

Unable to look away from the carnage unfolding in front of him on television, Newcombe said he was "watching when the second plane hit the other tower."

"It was horrible," he said. "Even though it was far away, I was kind of scared."

Newcombe added that he feels less secure since the attacks.

"If somebody could take a giant plane from a big corporation and smash it into a building of such importance, yeah, that makes me feel less secure," Newcombe said. "I'm a lot less important than them, I'm a lot less protected."

Brenda Hernandez was already at work when she heard two airplanes had struck the New York City skyscrapers.

One of her coworkers was worried a friend of his might have been on one of the flights.

"It was very touching," Hernandez, of Augusta, said of the memory. "It was devastating."

Hernandez, who now works at the Capital Connection pizza and sandwich shop in the Statehouse, said she's been afraid to fly ever since.

"It makes me more aware of people," she said.

The possibility that an aggressor could attack and kill thousands of Americans on U.S. soil was probably the furthest thing from Jon Staples's mind.

Staples, who lives in Rochester, N.Y. and summers in Winthrop, had been golfing nearly all day, away from any reports of terrorist attacks, amid the green grass and camaraderie of the game.

He finally came into the clubhouse with the rest of his group in the early afternoon. There they found out things weren't fine at all, as television broadcasts showed smoke billowing over New York City.

"By the time we came into the clubhouse, it must have been around 2 in the afternoon," Staples, 70, said. "We were totally oblivious to what was going on."

He said at first he didn't realize the severity of the carnage, thinking the incident was similar to a 1993 bombing in the World Trade Center, which did relatively little damage, compared to the 2001 devastation.

"It took a while for it to sink in," Staples said. "There was the aspect of just not being able to believe it."

NOV. 22, 1963

Jack Thornton, like President John F. Kennedy, was a young man with his life ahead of him on Nov. 22, 1963. Thornton was finally out of the Army after serving in Korea, which he had done with a promise from the military that they would help pay for medical school and fulfill his dream of becoming a doctor.

Thornton, a retired podiatrist who lives in Chelsea, was deer hunting in Allagash with his friends from the military, when they received news the 35th President of the United States had been shot while riding in a motorcade through Dallas, Texas.

"I remember we heard it on a little radio," Thornton, 74, said. "I was bringing my deer out with another fella, when we heard he had been killed."

Thornton and his friends were floored at news.

"I felt depressed," he said. "Depressed and then angry. I remember we went to a filling station and saw grown men with tears in their eyes."

The death of Kennedy -- the only Catholic to be elected President of the U.S. -- hit the Catholic community hard, Thornton said, a Catholic himself.

"It was a tragedy," Thornton recalled. "He was such a popular man."

Muriel Oakes was doing some family shopping while her friend, Priscilla Small, looked after the children. When Oakes heard from a store clerk that the president had been shot, she turned around and went home to her children.

When Oakes came through the door, Small said, "We just clasped each other. We have been good friends for a long time, and something even more bonding (for us) was having to share that sorrow together."

Even children, some as young as four, knew something was amiss that Friday afternoon as grown men cried and a nation mourned.

Hernandez, the woman who works at the Statehouse, a very young girl at the time of Kennedy's death, vividly remembered "my mother crying in front of the TV."

DEC. 7, 1941

People were dancing to Glenn Miller's "Chattanooga Choo Choo", the New York Yankees were World Series champions and a gallon of gas was 12 cents.

The year was 1941, and though World War II was starting to brew under the direction of men like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, the U.S. was isolated from the conflict.

Dec. 7, 1941, changed that, Anna Albee said.

The 75-year-old Augusta woman remembered listening to her parents and her landlord's family discussing the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the deep-water naval base that was on the island O'ahu, Hawaii.

"They were very upset about Pearl Harbor," Albee said. "They talked about all of the American people who died in that happening and how horrible it was. They went on to ask, 'Did that really need to happen?' and 'Was that right or wrong?'"

The world Albee knew as a child also changed with the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

"As I grew up, I noticed that some people paid attention to those things and other people had no interest in the world around them and were only interested in their lives and largely foolishness," she said.

"They worried about what they could buy in the store and how they looked."

Albee's life changed when her uncle was sent overseas to fight. He returned to his family after the war, but, Albee recalled, "He was a very unhappy person when he came back."

Small, the woman who had been baby-sitting at the time of Kennedy's death, was an eight-year-old girl when Pearl Harbor was bombed.

Small remembered "people glued to their radios," trying to get news on the attack.

"I don't remember much about how I felt, except that I was very troubled," Small said.

"It was a scary thing, and I was affected by the grown-ups around me. I remember big headlines and pictures, and from then on I was scared of the war that followed."

Oakes, Small's long-time friend, said it was common in those days for neighborhood children to play "Commando" and other war games.

"I suppose it was a way to deal with it," Oakes said. "Growing up that way, we didn't think it was bad to play 'Commando'. Now people have a totally different mind set and don't want their children doing it."

The federal government reported 2,403 people -- most of them in the navy -- were killed in the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Two-thirds of the fatalities happened within the first hour of the attack, Bill Stanley, chairman of the North Carolina-based Pearl Harbor Day Commemorative Committee, said.

Sixty years have passed since the bombing of Pearl Harbor, 44 since the assassination of JFK and seven since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, but feelings of fear, anger and an uncertainly of the future bind them together.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, various media outlets have reported 2,974 people were killed on that day, excluding the 19 individuals believed to be responsible. The remains of 24 additional people, also presumed dead, have never been found.

Keith Edwards, Susan M. Cover, Betty Adams and Mechele Cooper contributed to this story.