Tennesseans say they needed 9/11 loans
KNOXVILLE — Businesswoman Carol Ann Norton says she needed a federal loan intended to help merchants recover from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, even if the attacks had little bearing on her card shop.
“To say that your business — any retail business — was not affected would be a lie because every retail business was affected by 9/11,” said the owner of Carol Ann’s Suburban Hallmark.
But Norton, who used her $980,000 loan in 2003 to buy a building, said, “I don’t know that I am comfortable saying that 9/11 killed my business and I had to get … the loan to survive.
“I mean, it was one of the criteria. Was it the true reason? Probably not.”
Norton was among 123 Tennesseans who received $47.6 million from the Small Business Administration between 2001 and 2003 in low-cost loans created specifically to help merchants recover from the terrorist attacks in 2001.
Motels, restaurants, travel agencies and tour guides — all businesses that might reasonably have been hurt by declines in travel after the jetliner hijackings — benefited from the program in Tennessee.
But so did a chiropractor in Cordova, a dentist in Goodlettsville, a jeweler in Chattanooga, a tobacco shop in Memphis, a Baskin Robbins in Brentwood and a boat builder in Spring Hill.
A review by The Associated Press found that $5 billion in loans were distributed nationally through a program so loosely run that some companies at New York’s Ground Zero were turned down while others qualified that didn’t need terrorism aid or didn’t even know that was the loans’ purpose.
“I was not aware of any 9/11 (connection),” said David Horner, owner of Classy Lady Inc., a Knoxville women’s clothing store that received a $998,000 loan. The company used the loan to move out of a mall and into its own building.
“(It) was just a construction loan. We went through First Tennessee (Bank of Memphis). They were our construction lender, and then SBA came and bought them out at the end,” he said.
If a declaration of 9/11 impact was part of the deal, Horner couldn’t remember. “You know, it might have come across my desk,” he said. “But there were about 100 pages to that loan application and I can’t recall all the questions.”
“Was this loan approved under those conditions?” asked Ronald Baker, owner of Baker Motor Co., a used car lot in Kingsport that received a $476,000 loan in 2003.
“Mine had nothing to do with that,” he said of the terrorist attacks. “I am taken aback. I really don’t know what to say.”
The largest loan in Tennessee was nearly $1.7 million. It went to Bartlett Child Care Center Inc. in suburban Memphis. The money was spent on two nursery and after-school centers in Bartlett and Cordova that serve about 440 children.
Owner Kay Von Boeckman said she didn’t know the loan was linked to 9/11. A former employee made the application, she said. But she did say her business suffered from the attacks’ ripple effect on the economy.
“We had a lot of parents who lost their jobs either completely or they had to relocate. And it happened so quickly,” she said. “Our enrollment has just begun to recover in perhaps the last six months.”
Chip Headrick, owner of King of Kleen car wash in Chattanooga, received a $920,000 loan. He said it saved his two-station company in the face of poor management by once-trusted friends and falling demand for clean car service he blamed on the aftershocks from 9/11.
“In some ways it’s a stretch. A very small area was impacted physically,” Headrick said of the terrorist attacks. “Mentally, it impacted the nation as a whole. A lot of people for a while didn’t do anything. Fear came out. People watched what they spent.
“I don’t know per se if (the loan) was directly tied to all of that,” he said. “I think (it was) a combination of things.”