Five years later, peace and horror mix at Oklahoma City bomb site

Tuesday, April 18th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) -- Jeannine Gist stood looking out Tuesday through a window blown to daggers by the Oklahoma City bombing and found what had been missing for her here for five years.

"I feel peace," she said, her eyes aimed at the spot where her daughter died at work April 19, 1995.

The spring green lawn and long dark reflecting pool that will open Wednesday as the Oklahoma City National Memorial stretched before her where the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building once stood.

Behind her loomed the gutted hollow of another building wrecked by the blast, a place that will soon house a museum where visitors will hear the bomb as it exploded and learn more about its 168 victims.

"I'd like them to leave thinking `If there is anything I can do to make sure this never happens again, I will do it,' " said Gist, whose daughter, Karen Carr, was 32, worked on the federal building's fourth floor and taught aerobics at the YMCA across the street.

On Wednesday, two ceremonies will mark the opening of the memorial: A private one for families, survivors and rescue workers and a public ceremony where President Clinton is scheduled to speak. Thousands of people are expected to attend.

There will be hymns, a fly over, the ringing of church bells, the readings of the victims' names and silence in their honor. And there will be a final anthem -- "Again I Say Rejoice."

Joy and sorrow mixed in the tears of the designers of the memorial Tuesday. Torrey and Hans Butzer stood alone together under the American elm tree that bloomed even after weathering the blast of the bomb. He handed her a tissue. "It's tough, but it's time to give it to the community," she said.

In the Journal Record Building, the former newspaper office that sits directly across from the bomb site, a tour was under way to tell reporters about the Memorial Center Museum it will eventually hold.

The interactive museum will "house the experience of April 19,1995, and the days that followed," said Bob Johnson, chairman of the Oklahoma City Memorial Trust. It is scheduled to open in late November.

Visitors will be taken from everyday life right before the blast, hear the bomb as it was recorded during a meeting under way in a neighboring building and see the community's response and national outpouring that followed, officials said.

The story will be told simply, without drama, museum director Sunni Mercer said, pointing to one example -- a box holding keys plucked from the crumbled Murrah building.

Piles of these unclaimed house keys, locker keys, gate keys will be on display, all speaking to the normal lives changed by a terrorist plot.

David Page was one of those taking notes Tuesday. But he is part of that story, too.

The managing editor of the Journal Record, Page had just stepped out of his office for a cup of coffee that April 19 day when the bomb went off, shattering his office window and sending long shards of glass flying like knives.

A pink scar on one of his hands is a reminder. So was the order Tuesday to stay away from the hole that was once his window because the building remains unfurbished and dangerous.

"I think it looks nice," he said, straining to see out on to the electric green of the lawn and the black granite pool. "It is a peaceful look, seeing it now."

The memorial is flanked by "Gates of Time" representing the moments before and after the blast. On Tuesday, the pool held the wavy images of the 168 chairs planted in the building's footprint. Some of the chairs are smaller, representing the 19 children wh odied.

Gist knows exactly where her daughter's chair sits.

A cool breeze stirred her hair and the sun hit her cheeks as she looked out at it from the Journal Record Building.

Her face was serene, even as she explained how the empty chai rrepresents the empty one at her dinner table and the empty seat at her side when she goes shopping.

"You're not ever going to forget what happened to those people," she said. "But you're going to look out and see the water, see the Survivor Tree, the beautifulness of it and realize life still goes on."