There was an explosion, screams and the sound of breaking glass as plates of food smashed to the kitchen floor.

Lucky for Rae, the bullet missed her as she ran out of the kitchen, past the bar and pool tables and escaped through the front door of the dimly lit tavern.

Unfortunately, the bullet struck my waitress, Hazel “Ginny” Mainer, in the back. Ginny screamed: “My God, I’ve been hit,” as she, too, fled the gunman, who was wildly stalking the dining room and cursing. His chilling words echo today in my mind as if I heard them yesterday.

“Where’s the bitch?” Francis “Frannie” Dusch demanded repeatedly of me and the dozen or so other stunned diners, waving his gun. “I’m gonna kill the bitch?”

It was half past noon on Aug. 29, 1989, and I was an Associated Press correspondent reporting to the Chicago bureau and living in the central Illinois city of Peoria. I was having lunch with two fellow reporters, Toby Eckert and Mike Bailey, both of the Peoria Journal Star.

The memory of Frannie Dusch shooting Ginny flooded back last week when the human resources folks at The Gazette circulated a new training video for all of us to watch.

The video is titled “Run, Hide, Fight. How to Survive a Mass Shooting,” and it features actors confronted with an “active shooter” scenario.

The goal is to train employees how to properly react in the event a wild-eyed gunman enters the building. It’s a good idea, I think.

Given the frequency of workplace shootings nationwide, it makes perfect sense to train employees. This type of video is becoming commonplace, in fact, in new-employee orientation.

Recently, our own building was on lockdown because of a threat against another tenant. It was deemed a credible threat by police, and we spent a tense day watching and waiting. Though the day passed without incident, it made me think of escape routes from our new office and where I could safely hide if the threat materialized.

So I watched the video with heightened interest. As the video unfolded, I was instantly transported back to Lindy’s in Peoria and facing Frannie Dusch once more.

In the video, viewers are urged to run from a shooter if a safe escape route is possible.

If not, victims are urged to stay calm, turn off lights and phones and hide from an active shooter behind a locked door or a door barred by desks or copy machines or cabinets.

As a last resort, if employees find themselves trapped and a confrontation inevitable, they should arm themselves with any weapon available, such as a fire extinguisher, letter opener or heavy object.

I thought back to how Toby, Mike and I reacted as well as the other diners when Frannie Dusch paced Lindy’s bar.

I recalled how Toby responded by jumping up and running to the back of the bar and hiding in a corner.

Mike seemed to be in shock and sat at the table confused.

I had a view of the kitchen and saw Rae fleeing and Ginny screaming and running for her life. Then I saw Frannie Dusch and his gun.

Vividly, I recall ducking under the table and grabbing Mike by the arm, pulling him under, too, as Dusch paced and swore and vowed to kill his wife.

At the next table, a woman sat in a daze, repeatedly asking: “Is this a joke? Is this a joke? This isn’t funny.”

Then I watched as Dusch turned to her, told her to get up, muttered that he’d show her a joke, pointed his gun and pulled the trigger. But it didn’t fire. He looked at his weapon, glanced around the room and left by the front door.

My last image of Dusch was of him briskly walking down the sidewalk, past the front window of Lindy’s, as a bread truck pulled up and parked to make a delivery. I remember thinking the driver had no idea of his close call with a would-be killer. Dusch escaped, only to be caught after a six-hour police manhunt.

Meanwhile, I ran into the kitchen to find a phone and call police and an ambulance. I found Toby hiding in a corner. And I went outside to find Ginny sitting on the sidewalk, a small hole in the back of her white waitress blouse. A single drop of blood dripped from it.

I remember thinking how lucky we all were because I am convinced Dusch would have kept shooting had his gun not jammed.

The stress of the day continued with a trip to the Peoria Police Department to give statements, to identify Dusch from mugshots and to pick him out of a lineup.

Several months later, I would testify against him at trial and help convict him of attempted murder. At trial, I saw Ginny for the first time since the shooting. She was in a wheelchair. The shooting had left her paralyzed.

I asked Toby and Mike to watch the “Run, Hide, Fight” video to get their thoughts.

Today, Toby is a senior state fiscal policy editor at the Washington, D.C., think tank Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. He gave the video a mixed review.

“It’s all well and good to give me this information, but when you are suddenly in a situation like that, instinct takes over,” Toby said in an email. “For instance, back at Lindy’s almost everyone immediately dove under a table. For some reason, my first instinct was to stand up and get the hell out of there.

“If I or you or Bailey had seen a video like this first, would we really have acted any differently? Would we have been able to recall the training video in that split second when you have to act?”

Mike, longtime opinion page editor at the Journal Star, agreed that the video has limited value.

“Nothing really ever prepares you for that situation,” Mike told me. “Though I suppose that, given the reality of the times in which we live, it doesn’t hurt to think about it in advance.”

At the time of the shooting, Mike wrote a first-person account in which he observed the various reactions of witnesses.

“My mind failed to grasp the nightmare we’d stumbled into,” he wrote at the time. “Like everyone else at Lindy’s Villa Tap, I soon found myself under a Formica table, thanks in great part to my lunch companion, Associated Press reporter Bill Vogrin. ‘Stay down!’ he barked repeatedly as the gunman . paced the restaurant waving his pistol.”

Then he noted how Toby fled and other diners sat bewildered.

“Of the three of us, Vogrin kept his head about him the best,” Mike wrote in 1989, “later describing what happened in details I missed.”

I don’t include that to brag (OK, maybe just a little) but to point out that no one reacts the same.

Toby challenged advice in the video.

“If you’re going to run and hide, you better know where the best place to do that is,” Toby said. “When I ran into that back room at Lindy’s, there was no door, nowhere to hide and no way to get out. I cornered myself.”

And he thought the video should have suggested options if a shooting turns into a hostage situation.

Mike said the video offered some smart advice.

“I do think the video has its priorities straight, which is run first, get out of the building if you can – though you don’t necessarily know what awaits you outside, either,” he said.

And to those who will say “if you had been carrying a gun, you could have defended yourselves,” Mike noted that the Lindy’s owner had a gun behind the bar and he knew Dusch had been making threats against his wife. But he froze and never drew it or fired at Dusch.

All three of us agree the video makes people think about the possibility and consider how they should react. 

And I think we all agree that every scenario is different and nothing can really prepare you for it.

In fact, the other time I was faced with armed gunmen in the desert outside Las Vegas, the run, hide, fight scenarios wouldn’t have helped me much.

But that’s another column.