We
are a People of Amazing Grace who have not permitted the passage of time to
besmirch the price paid by 2,977 patriots 18 years ago today. We have not
forgotten.
Back
then, I was a happy New Yorker who could never conceive such devastation. The
only stress I knew was fanciful in retrospect. The pressure cooker of being in
sales on Wall Street held nothing to what was to come. We naively enjoyed a
backdrop of perfect peace in our country. Our generation was one war had never
visited. We innocents lived as freely as we imagined we were.
On
that perfect Tuesday morning, I walked part of the way to the office. I was not
alone but joined by hordes taking in the blistering blindness of the blue sky.
It would have been a perfect day for flying. But enemies of God, the state and
mankind were in cockpits that morning, the first inklings of which we learned
of at our desks. CNBC’s Mark Haines initial interruption went largely
unnoticed. And then the second plane hit.
In
the years that have since passed, we have fought back, defied the beasts, and
rebuilt to the heavens. The Freedom Tower has become my visual touchstone,
rising a symbolic 1776 feet into the sky. Its 200 x 200-foot base is identical
to those of the Twin Towers whose footprints are forever memorialized, etched
with every single name of the victims robbed from us that day. The new One
World Trade Center can never replace the original or its sister. But the
glorious architectural feat can stand proud as a reminder that we did not let
the bastards get us down.
At
8:46 am EST, I will, as I’ve done every year, stop and pay tribute to the
fallen as the ceremony gets underway that recites their names, one by one. We
are all duty bound to do the same.
The
tragedy of 9/11 did not end at 10:28 am when the North Tower collapsed.
Recognizing this, today also honors the lives of the yet unknown, countless
thousands who have followed. The 9/11 Memorial features a
new addition, a sculptural salute inlaid with steel salvaged from the wreckage
dedicated, “to those whose actions in our time of need led to their injury,
sickness, and death.” I shall be visiting this addition on my next trip to New
York. I invite you to do the same.
Years
ago, I applied my God-given gift of writing to do what little I could to Never
Forget. The product of that effort is Angels Manning Heaven’s Trading Floors.
Many of you have read this. Many of you have not. It is painful for me, but I
re-read it every year. Please share this with whomever you like. I am humbled
for it.
This
year, I also share with you a photo that is very special to me. It shows the
Freedom Tower at night shining through the World Trade Center Oculus. The image
marries the two testaments of our ability to rebuild, to our very resilience
and the faith we hold in the good our country can be. I like to think that
today’s tower that kisses the sky is accessible by the blessed traders looking
down upon us, an easy step from the heavens they can reach in defiance of the
steps they could not take up to escape their fates 18 years ago. We once were
lost, but now are found. We have not forgotten.
We
never will.
He
could have passed for Yul Brynner’s twin if it wasn’t for those eyes. He was 57
years old, 6’2” tall, tan and handsome with a shining bald head. But his eyes,
those elfish eyes dared those around him to partake of anything but his
infectious happiness. It was those eyes I will never forget.
It
was Labor Day weekend, 2001. One of my best friend’s college buddies from UCLA
was in town and his uncle had a boat. So we had the good fortune to be invited
to take a cruise around Shelter Island on that long holiday weekend 18 years
ago. I was 30 years old at the time and I can tell you there was no “boat”
about this Yul Brynner look-a-like’s 130- foot yacht. The crystal champagne
flutes, the hot tub on the deck, the full crew – none of these accoutrements
faintly resembled the boats I’d been on as a middle class girl spending summers
off Connecticut’s stretch of Long Island Sound. The thing is, our friend’s
uncle was none other than Herman Sandler, the renowned investment banker and
co-founder of Sandler O’Neill.
I
wasn’t sure what to expect of Sandler and I had no idea that this chance
meeting would make a soon to happen unspeakable act that much more real. Would
Sandler exude that same pomposity so common among the Ivy League investment
bankers who had underwritten the Internet Revolution? In a word, hardly.
Sandler personified self-made man. After introducing me to his family, of whom
he was immensely proud, he graciously offered me something to eat or drink. And
then, he told me a story about a man who knew the value of never straying the
course. It haunts me to this day.
It
was a good old-fashioned American Dream story about a man and some friends who
started an investment bank to banks and built their firm to the top of the
world. Literally. The secret to his success, which he enjoyed from his place in
the clouds, on the 104th floor of the south tower of the World Trade Center was
simply hard work, he said. He prided himself, relaying to me in what I could
tell was a tale he’d repeated time and again, not only on making it to the top
of the tallest building in the city, but on beating the youngest and hungriest
to the office in the mornings and turning off the lights at night. Never forget
where you come from. Never take for granted what you have.
In
2001, I had been on Wall Street for five years and was enjoying my own success
and experiencing firsthand what money could buy. Given the choices my world
offered, most would not have chosen night school. But I was determined to
fulfill a lifelong dream and attend Columbia where I was to earn my master’s in
journalism to complement my MBA in finance from the University of Texas. I
guess I was not like most others. I wanted something tangible to open the next
door in my career, which I knew would involve both the markets and writing. I
called it my retirement plan.
Throughout
this Wall Street by day, student by night chapter of my life, the minute the
stock market closed at 3 pm, I would rush to the west side subway lines to trek
north to Columbia’s campus. Just before Labor Day that year, I had turned in a
class project, exploring the world of the famous Cornell Burn Center at New
York-Presbyterian Hospital. During my time on the project, the unit was quiet
save a few occupants, which apparently was not the norm. So those brave nurses
had to paint a picture for me of what it was like when the floor was bustling
with victims of fire-related disasters. Many of the stories of pain and
suffering were so horrific I remember being grateful for the relative calm and
saying a little prayer the unit would stay that way.
I
returned to work on Tuesday, September 4, after that long weekend that proved
to be fateful, with a new perspective on life and work, inspired by Sandler’s
humility. Little did I know we were all living on precious borrowed time. It
was impossible to conceive that one short week later, Sandler’s inspirational
tale and those nurses’ surreal stories would collide in a very real nightmare.
It’s
the Pearl Harbor of my generation. Most Americans can tell you where they were
on the morning of September 11, 2001. I had walked part of the way to work that
day, so picture perfect was the blue of the blue sky. I was in
my office at 277 Park Avenue in midtown watching CNBC’s Mark Haines on my left
screen and pre-market activity on my right screen. As
was most often the case, it was muted as live calls on economic data and
company news came over the real life squawk box on my desk. My two assistants
were seated outside my office going through their pre-market routine, fortified
as was usually the case with oatmeal, yogurt and coffee. In retrospect, the
mundaneness of the morning’s details are bittersweet.
It
was almost 9 am and out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that a live picture
of the World Trade Center had popped up on CNBC. Haines reported, as did many
initially, that a small commuter plane had hit the north tower of the World
Trade Center. As distracting as the image was, I tried to go back to my own
morning routine, preparing for the stock market open in what had ceased to be
one-way (up) trading after the Nasdaq peaked in March 2000.
And then,
at 9:02 am, time stood still. A scream pierced the floor as
one of my assistants watched a second plane, a second enormous plane, fly
straight into what appeared to be Morgan Stanley’s office floors in the south
tower, where her father was at work. As things turned
out, it didn’t matter where the plane had hit for the employees of Morgan
Stanley that morning. They had Rick Rescorla, the firm’s Cornish-born director
of security and a Vietnam veteran who had been preparing for this day for
years. He knew the Twin Towers were an ideal target for terrorists. Thanks to
his efforts and years of constant drilling – every three months, which some
thought overzealous — all but 13 of Morgan Stanley’s 2,687 employees and 215
office visitors survived that day. With the evacuation complete, Rescorla
heroically reentered the buildings to continue his rescue efforts and in doing
so, paid the ultimate price.
Ironically,
as was the case with Morgan Stanley’s Rescorla, some at Sandler O’Neill had
lived through the first attack on the World Trade Center. When the young firm
had outgrown its previous office space, it chose the south tower as its new
home, moving in the same week it was bombed on Friday, Feb. 26, 1993. Many who
struggled their way down over 100 flights in crowded stairwells, through seas
of discarded women’s shoes, learned the lesson that they would have been just as
well staying put. It was that very hesitation, borne of that lesson, that cost
many of the firm’s employees their lives.
In
the 16 minutes between the time the first and second planes struck the towers,
the Port Authority had announced over the south tower’s intercom system that
the issues were isolated to the north tower and to stay put. That didn’t mean
the scenes across the way at the north tower were any less horrifying as rather
than suffocate or burn to death, some leapt to their deaths before
the very eyes of those across the way in the south tower.
Amid
this mayhem, Jennifer Gorsuch, a Sandler employee, emerged from the ladies room
just in time to hear Sandler shout,“Holy shit!” Gorsach rushed to
find a friend and fellow Sandler employee who had survived the 1993 ordeal and
knew of an escape route. Together, the two set off down an open
stairwell.
Sandler,
though, going off his 1993 experience, told one investment banker who did
survive 9/11 that the safest place to be was in the office. He added, though,
that anyone who wanted to leave was welcome to do so. Of the 83 employees in
the office that morning, 17 chose to leave right away. The bond traders and
most of those on the equity desk chose to remain.
Only
three other Sandler employees would make it out alive. The
rest, including Sandler himself, were never aware that one, and only one, open
staircase offered them safe passage; the building’s intercom system had been
knocked out at the time of the second plane’s impact.
From
the little we know, many that day above the crash site tried to get to the
roof. Though it would not have made a difference in the end, it is nevertheless
deeply disturbing that the door to the roof was found to have been locked. The
towers were exempt from a city code that required roof access to remain
unlocked. The Port Authority and Fire Department had agreed that the safest
evacuation route was down, not up. Plus, enforcing the exemption delivered a
loud and clear message to vandals, media-mongering pranksters and those contemplating
suicide.
For me,
the sweetest sorrow came down to the nobility of those brash, boisterous
traders. Many that day, at Sandler O’Neill and Keefe, Bruyette &
Woods and Cantor Fitzgerald, among others, were among the 1,500 who could have
possibly escaped but chose to do right by their firms’ clients. You see, once
it was understood that the attacks were an act of terror, the markets began to
flash angry red, promising to crash at the open, handing certain victory to the
evil, soulless weaklings who took aim at the economic heart of this great
country. It is the traders who chose to man their stations I mourn to this day,
those I have always called, with utter reverence, the real Masters of the
Universe.
The
helplessness I felt when the buildings fell was matched only by my horror at
the silence that followed. At some point between 9 am and 10
am that morning, I found myself praying the deafening fire engine and ambulance
sirens tearing down Park Avenue would just stop blaring. The cacophony had
filled the 102 minutes that followed the initial plane striking the north tower
at 8:46 am. But then the buildings did fall. Although the second to be struck
by a plane, the south tower was the first to fall at 9:59 am. In the 29 minutes
that followed, we all prayed the north tower would escape the fate of its
sister to the south. But it was not to be. The unthinkable, the impossible
happened, not once, but twice. And then it was quiet, quiet for days and months
and now, 18 years.
Of
course, there were miraculously 12,000 who walked away,
mainly those who had evacuated the floors beneath the impact zones in both
buildings. No doubt, the survivors paved a pathway of hope to help the country
heal. But the dearth of rescues was nevertheless heartbreaking as we
collectively sat vigil praying man and dog would pull a survivor from the pile.
Hence the devastation wrought by the silence. It was unfathomable to contrast
those who had braved the fires and lost, and the mere 22 survivors admitted to
the no longer nearly vacant Cornell Burn Center of my Columbia class project
experience. As if to punctuate the pain, four hospital EMS employees had been
lost along with 408 other rescue workers that dark day.
Normalcy
was suspended in the days and hellish nights that followed. We
financial markets survivors, weighed down by guilt as we were, were told to do
what those in those towers had done so bravely. We stayed on call in the event
Dick Grasso and the other powers that be were able to open the markets for
trading. We were prepared to be the calm in the stormy market seas that were
sure to follow the initial open.
Unlike
the markets, Columbia resumed classes on Wednesday, September 12th. The moment
I stepped out of my cab on 125th Street that evening, the memories of the
sounds of 9/11 were lost in the overwhelmingly toxic smells of its aftermath.
Buffered as I was, at home in the middle of the island on Fifth Avenue, I had
only experienced the tragedy’s aftermath from the nonstop playback news images
of the towers that were, and then ceased to be. But Columbia, with its
proximity to the Hudson, is an inescapable spot to take in what the winds
carry. That evening it was the sad novelty of the smell of burning computers,
steel and God knows what else, something I hope to never know again.
On
Friday, September 14th, I was set free to travel north to Connecticut to the
loving arms of my family who were worried so. They tried to bolster my spirits,
what with my 31st birthday set to arrive on Monday. But I was in no place to
find the will to celebrate. I was short the markets, poised to profit the
minute trading opened on Monday morning and beating myself up as a traitor to
my country for being so. The moment I was able to do so on the morning of
September 17th, I closed out my position. And I manned my station.
That
night, most of my friends dragged me out to my favorite Italian restaurant. But
one of us was absent from the table. My dear friend, whose UCLA friend had
introduced us to Herman Sandler, found herself in the right place at the right
time to begin to help the healing process. At the time, she was working at Bank
of America in midtown. The very day the towers fell, the bank had offered
Sandler O’Neill survivors temporary office space in the same midtown office at
which my friend worked. Jimmy Dunne, who found himself running Sandler O’Neill
in the flash of an eye, gratefully accepted. Dunne had been out of the office
on 9/11 trying to qualify for the U.S. Mid-Amateur Classic; he survived by
chance and chance alone. So devastated was my friend that she chose to stay
late every night, on her own time, to help Dunne write condolence letters to
the families of the 66 Sandler employees who had lost their lives. She would
eventually end up working at Sandler.
On my
birthday, six days after 9/11, my friends insisted that robbing us all of joy,
the very ability to celebrate life’s little occasions, would represent yet
another feather in the caps of the cowards who attacked our fearless traders,
our Masters of the Universe who were now all, and would be forever, on heavens’
trading floors. We raised our glasses to them that September evening and I
remember thinking I hope Smith & Wollensky delivers in the celestial realm.
But I
don’t digress. I never do on 9/11. I never shy away from remembering the worst
day of my life. To do so would be an unforgivable dishonor to the 2,977 victims
who gave their lives on that painfully beautifully September morning. And so, I
never will.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/helplessness-i-felt-was-matched-only-silence-followed-never-forget-911
