Friends, former classmates of Acorn reporter recall events of Sept. 11

Friends, former classmates of Acorn reporter recall events of Sept. 11

New York City skyline before the Sept. 11 attacks

By Wayne Harrison

Acorn Sports Writer

I was back in the New York-New Jersey area recently with friends for a surprise 40th birthday party for my lifelong friend Brad Barazani. We grew up in Great Neck on Long Island, about ½ hour from Manhattan. The party was in Maplewood, N.J., Brad’s current hometown.

Three of the guys on hand for the party were near the attacks on the World Trade Center buildings, and I asked them if they would mind being interviewed for a story in The Acorn.

Dave Vogel was the most valuable player on the Great Neck North baseball team his senior year (1980) of high school and had worked at Merrill Lynch at the World Financial Center, across from the World Trade Center. He worked there as a bond trader even before the first bombing in 1993.

Doug Klein, a football player at Great Neck North (class or ’80) worked on the 73rd floor of building No. 2, or the South Tower, which was hit on the 79th through 84th floors, the second building hit by a commercial airliner in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attack.

Klein worked for Morgan Stanley at the time and now is a portfolio management specialist for CFS Investment Advisory Services.

Bob Edison is a pseudonym for the third friend who shared his story. He works for a high-profile investment-banking firm that doesn’t allow its workers to do interviews with the press without clearance.

Edison worked across the street from the World Trade Center in the American Express Tower where he was in an 8 a.m. meeting when the first tower was hit.

"The plane was full throttle which brought some of the guys from my meeting to the window," Edison said. "And they were watching the plane coming to the North Tower, and they started to speculate ‘Is it going to go around the building?’

"Then I heard this huge crash and I went running to the window, and I saw this debris and this orange-red like fireball coming toward the window."

The first tower, or the North Tower, had been hit.

"We had just gotten off the phone," said Vogel, recalling a conversation with a good friend, Matthew Picerno, who worked at the World Trade Center, died there, and left behind three children and a young wife.

"We were talking about the Giant-Denver football game because it was the first game of the season that night," Vogel added.

The New York Giants had played the Denver Broncos in the season opener the night before on Mon., Sept. 10, and some people’s lives were saved because they were arriving late to work the next morning at the World Trade Center. The football game would have ended past midnight Eastern Time.

"We heard the windows kind of buckle and we heard an explosion," Vogel said. "And to me it sounded exactly like the situation that happened in the first explosion in the garage of the tower (in 1993). I never thought it was an accident. I thought it was another attack because it was an eerily similar sound."

Klein was headed into work on the 73rd floor of tower No. 2, the South Tower, late, because it was his son’s first day of school.

"My son had just started kindergarten," said Klein, a New Jersey resident now. "And it was kind of a big deal. I was still about ½ hour away at 8:45 when the plane hit. I was looking directly at it, and then the second plane hit and that was just a giant fire, and I couldn’t believe it."

As Vogel headed north toward the ferry that would take him back to Hoboken, N.J. after the planes hit the buildings—but before the towers collapsed—he was running. The first tower was hit. People were already trying to escape.

"I didn’t know what was going on at that point," said Vogel, as he ran north toward the ferry with many others. "For all I knew, there were people coming around the corner with machine guns—that’s the kind of thing it sounded like.

"And then, all of a sudden, you just heard this really loud noise of a plane coming in," Vogel said. "And then the second explosion happened. People saw that plane coming in and screamed. At that point, anyone who thought it was possibly an accident obviously knew that it wasn’t."

As Vogel headed back to safety via the ferry, Edison was deciding what to do with co-workers at the American Express Building across from the Trade Towers. He had also been there in ’93.

"I told everyone that these people were reading out of a manual," Edison said recalling words of supervisors who told him and his colleagues that it was safe to stay inside their building. "They were trying to keep us calm. But we had to think on our feet. Basically our lives were at stake. We shouldn’t be relying on them."

Edison decided to vacate his building and make a conscious effort to get at least ¼ mile from the first tower because he knew it was ¼-mile high and if it fell, it could wipe out everything in its wake.

"I walked downstairs, went to the front of my building to the northeast corner," Edison said. "Now this is directly across the street from the North Tower and I’m looking up and I’m basically just seeing people jump out of the building and people hanging off the ledges."

"I couldn’t see the South Tower because it was blocked," Edison added. "I was race-walking away and I saw a girl I went to high school with. She comes race-walking behind me, barefoot, holding a baby, looking like one of these women running away from a bombing in a war."

Vogel was grateful he didn’t witness what Edison did. He had made it back by ferry to New Jersey where he listened to the news while hoping his wife, Carla, was safe.

"I think I got one of the last ferries out," he said. "But I wasn’t around when the thing collapsed and I didn’t see people jump from the building. We were listening to the radio. There were still four or five planes in the air that they were trying to track.

"Then we heard the Pentagon got hit," Vogel added. "I thought I was in the middle of a Tom Clancy novel. I stopped at a liquor store, got a bottle of wine, got home and waited for my wife."

Carla was headed into the Lincoln Tunnel in downtown Manhattan, toward the Port Authority, when passengers on the bus she rode started yelling, ‘Don’t go in the tunnel!’ They had also heard of the attacks on the radio and it didn’t take long to convince the bus driver to make a U-turn just as the bus was about to go into the tunnel headed in the direction of the attacks.

"I remember every second of that day like it was yesterday," said Dave Vogel. "My first thoughts went to the guys at Cantor Fitzgerald who I knew. Everybody up there died. I knew at least 10 guys."

Klein’s friends and clients thought he was on the 73rd floor of Tower Two when it was hit.

"All my customers, they assumed that I was there so they didn’t know what to think," he said. "It took me two days to call everybody that I knew. Most people were ‘Thank you, thank you.’ It was probably the most outpouring of affection I’ll get in my entire life."

Though grateful for the support he received from the people he knew, Klein can’t help thinking about those less fortunate.

"This company, Cantor Fitzgerald, they got so wiped out," he said. "People couldn’t go down the stairs because there were sheets and sheets of sheetrock blocking the stairwells. Thinking about all the ways that people died really gets me sick to my stomach."

Klein also thinks about the mindset of the terrorists.

"Just the idea that you realize that all of those days that you go to work, there’s charts in somebody’s room and they have a picture of the World Trade Center up there, and they’re actually focusing on the day that they’re going to hit your building," he said.

Vogel never spoke to his friend Matt Picerno again after the discussion they had about the Giants-Broncos’ football game.

"The hardest thing I ever did was—a couple of days afterwards—calling his wife," Vogel said, adding about the discovery of Picerno’s remains, "He was actually one of the first people that they found. They found him, I think, three or four days later."

Vogel’s older son, Brian will be 8 in October, his younger son, Matt, turned 6 last May.

"My first thoughts were, ‘What kind of world are they growing up in?’ That’s really what made me sad, knowing that the innocence and the insulation that we kind of grew up in—in Great Neck—seemed to be gone in every corner."

My friends Dave, Doug and "Bob" felt vulnerable working near or in the World Trade Center because they saw what happened in 1993. Now, although they’ve moved to different work locations, their fear is heightened.

"I have just what they’re looking for," Edison said. "I’m an American. I’m a New Yorker. I’m Jewish. I’m an investment banker. Now I’m sitting in Times Square. So I have five things that are making me high risk."

Vogel can’t help think about Matt Picerno and the 2,799 other people who died in the towers.

"Can you imagine that," he said, "having a cup of coffee in your hand, you’re talking to your friends, you’re kind of getting ready for the day. And you see a 767 bearing down on you. You’re looking out at a beautiful, sunny morning and there’s a plane coming at you."