Melody Jones was having lunch with 10 interns at her Washington, D.C., research firm in August when one asked her what was the most significant event in her career.
“I thought for about 10 seconds and it was so obvious–I said `Going through 9/11 as head of HR for Aon,'” Jones recalled Wednesday. “It’s the kind of thing you never expect in a lifetime, and having gone through it, it affects you for the rest of your life.”
On the eve of the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, many who lived through it in New York or were connected to the events through Chicago companies with satellite offices, have moved on, in some cases to new states or companies.
But some are still haunted by the memories, especially at Chicago-based Aon Corp., which lost 176 of about 1,100 workers in the World Trade Center attacks. The insurance brokerage and consulting firm leased space on floors 92 and 98 through 105 of the 110-story south tower.
One story in particular has stuck with Jones.
“It’s a woman who was on the phone with her husband, and he knew he wasn’t making it out. They said their goodbyes and reminisced, and she told him not to be afraid. He told her he wasn’t. Then she heard him say something like, `I think the floor is’ and the phone went dead. I think about that a lot.”
“Each year I think it’s not going–see, I’m going to cry, so just bear with me,” said Jones, choking up before quickly regaining her composure. “I say, `This year I’m going to be fine, and it’s not going to bother me.'”
Many members of Aon’s senior team, including then-CEO Patrick Ryan and his president at the time, Mike O’Halleran, were out of the country at the time of the attacks.
Until they returned, the stopgap leadership team included Jones, who is from Carmi, a small southern Illinois town, and Harvey Medvin, Aon’s now-retired chief financial officer.
Aon Center, one of Chicago’s tallest buildings, was evacuated, and the company set up a 24-7 war room in its Glenview facility. Hotel rooms were rented for employees who didn’t live nearby. Spouses of Aon workers also staffed the center, including Jones’ husband, Kirk, who helped field calls and serve food.
“Anybody who needed to step into the leadership role did so, and it was one of the things I loved,” Jones said. “When I was about ready to drop, Harvey stepped in, and when Harvey was about ready to drop, Pat Ryan had made it back and he stepped in, and when Pat was ready to drop I was ready to go again. And then Mike was back and Mike took over.”
Aon provided grief counseling for employees and members of families who lost relatives. Because there were not enough counselors available, Jones arranged for professors and graduate students in the psychology departments of local universities to fill in.
Jones learned a great deal from the experience.
“One thing I learned and have been rigorous about since is it’s essential to have really buttoned-up employee records–current contact information, location, business travel,” she said.
“From a family standpoint, some of the most heart-wrenching situations we found were employees who hadn’t kept their beneficiary designations up-to-date, and so we had sometimes significant benefits payments going to people who were not at all current families,” Jones said.
The experience also reshaped her own approach to life.
“None of us are guaranteed the next day, so it’s important to do things you’ve always thought you wanted to do,” she said. For example, Jones has been taking ballroom dance lessons for the past four years.
“I always wanted to learn classic ballroom–waltz, rumba, cha-cha, salsa,” she said. And her husband, who loved motorcycles as a young man, bought two motorcycles.
Jones plans to be at work Monday.
“Right now I have things on my calendar, including an executive committee meeting with my new senior team,” said Jones, who last March joined Corporate Executive Board as its chief human resources officer. “I will wear my Aon pins; I wear those every year.”
Aon’s plans to mark the anniversary include putting up a special commemorative home page on its Web site. These days, Aon workers in New York are based mostly in two offices, with more than 800 in Aon Center at 55 E. 52nd St., and more than 500 at 199 Water St. Another 200 occupy five smaller offices in Manhattan.
Gary Marchitello, who headed Aon’s global property practice at the time of the attack and narrowly escaped being in the World Trade Center when the first plane hit, said some of the Aon workers who perished were acquaintances. A few, including marketing executive Mary Wieman, were “dear friends.”
“She’s someone I miss every day,” said Marchitello, who in 2005 became property insurance practice leader for New York-based Integro Ltd., an Aon competitor.
“The grief fortunately diminishes, but then you let your mind wander back and the pain comes back,” Marchitello said. “But each year it gets a little better, and I’m a lot healthier than I was, mentally.”
What distinguished Sept. 11 from, say, a death from a car accident or sudden illness, he said, was the overwhelming dimension of it.
“There’s a sense of surrealism about it,” Marchitello said. “I watched the whole thing unfold.”
Marchitello missed the attacks by minutes.
He had stopped into his World Trade Center office but left for a meeting across the street several minutes before the first plane hit.
Upon impact, he heard a boom and felt the earth shake.
“The first thing you think of is thunder but that’s ridiculous because it’s a clear day,” he said.
Looking out the window, Marchitello said he saw the sky filled with paper. Then he saw smoke and flames spewing from the World Trade Center.
“Then you see larger objects falling from the building and realize they’re people, and that’s when it really gets horrifying,” he said.
Not long afterward, the second plane struck.
“I just saw that out of the corner of my eye just before it happened,” Marchitello said. “At that point, I knew we were under attack and ran like hell” to Aon’s corporate apartment several blocks away. Other Aon workers joined him there.
It wasn’t long before he returned to work.
“Whether it was a defense mechanism or autopilot, I never missed a day of work, even though there was no place to go to work for a while,” Marchitello said.
Others also dove back into their jobs, he said.
“We were going to rebuild the company for the good of remaining colleagues and, frankly, in the honor of those we lost,” he said.
Marchitello said his former employer responded “tremendously” to the disaster, including starting a scholarship fund for children of the deceased.
For the anniversary, Marchitello said he usually gets together for dinner with close friends who he shared that day with and the loved ones of some who perished. “We get a private room somewhere and make a nice long night of it and share the warmth,” Marchitello said.
Today, Marchitello works in the Times Square area of Manhattan.
“You always have to worry about another terrorist event,” he said. “But life is full of risks, and I happen to be in a business of risk, and to not do what I like, and to not do it where it happens, is, not to be cliched, giving in to the terrorists.”
Nafisa Degani, a Muslim, remembers her Aon boss saying that a plane was heading for the north tower. And she witnessed the explosion and flames.
“My reaction was, there’s so much glass around, it could start cracking up.”
Degani figures she had made it down to about the 50th floor when the second plane hit her tower. Her boss never made it out.
Degani said she never felt shunned or experienced any backlash from her Aon coworkers as a result of her religion.
“Here, I don’t feel any different,” she said Friday from Aon’s offices in New York.
Steve Greenberg, an Aon worker who was in the World Trade Center at the time of the attack, said he still misses colleagues who died, particularly Florence Gregory, whom he had known for years.
Greenberg, who had joined Aon only a week before the attack, was in a training class on the 92nd floor with 12 people. Only four would survive.
They heard a boom and felt the building shake. Someone poked their head in the doorway and reported seeing fire in the other tower and urged them to evacuate to play it safe.
When they got down to the 70th floor, an announcement was made that the building was safe and they could return to their offices.
That’s when the second plane hit their building. Walls started cracking and splitting. People were grabbing onto each other.
A member of Greenberg’s training class had asthma and begged Greenberg not to leave her.
The two continued to descend but “had to stop frequently because she couldn’t breathe,” according to Greenberg’s recollection in the book “Never Forget: An Oral History of Sept. 11, 2001,” by Mitchell Fink.
“On the way down, we saw people with things stuck in their heads, blood everywhere …” Eventually they escaped the building and began walking east, according to the book.
Suddenly they heard screaming and saw smoke from the collapsed building billowing towards them. They started running but, realizing they couldn’t outrun it, stood there holding each other until it dissipated, the book said.
They made their way to a deli in Chinatown and used a phone to call Greenberg’s wife. He bought a bottle of water, threw $5 on the counter and left with his co-worker.
Eventually, they ended up in a restaurant, Lindy’s, covered in soot. A woman sitting next to them paid their tab, and Greenberg and his co-worker sat there for a few hours.
The senior client specialist said he never considered leaving Aon. But he said he worries about the possibility of additional terrorist attacks and is still haunted by the sight of airplanes and smoke.
“I can’t see a plane in the sky without watching until it’s out of sight,” Greenberg said. “I still get very emotional when I see movies or pictures that show large amounts of smoke, like a shuttle liftoff. That’s what I remember most about the attack–being hit with that mile-high cloud of smoke.”
Even in Chicago, some Aon workers had visceral reactions to the attack.
“A lot of us had the frame of reference of having had meetings in the Trade towers, and specifically one of our first thoughts was how high up in the building our folks were,” said David Van de Walle, then-public relations manager for Aon’s consulting business.
“I got my first call from Aon’s Columbus office saying, `Dave, what do we say?'” Van de Walle said. “That was within an hour, and that was the beginning of the floodgates opening.”
About 20 consulting workers lost their lives.
What sticks in Van de Walle’s mind is how small twists of fate saved some people.
“One woman I know missed her bus. With another woman, her cats were driving her crazy and she was late,” recalled Van de Walle, who left Aon earlier this year to start USphere.com, a Web-based tool for students looking for colleges.
Stephen Ban, vice president of corporate marketing at T. Rowe Price but at the time of the attacks a senior vice president for marketing and communications at Aon in Chicago, said he was impressed by two Aon executives deciding to drive to New York to be with employees.
“In the aftermath of this day where people have driven airplanes into two buildings and there’s a hole in lower Manhattan, two senior guys say we have got to be there because we have so many employees there,” Ban said. “They drove all night from Chicago.”
Ban also recounted an Aon worker who was above the point of impact and survived. A national magazine wanted to include him in a photo for a one-year anniversary story.
“He said, `The press has contacted me and I need to know if it’s OK for me to talk,'” Ban said.
“I just thought what a remarkable phone call for someone to make. As far as I’m concerned he doesn’t need to ask for permission for anything for the rest of his life.”
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byerak@tribune.com
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Moments of silence at Calyon
Chicago-based Carr Futures lost 69 of its 143 workers who worked out of offices on the 92nd floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center.
“I was walking in the door a couple minutes after the plane hit, and within 15 minutes, I had the first wife calling me,” recalled Carol Hetman, executive vice president and the head of personnel at Carr, now Calyon Financial.
In early 2002 Hetman was asked to be a part of an HR panel discussing Sept. 11 experiences.
“I couldn’t do it,” she said, explaining that her emotions were still too raw.
Hetman said she remains in contact with victims’ families, and the pain lingers. “It has taken a lot for me to talk to you about it,” she said last week.
Calyon Financial will mark the anniversary with moments of silence at its midtown Manhattan offices, where it has 120 employees, and at its Chicago headquarters, 550 W. Jackson Blvd. Office lobbies in both cities have plaques engraved with the employees’ names who died in the attack.
Calyon’s Web site also has a page listing names of victims, with asterisks next to those who have been confirmed dead; 18 of the 69 remain missing.
–Becky Yerak
