Four individuals who transformed loss into resilience
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Charitable efforts honoring our lost colleagues and friends.
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VOICES provides information, resources and support programs to meet the evolving needs of the 9/11 families, survivors, rescue and recovery workers.
Some grandfathers teach grandsons to fish. Terence E. Adderley Jr.'s taught him to read The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Adderley, known as Ted, was born with business in his blood and relished it. His grandfather, William Russell Kelly, founded Kelly Services, a temp agency based in Michigan.
By the time Mr. Adderley was 12, he was picking his own stocks. He went to his grandfather's university ? Vanderbilt ? and joined his grandfather's fraternity, Sigma Chi. In the summers, he worked at Kelly and practiced dry wit. He teased co-workers about trivial mistakes by signing letters to them in a script similar to the company's chief executive ? his father, Terence E. Adderley.
At 22, he found Wall Street an easy fit. He shared a preference for French cuffs and collars with his new boss, the veteran Wall Street money manager David Alger.
Mr. Adderley planned ahead and family always figured prominently. His sister Elizabeth's 17th birthday fell in October. From her brother, she received a watch with a blue band (her favorite color) and gloves. Mr. Adderley had bought them for her by August, along with a pink scarf. It was not pashmina.
"He didn't care for pashmina," said Mr. Adderley's mother, Mary Beth. "If he was going to buy something for his sister, it was going to be cashmere."
View family tributes on The New York Times Portraits of Grief View family tributes on the VOICES of September 11th
For a generation of up- and-comers in the money world of Lower Manhattan, the scene was deeply familiar: David Alger's lunch table. Nothing fancy about it ? Mr. Alger seemed to thrive on cheeseburgers and apple pie, and any nondescript Wall Street coffee shop would do. His stories are what live on, and the lessons embedded within them about the stock market, and about life.
"I can see him chewing apple pie and telling these stories," said Rob Lyon, who worked for Mr. Alger at Fred Alger Management in the 1980's and remained close. One of Mr. Alger's lunch lessons was that big companies cannot possibly grow as fast as little ones, and that problems in a company ? or a life ? can never fully be solved in one three-month reporting period. You have to look to the horizon, he would tell the young Turks.
Mr. Alger, who was 57, took over operations at Alger Management from his brother, Frederick, in 1995. But by then his impromptu lunch seminars were Wall Street lore, former pupils like Mr. Lyon said. And strangely, all the stories seemed to have the same opening line: "That reminds me of something," he would say.
Janice Ashley was a modern-day Renaissance woman: literary, artistic and skilled in finance, as comfortable on Rollerblades as ordering a meal in a fancy restaurant. She was also outspoken and bubbly, someone who kept her friends from elementary school but relished new experiences, like a trip to Turkey in August.
"She marched to her own tune," said Richard Gallo, a friend she had dated for over five years. "She wouldn't have chicken or beef when she went out to eat ? she'd order the antelope steak or ostrich burger."
In a letter of condolence to the Ashley family, another friend recalled how Ms. Ashley was their only high school classmate to compliment her unconventional Sweet 16 party, at a Manhattan comedy club. "She just got things," Risa Lewak said. "There was nothing phony about her."
Ms. Ashley, 25, lived with her mother, father and 18-year-old brother in Rockville Centre, N.Y., and worked as a research associate at Fred Alger Management. She returned home tired from 12-hour days but found time to talk about her dreams, like eventually opening a florist gift shop, said Carol Ashley, her mother. She misses her daughter the most in the evenings. "She just sparkled," Mrs. Ashley said.
Hers had been the dream of so many immigrants ? to find a better life for herself and her family: a comfortable home, a good school for her son, a good job. And find it, she did. Indeed, in many ways, Yelena Belilovsky, who immigrated to this country from Kiev in 1993, had found all that she ever wanted. "She loved living in this country," said Ross Tisnovsky, her younger brother.
Mrs. Belilovsky, 38, lived with her husband, Boris, and son, Eugene, 13, in Mamaroneck, N.Y. Despite an early struggle with English, she managed to go back to school, received a Master of Library Sciences degree and landed a job at Fred Alger Management, where she had recently been named assistant vice president for information. She took pride in her job and the fact that everyone at work knew her by her Americanized first name, Helen.
She was so enamored of her new life in the United States that she eventually persuaded Mr. Tisnovsky and their parents, Leonid and Emma Tisnovsky, to leave the familiar surroundings of their homeland and to take a big gamble on this country as well. "It is devastating," Mr. Tisnovsky said. "The only reason our parents came here was to be with Helen and me.
Taking more than a dozen 15-year-old Boy Scouts to the wilds of New Mexico for a 10- day trip on horseback might not sound like the ideal trip for some people, but it was for Michael A. Boccardi. "It was a once in a lifetime thing," said his friend Ed Maselli, an assistant scoutmaster of Troop 40 in Mount Vernon, N.Y., which Mr. Boccardi led as scoutmaster. "Snakes, bears, the whole nine yards. He loved it."
Mr. Boccardi, 30, worked as a senior vice president of institutional relations at Fred Alger Management.
Scouting captured Mr. Boccardi's imagination from the age of 10; he had been an Eagle Scout himself. A typical month might include 20 nights devoted to various activities and events, according to the Westchester-Putnam Council of the Boy Scouts of America.
Scouting was on his mind on the morning of Sept. 11. From his office, he sent an e-mail message to a mother of one of the boys just before 9 a.m. It was the troop's revised newsletter.
It was Christmas Eve, 1962, and Nick Chiarchiaro was concluding a visit to his Aunt Betty in Park Slope, Brooklyn. He gave his cousin, Rose, a peck on the cheek ? when skinny Dorothy Arguelles, her friend, piped up: "Aren't you going to give me a Christmas kiss, too?"
The reply that first sprang to mind was no. He barely knew her and had never given her a thought. But politely, he leaned over. Aiming for her cheek, he hit her lips ? and was hit by lightning. "My knees buckled," he said. "I left the house, I didn't know where I was going. I just knew I had to be with her."
Three months later ? heart pounding ? he asked her out. They went to a tiny cocktail lounge, on Love Lane in Brooklyn Heights, and ordered brandies. A year later, after Mr. Chiarchiaro asked her mother's permission, they were engaged.
During the 37 years that followed, he rarely experienced an hour of boredom. "Movies, dinners, friends," he said. Three children. For her, a job at Fred Alger Management ? to pay for clothes filling four bedroom closets. And a constant game of sparring. They argued, he said, about everything. "That's what kept us going. We were oil and water, black and white. In public, she called me Mr. Moroney ? short for moron. The neighbor girls called us the Bickersons."
"Kind," he said, thinking of words to characterize her. "Considerate. And cantankerous."
From his older brother Dominic's vantage point, Christopher Ciafardini was "the ultimate stimulus junkie." At the age of 9, his fascination with bicycling inspired him to complete a 100-mile race. Then he quit biking and fixated on comics and becoming a cartoonist. During his weight-lifter phase, he presented his mother with a subscription to Muscle & Fitness magazine one Mother's Day as a way of sharing his hobby du jour; she was thrilled when he outgrew it.
Studying was never a forte until college, when his attention turned to finance. To the family's surprise, Mr. Ciafardini found a passion that stuck and carried him through graduate school at Cornell University into a real-life version of his favorite film, "Wall Street." He and his friends began living out a game called "Who Retires First?"
Last spring, Mr. Ciafardini, 30, joined Fred Alger Management as a financial analyst, and in August was promoted to vice president. He had a closet full of Brooks Brothers suits he could not wait to jump into each weekday morning and had just gotten his first passport, a hint that international finance was his next niche.
"He was one of those typical Wall Street guys who worked 18-hour days and loved it," said Dominic Ciafardini. "It wasn't just a job to him; it was his identity."
Giving defined Dolores M. Costa. "My wife had a heart of gold -- she was very soft," said her husband, Charles, who said people were drawn to her blue eyes and her smile.
"She would be up at 5 o'clock every morning to go to work, and from the minute she got up she was giving," he said. "She was giving to me, to her home, to strangers in the street. She gave herself. And when she was at her job, she was giving 110 percent."
Mrs. Costa, who would have turned 54 on Sept. 13, rose to the position of vice president at Fred Alger Management, on the 93rd floor of 1 World Trade Center.
Her evenings were spent crocheting colorful afghans for friends and talking with her husband about life. Mornings she fed finches, warblers and sparrows that lived in the birdhouses in her backyard in Port Monmouth, N.J. She was planning an 80th birthday party for her mother.
"She was really a good daughter," said Marie Barbosa of Brooklyn. "She worried about me, and now she is gone. That is the sad part of it all."
Among the potential dangers of hanging out with Jerry DeVito were that you would laugh a lot and find yourself blown away by his mastery of sports trivia. And one other thing: you might have gotten fat.
Mr. DeVito, 66, loved to take care of people around him, especially when it came to making sure that they were fed. He was the personal driver for David Alger, the chief executive of Fred Alger Management. When not behind the wheel, Mr. DeVito spent his days at the firm, spending time with traders and looking out for the welfare of interns, particularly making sure they knew there was leftover food from a conference or luncheon.
"He even used the interoffice mail system to send doughnuts to our New Jersey site," said Christopher W. Cheever, a former summer intern.
A native of the Bronx and a great baseball player in his younger days, Mr. DeVito was a die-hard Yankees fan, who used to joke with the Alger brothers that they should buy the Bronx Bombers and make him the team's general manager. A father of two, he planned to retire this year, though he would have missed being in the mix. "He just liked being around people," said his daughter, Robyn Goldstein. "No matter what age you were, young or old, you could count on him."
View family tributes on The New York Times Portraits of Grief View family tributes on the VOICES of September 11th
Barbara Etzold always answered the phone whenever David Konigsberg called for a friend who never seemed to be available. On one level, this was natural; she was, after all, a receptionist at Fred Alger Management. On another, it was kismet.
Two months into this strange telephonic relationship, Mr. Konigsberg mentioned in passing that he would be stopping by the office, and Ms. Etzold popped the question: "Why don't you take me out to lunch?"
The widowed receptionist and the divorced health-benefits administrator became inseparable. In 1997, a year after their first date, the couple moved into a house that Mr. Konigsberg bought in Jersey City. They would boat together along the Hudson River, snorkel together in the Bahamas, ride stationary bicycles together at a local health club. "She and I were just livers of life," Mr. Konigsberg said, referring to Ms. Etzold, who was 43. "There wasn't enough."
Then, of course, there was their Harley- Davidson. The two of them would zoom down to the beaches of New Jersey, to an arts-and-crafts community in Pennsylvania, or to the village of Cold Spring, in Putnam County. "You go up that Route 9W and over the Bear Mountain Bridge," Mr. Konigsberg said. "Especially at this time of year, when it's the most beautiful."
Sean B. Fegan eventually gave up on the lettuce he planted in his family's garden in Blauvelt in Rockland County, where he visited for Sunday dinner every week. "His scallions were his biggest success," Mr. Fegan's sister Anne Marie said; the lettuce was one of his rare defeats.
At 34, Mr. Fegan was a senior equity trader and an assistant vice president at Fred Alger Management Inc. He was meticulous about the way he looked. "He ran and worked out," Ms. Fegan said. "He had really beautiful blue eyes." Mr. Fegan also had to get the details right, whether in long, funny stories he loved to tell or when quizzing his parents, Colette and Peter, and Anne Marie and his other siblings, Catherine and Peter Jr., about how their lives were going.
But Mr. Fegan also liked to party in Manhattan, where he lived, to go to Jets games and to travel to Europe, often with his girlfriend, Jenny Hebeler. A favorite destination was County Cavan in Ireland, where his family came from and still maintains a home. He wanted the family to have dual citizenship and had applied for it for himself. "He was very proud of his heritage," Ms. Fegan said. "He always made the most of life."
There were no exchanges of "I do." No cake was cut, with a slice saved to store in the freezer for the first anniversary. And there was no dance to the couple's favorite song. The guests simply looked at photographs and talked about possibilities at a banquet hall in Caldwell, N.J., on Oct. 19.
Karen Carlucci had called a small group of friends and relatives together to memorialize a wedding that never was.
Her fiance, Peter Christopher Frank, was a vice president and financial analyst for Fred Alger & Co. on the 93rd floor of 1 World Trade Center.
"It was going to be our wedding day and I just couldn't pretend that it wasn't anything," Ms. Carlucci said of that October day. "I had to do something. I think it was helpful, not just for me, but for everybody."
Mr. Frank and Ms. Carlucci, both 29, were looking forward to buying an apartment in Greenwich Village, where they had lived in a rental for two and a half years with their 7-year-old fawn-colored boxer, Chavez.
Six-foot-two, with a slim athletic build, Mr. Frank was the consummate team player on the athletic field and in the boardroom, said his mother, Constance Frank. He was dedicated to friends and family. When doctors discovered last March that his godson, Gregory Waltman, 17, had chronic myeloid leukemia, Mr. Frank stayed by his hospital bedside, whispering words of encouragement, Mrs. Frank said. "Greg, you can get better," Mr. Frank said, according to his mother. "You can get out of this bed. Let's do it."
Elizabeth Gregg was not in her brownstone in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, when a neighbor walked by on the morning of Sept. 11.
"We had talked the day before about voting," said Joseph Igneri, who had lived near her for more than 20 years. She was always punctual, so he figured she had already left to vote, or was at work on the 93rd floor of 1 World Trade Center, where she was an analyst for Fred Alger Management. "Then I went around the corner," Mr. Igneri said, "and disaster happened."
Elizabeth, 52, who was known to her friends as Lisa, had no family in the area, so Mr. Igneri took it upon himself to search for his neighbor. "Somebody had to show for her," he said. He searched the hospitals and rescue sites, pasted up fliers and tracked down her dentist for records.
Lisa had worked at Alger for 18 years, but finance was not her first career choice. Before she moved to New York in the late 1970's and earned an M.B.A. from New York University, she eagerly studied history, receiving a doctorate in medieval studies from Yale. Her specialty was defense spending in 15th-century France.
Bradley Van Hoorn showed up for his sophomore year at Yale with a mounted caribou head, a gift from his father. The two, along with Mr. Hoorn's mother and sister, crammed the head into a van with Mr. Hoorn's luggage and drove from Richland, a small town near Kalamazoo, Mich., to New Haven.
Mr. Hoorn had warned his roommates.
"These city slicker kids that lived with him thanked us for the moose we brought," his mother, Kathy, recalled. "I don't think they knew the difference between a moose, an elk and a caribou, but they were wonderful kids."
After graduation, Mr. Hoorn, 22, worked for an investment firm on the 93rd floor of the World Trade Center's north tower. He saw the city as an adventure, but lamented the lack of tennis courts.
He hoped to eventually head back west in his red Porsche (another gift from his father), and maybe even someday become a teacher, like his mother.
She remembers his sheepish grins when she caught her son reading novels while he was supposed to be studying. In one sitting, Mr. Hoorn could finish a Grisham or Clancy, and he devoured the Harry Potters.
"There was a lot of kid in him," she said.
Michael C. Howell rarely took vacations or sick days. He simply found it hard to slow down at Fred Alger Management Inc., where he was the director of management information systems. His high energy also was evident in his tennis game: he played to win. He used to be on the courts nearly every weekend with his 29-year-old son, Kevin, also a computer network engineer. His son was wary of his father's very good forehand.
Mr. Howell, 60, had to make a rotten choice recently. He had been handed a ticket to the United States Open. Should he go? He reluctantly decided that he had too many meetings planned and clients to see. His wife, Emily, remembers how he did the funniest thing. He left his office on the 93rd floor of 1 World Trade Center and drove to his home in Bayside, Queens, staying just long enough to deliver the ticket to her. "He startled me," she says. Then he went straight back to work.
Yeng Leng Khoo was used to seeing his big sister Sei-Lai Khoo quoted in the press about hot public offerings and tech stocks. At 38, she co-managed some of the best-known mutual funds at Fred Alger Management and was often sought out for her views about market trends.
But for all her success, she always had time for family, friends and coworkers, they say. When Yeng Leng arrived in New York from Malaysia, where they grew up, to start college, she treated him to his first Broadway show. She also taught him survival skills such as which subways to take -- and how to use Zagat's to find the best dumplings in town.
"She always remembered what she ordered and what was good the last time we ate someplace," said her brother. He said she was also first to "fight for the bill."
Ms. Khoo provided the same lifeline to young colleagues, once professing shock that a subordinate of Vietnamese descent had never sampled Vietnamese cuisine. Off they went.
As a child, Andy J. Kim developed his musical talents. He played piano, clarinet and guitar. During high school, he was in the marching band, the jazz band and the orchestra. At Columbia University, where he studied engineering and finance, he developed his spiritual side, working with the Campus Crusade for Christ.
After college, Mr. Kim, 26, was a research analyst for Fred Alger Management; in late July, he passed the certified financial analyst exam.
Although he lived in Leonia, N.J., he spent every moment he could at the Bethany United Methodist Church in Wayne, where his musicality and spirituality came together. He worked with the youth group and led the band that played during church services. Some said he was the best worship leader they had known.
He was especially excited when he was asked early this year to lead worship at Autumn Blaze, a gathering of about 6,000 young people scheduled for Oct. 13 in New Jersey. He even formed a special band for the event.
But they played without him. "We felt we should continue," said his companion, Michele Jhun, who sang in the band. "That is what Andy would have wanted."
The question, at last, is put to Andrew Caspersen: Did your girlfriend have any flaws?
Long pause.
Catherine Fairfax MacRae, granddaughter of a founding partner of the law firm LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae, won the math prize at the Brearley School, was editor of its newspaper, and was a ferocious field hockey player. At Princeton she made varsity squash and graduated magna cum laude in economics, with concentrations in math and finance. She never pulled an all-nighter and usually finished her work a week ahead, said Channing Barnett, a friend.
Cat was never late and expected the same when you met her for dinner. She was inexhaustibly thoughtful, always checking in, sending small gifts, and fretting that she was not being a good enough friend, seemingly to hundreds. She was beautiful and funny and charmingly self-deprecating and talked on the phone to her mother at least three times a day.
People always wanted her at their parties.
She was 23, and a stock analyst at Fred Alger Management on the 93rd floor of 1 World Trade Center.
Mr. Caspersen?
"She was not great with driving directions and we'd get lost quite often," conceded Mr. Caspersen, a Harvard law student. "But that was a bonus. It allowed us to spend more time together."
When she was in the fifth grade, Sara Manley Harvey turned a school fund- raiser into a mini-M.B.A. lesson. While her classmates went door to door selling oranges and grapefruits, she used the phone book to call the people who lived on the wealthiest street in the next town over, and broke all sales records.
That early lesson in gumption served her well. After graduating from Georgetown, she advanced steadily in financial circles, putting in long days as a telecom analyst with Fred Alger Management. "People would see how pretty she was, but they wouldn't know how seriously she took her job and how hard she worked at everything," said her sister May-Lis.
On Aug. 11 last year, Sara Manley married Bill Harvey at a storybook wedding in Chapel Hill, N.C. Mrs. Harvey, 31, oversaw every detail, down to the magenta-colored napkins that matched the roses the flower girls carried. She took as much time planning the menu for three guests who were vegetarians as she did for the other 120 invitees. "That's the kind of person Sara was," Mr. Harvey said. "She wanted to make sure everyone was happy."
Mrs. Harvey also found time to volunteer for various charities, including the Fabretto Children's Foundation. In April, the foundation's new multiuse center in the rural community of Somoto, Nicaragua, will be dedicated in her name.
View family tributes on the VOICES of September 11th
There is Avnish Patel, beaming from astride a rented scooter in Thailand. There he is again, skimming through the powder at Snowbird in Utah, hiking 3,000 feet above Lake Wakatipu in New Zealand, decked out in Mardi Gras beads and surrounded by his four best college buddies at a Cajun restaurant in New Orleans. Mr. Patel, a research analyst for Fred Alger Management, was only 28, but he had already been everywhere, "probably 20 to 30 countries," in his older brother Yogesh's estimation.
The proof can be found on the Web site where Mr. Patel, a talented photographer, posted elegant images from his travels (along with nuggets of wisdom culled from his favorite novels). But despite his voracious appetite for the rest of the world, there was no question in Mr. Patel's mind that New York City was home. As an 11-year-old living in London, he had persuaded his parents to let him cross the Atlantic alone and move in with an uncle in Connecticut. From then on, he was hooked, eventually graduating from ? where else? ? New York University.
"His love for New York City was immense," his brother said. "We tried to get him to live out in Long Island, but he just wanted to be there."
Three black and white pictures taken from the 93rd floor of his office in the north tower attest to the depth of that love. Next to one, a moody tribute to the Statue of Liberty ? glimpsed as a proud dark silhouette across an expanse of glinting water ? Mr. Patel had written: "Freedom! Liberty! The ultimate symbol of the greatest city in the world."
Meeting Tu-Anh Pham for the first time, you'd notice that she emoted from head to toe, like "a tiny little live wire who just smiled and glowed," said Frank Durham, an investor in the brewery she wanted to build in the Virgin Islands.
Hurricanes would defeat the concept, but it was just one adventure in her busy life. As a teenager, she was airlifted out of South Vietnam with her father and siblings in 1975, while her mother stayed behind. It was months before they were reunited, and Tu-Anh stepped in. "She took care of us," said her younger sister, Mai-Anh Pham, a physician in Atlanta.
She met her husband, Tom Knobel, when they both worked at Dow Chemical in Texas in the early 1980's. He stayed with the company while she attended business school and held a series of jobs before joining Fred Alger Management as an analyst in 1997. She loved her work. He became a novelist. For years they longed for a baby, and the smiling Vivienne Hoang-Anh Knobel was born last July. After a six-week maternity leave, her mother, who was 42, returned to the office on Sept. 10.
A memorial to the trade center victims in Princeton, N.J., where she lived, consists of stones bearing a single word to remember each one. Tom Knobel chose "determination" for Tu-Anh Pham.
Life was proceeding more or less on schedule for Edward R. Pykon and his wife, Jackie.
They met 10 years ago on the Fourth of July, and last August they celebrated their fifth wedding anniversary. In 2000, again on the Fourth of July, they found out that they were going to be parents. By the time their daughter, Jordyn, was born eight months ago, they had already bought a house in Princeton Junction, N.J.
"We came here to raise a family," Jackie Pykon said. ''Our plan was to buy a beautiful home, fix it up and have a baby. Everything was going along just as planned."
Mr. Pykon, 33, worked at the World Trade Center offices of Fred Alger Management, where he was a senior vice president with a specialty in health care. "What was great about Ed was that he was brilliant, but not stuffy or boring," Mrs. Pykon said. He was very down to earth, modest, and a lot of fun to be around." As an undergraduate at Lehigh University, Mr. Pykon was known as Fast Eddy, a nickname he picked up as the D.J. at his fraternity. "We still have the turntables in the basement," Mrs. Pykon said. "He had a real adventure for life."
Ginger Risco Nelson: Striving for the Best William A. Nelson remembers his wife, Ginger Risco Nelson, as someone who always strove to be the best and never did anything casually. They met on a bicycling trip in the Napa Valley of California, when she joined him and his friends because they always opted for longer routes over shorter ones.
A senior vice president and senior analyst at Fred Alger Management, Ms. Risco Nelson, 48, covered retailing stocks like Nike and Home Depot. The job allowed her to combine a love for design with her hunger for always knowing more. "When someone made a statement, she instantly had 10 questions," Dr. Nelson said. Evenings, she stretched out on their bed surrounded by reports about the companies she followed while he made dinner.
Although they had been married almost 10 years, they still did many things together, from buying photographs for their growing collection (she liked black-and-white abstracts) to running the New York City Marathon (they had planned to run it again next year) to shopping for her designer clothes (he would go into the dressing rooms with her and she often consulted him about what she wore).
When he filed a missing person report, he was able to describe her in detail: A redhead, very lean, about 110 pounds, wearing a black pinstriped Gucci suit with tapered pants and a white cotton blouse with a spread collar. He even knew the color and make of her underwear. "Their mouths were open," Dr. Nelson said.
Everyone at Princeton, it seemed, knew him as Stinky. The nickname was applied to John T. Schroeder, for reasons now unclear, when he visited the campus as a high school lacrosse recruit. In the first week of freshman year, "he was introduced to me as Stinky," a classmate, David Shefferman, recalled, "and I thought he must have been at least a sophomore." The two later played on a national championship team.
Eventually the nickname became the norm. An eating club friend once pointed out the prevalence of nicknames on the lacrosse team and said, "Stinky, you're the only one who doesn't have a nickname."
The nickname stuck as Mr. Schroeder, 31, played lacrosse for clubs while he worked on Wall Street; he joined Fred Alger Management as an equity trader in July. "There were different sides to him and they were all a lot of fun," Mr. Shefferman said.
Friends recall his sharp wit, which he often turned on himself. When his Princeton class wore basketball outfits in a reunion parade, he donned oversize glasses and wildly dribbled a basketball in goofy tribute to a former professional basketball player, Kurt Rambis of the Los Angeles Lakers. One Halloween he was Paul Stanley of the rock band Kiss; another time he made an Elvis costume and found many other excuses to wear it, said his roommate, Kevin Coulter. "He seemed to celebrate Halloween throughout the year," Mr. Coulter said.
Ruth Sigmund loves the story her daughter Johanna's friends tell of how she used to joke around at field hockey practices at Fairfield University. "After hours of practice, she would do a little dance and just crack everybody up," her mother said. "She would keep up everybody's spirits."
Johanna Sigmund, 25, ran in the New York Marathon, blared Janet Jackson and U2 at all-night parties, bought meals for a homeless couple who lived near her and regularly cooked breakfast for her three roommates. Her friendliness and ease served her well in her job as a liaison to investors at Fred Alger Management.
Not long after Sept. 11, a stranger wrote to her parents. The letter writer had been thrown out of a taxi after it collided with a car in Hoboken. The taxi driver sped off, leaving the woman on the street, bleeding. Johanna Sigmund rushed over, cleaned the woman up, took her to the emergency room and held her hand while she had stitches.
"I saw Johanna's picture on a Web site recently, and I immediately recognized her as the angel that helped me out that night," the woman wrote. "I lost many friends in the Sept. 11 tragedy. I now add Johanna's name to my list of friends in heaven."
Ms. Signer worked on the 93rd floor of the North World Trade Center building at company called Fred Alger. She was 32 years old and was to be married that coming Saturday to Paul Mauceri, a carpenter who had known her for 14 years. She was from the Ridgewood section of Queens and was a parishioner at St. Pancras in Glendale. On the day of her wedding, the priest conducted a Mass for her before a packed church that was reported in a Jimmy Breslin column the next day.
I know Ms. Signer has some very loving cousins ? Eddie, Rosa, Kayla and Brian Malone ? who populate the web with tributes and memorials to her memory. A couple of her friends remember her laughter and kindness. A few days ago one of her cousins wrote that her mother is still hurting terribly from the loss of her daughter.
The City of New York renamed a street in Queens Dianne T. Signer Drive in 2003.
Ms. Signer was one of three parishioners of St. Pancras who died on 9/11 and one of 36 people in her firm who died. Her offices were just two floors below where American Airlines' flight 11 crashed into the northern face of the building at about 466 miles per hour with about 10,000 gallons of jet fuel on board. In the list of 2,996 people who died in the attacks, her name is most often listed between Johanna Sigmund, who also worked at Fred Alger, and Gregory Sikorsky, a New York firefighter.
The world has moved on since 2001. School started at St. Pancras this past Wednesday and the youngest students there weren't even born back then. Fred Alger lost most of their headquarters staff that day but rebuilt. The World Trade Center site is being rebuilt ? albeit haltingly ? as well. For those of us not directly involved in the attacks or their immediate aftermath, we note the day and we remember where we were when we heard and what we did and felt. For most of us, though, the raw edges of our emotions have been smoothed by the passage of time. And ? for what it's worth ? I think that's how it should be.
But we should never forget. I'm honored to do a little bit to help remember Dianne T. Signer.
- Austin
Arthur Simon was an equities trader for Fred Alger Management on the 93rd floor of 1 World Trade Center. His oldest child, Kenneth, had a similar job at Cantor Fitzgerald a few flights up.
Arthur Simon, 57, had many passions: his four children; the Jets and the Mets; Atlantic City; doo-wop music (especially the song "Runaround Sue"). But the principal love story of his life began 38 years ago when he was a librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library's Canarsie branch and went to a party where he met another librarian, Susan Bloch, who was then just 16. Both were great dancers, the kind that other dancers stepped back to make room for. They became inseparable.
"He always wanted to get married young and start a family," Mrs. Simon said recently. "It didn't matter that there was no money. He wasn't afraid to make a commitment."
Kenneth was born when his parents were living in Canarsie; then came Jennifer, who is a biology teacher in Chappaqua, N.Y. The family moved to Rockland County where Todd, who became a top high school wrestler and wide receiver, was born, along with Mandy, who grew up to be a homecoming queen.
"Arthur was very, very proud of all of them," Mrs. Simon said. And it all began in Brooklyn. "He chased after me," she said. "And I let him catch me."
Bonnie Smithwick Quogue, N.Y.; grew up in Villanova and graduated from Harriton High School Married, 54, daughter age 15 and son age 20 Portfolio manager, Fred Alger Management, 93d floor, North Tower.
Bonnie Smithwick always had the brains for numbers, even as a child. But her younger brother, Peter Shihadeh, takes credit for teaching Sis her first lesson in business. She was 16, and had spent the 11 years since his birth "beating me up if she wanted something," he recalled. That year, Peter took up wrestling, and learned the double-leg takedown.
The next time she wanted something and cuffed him to get it, he tackled her. "I'll never forget the shock in her big brown eyes," said Peter, now 50 and owner of the family business, Shihadeh Carpets in Ardmore. "From that day on, she became the consummate salesman. She'd lay out for me why this was great for me to do, the benefits, all of that." Her skill at persuasion - and her passion for mathematics - paid off. At Bucknell University, she majored in math and graduated with a job at IBM. "She wrote the software for the very first credit card," her brother said. "She regarded math as crossword-puzzle solving. It was fascinating to her." But Bonnie, with her Irish looks, was no numbers nerd. In college, she was also a cheerleader and a tennis player.
"Bucknell didn't have much of a tennis team," said her father, David Shihadeh, "but she was half of it." Always athletic, she continued to play tennis, took up golf, and joined her husband.
Michael A. Tamuccio was a true guy's guy, which is why his friends knew that Kathleen Horner was "the one" when the couple showed up at a Halloween party in Raggedy Ann and Andy costumes.
This was a man who had dressed as a bottle of Budweiser the previous year, who was a World War II buff and once an Eagle Scout. A man who, as a student at Fordham University, wrestled down a mugger, grabbed his weapon (a sock filled with quarters) and then used the change to do laundry for the next few weeks.
A vice president for equities trading at Fred Alger Management, Mr. Tamuccio, 37, was known for helping others find work on Wall Street. If the job did not work out, he told them, we will still be friends.
Mr. Tamuccio was thrilled with the view from his office on the 93rd floor of 1 World Trade Center. But his favorite lookout point was White Face Mountain, in the Adirondacks, where he and Kathleen, his wife since 1996, would go to ski, and to marvel at the rugged beauty of the mountains and swirling snow.
It is not every man you would want to share a tandem bicycle with. The front and rear riders have to be in tune, with no battles of the will, no bullying. The person in front, usually the man, steers, sets the pace, makes the decisions. "You do have to be exactly in sync," said Karen Reilly, who rode behind her husband, Ronald Tartaro.
They climbed and coasted well together. Not that he was predictable, she said, but he was logical and reasonable. "He always did the thing that made the most sense," she said.
The couple worked hard to get their children - two girls, ages 7 and 5, and a boy, 3 - out bicycling. When there were just two girls, the parents would tow them in a trailer behind the tandem bike. After their son arrived, he took his place in the trailer, and the oldest girl rode in a one-wheeled bicycle attached to Ms. Reilly's.
Mr. Tartaro, 38, an executive vice president at Fred Alger Management, harbored big dreams of wider-ranging travel. "He wanted to buy a boat and sail around the world," with family and friends joining in for different legs of the trip, his wife said. "He had it practically funded, not that we were going to do it anytime soon."
A cousin compared Jennifer Lynn Tzemis to lightning, the kind that shatters the darkness before it disappears. She was bright, quick, electrifying with her energy. She had a good job ? as a vice president at Fred Alger Management on the 93rd floor of 1 World Trade Center. She was in love. And she was 26.
"She had a marvelous dimple in her right cheek, and she smiled with a chuckle that was contagious," said her mother, Nancy Doris, who dreams about her at night. "She loved chocolate ice cream, and she was learning to play golf." She had already learned to ski and to snowboard ? fearlessly, the way she did everything.
She followed her father, Stamatios, and her older sister, Sophia, into the financial management business. "She didn't really know any bounds," her sister said. "She wasn't at all arrogant; she was just confident. It was hard for her to understand why other people wouldn't be confident."
Ms. Tzemis had all kinds of plans: to start a business with her father, to have a family, to help others. "She was hoping to mentor one day," her sister said, "to show other women how to do what she did."
"She was well loved, and she was a lot of fun," said her mother. "I hope she comes back again someday."
On Tyler Ugolyn's Web site is a handwritten note from his grandmother: Yesterday is history. Tomorrow a mystery. Today is a gift from God!
The words resounded through the life of Mr. Ugolyn, a 23-year-old Columbia University graduate who started his dream job last summer as a research associate with Fred Alger Management Inc., in the World Trade Center. At 6-foot-4, he was an accomplished athlete who played basketball for Columbia before being injured. Not to be defined by a single thing, he was known for a constant smile and infectious, if offbeat, laugh. He helped start a youth basketball program in Harlem, but was also known for his love for his 1992 GMC Typhoon (also featured prominently on the Web site).
"He did many things diligently and with passion," said Zachary Schiller, a friend and teammate at Columbia. "The way he ran drills in basketball. The way he went to church every Sunday. He did it without complaining and would sort of remind everyone through his effort and example."
On Sept. 9, Gregory Wachtler took his father and a cousin from Belgium up to his office on the 93rd floor of 1 World Trade Center. It was Sunday and the building was closed, but Mr. Wachtler flashed his company I.D. to the guard. A research associate at Fred Alger Management, he had his run of the place.
They stared out at Manhattan from the conference room. Floor-to-ceiling glass windows. The Empire State Building across the way. A bird's eye view of the street in SoHo where Mr. Wachtler had begun renting a studio only eight months earlier.
This was the outlook on life that Mr. Wachtler had at age 25. "He became really responsible, very conscious of what he was doing," his father, Paul Wachtler, said. "It was a nice life for him."
Gregory Wachtler had finally made the big leap across the Hudson River, from the suburbs of New Jersey to the electric dance of Manhattan. He went club-hopping. He went in-line skating along the Hudson. He played tennis at Chelsea Piers. Just a year ago, he and his father went to see a Pink Floyd concert. The city seemed to be full of music.
His father recently began clearing out his son's apartment. Mr. Wachtler was just settling in, and a bed he had ordered was still en route. His tennis rackets were nowhere to be found. But his body has been recovered, along with the I.D. that always got him into the World Trade Center.
Meredith Lynn Whalen wanted to be a successful portfolio manager and then the owner of a horse farm in Kentucky. And between those goals, she planned to cram in a lot of travel, including many cruises.
Ms. Whalen, 23, was a research associate at Fred Alger Management on the 93rd floor of 1 World Trade Center. She grew up in Canton, Mich., where she learned to ride and cheerfully cleaned out stalls. She graduated from the University of Michigan Business School in 2000. She had worked the summer before her senior year at Goldman Sachs in London but decided she wanted to work for a smaller firm, where she thought she would get more intense training.
"It was her dream job," said her mother, Pat. "My daughter loved the fast-paced life of the city and enjoyed all it had to offer, from the plays to the parks and museums and the night life." Although she had been working just 15 months, Ms. Whalen was the front-line person for researching eBay, the Internet auction company, one of Alger's top holdings.
Ms. Whalen was already a veteran of four cruises. Her first, in the early 1990's on the Sovereign of the Sea, was delayed because of a fire while it was docked in San Juan, P.R. She had planned to leave from Barcelona, Spain, on Sept. 15 for a 12-night Mediterranean cruise with her mother.
Myrna Yaskulka's family called her the bag lady - she was rarely without bulging shopping bags from Strawberry and Century 21. To her granddaughters, the clothes they contained were more thrilling than a new Barbie outfit. There was, for instance, her metallic gold raincoat. And her FUBU pantsuit. And leopard-skin everything - pants, earrings, photo frames.
"Not the sorts of things," said Jay Yaskulka, her son, "you would normally see on a woman her age." But Ms. Yaskulka, 59 and a size 8, was as chic as a downtown hipster. She was such an ardent shopper that store managers called her about new shipments. She was confident enough to wear outrageous things, like pink rhinestone-studded sunglasses, and carry it off.
She commuted from Staten Island to her secretarial job at Fred Alger Management in 1 World Trade Center. Often, Mr. Yaskulka passed beneath her windows when he took Brianna, 8, and Shannon, 4, to the city. "When we drove by the World Trade Center," he said, "they would look up at the 93rd floor and yell, 'Hi, Grandma!' "
