A Decade of Hope (52 page)

The first stop is right outside the firehouse of Engine 10 and Ladder 10, on Liberty Street, just opposite the actual World Trade Center site, and then we move on to the firefighters' memorial, the beautiful bronze plaque that depicts a reenactment of the day's events. Then we go into the World Financial Center, where everyone sits down in one of the buildings and has a great view of the actual site itself, and we talk about the day of September 11. And this is where we introduce the personal story. Most of the people who are on those tours are not native New Yorkers but visitors from all over the country, and all over the world. Many relate their own experiences on 9/11. And then we walk all around the site, pointing out what occurred at different times of the day.

After doing the tours for a year as the support person, I said, You know what, I could take the lead, and the Tribute Center pushed me to do so. I prepared my presentation, and they worked on it a little bit, and then I did my first tour. And I think I did a pretty good job. I've now completed four years at the Tribute Center, doing maybe three tours a month, both lead and support, and I'm happy to have that flexibility. Tribute does four tours [a day], Monday through Friday. So that's eighty people a day, Monday through Friday, and weekends are packed. That's a total of around a thousand [people] a week. There have been over two million visitors in all so far. If I wasn't part of Tribute, I don't think I would know as much as I know. When you're doing a walking tour, you have to know what you're talking about, almost every aspect of it. Although I'm no expert, at least I know what went on.

I've heard some of the support people, when they come and tell their stories, like the miracle on Stairway B, and the firefighters who were trapped there [see Jay Jonas, page 52]. Visitors keep telling us we must tell people to never forget. Some actually say they'll never forgive. I don't add that.

 

Do I blame somebody for Barbara's death? You know I've never really looked at it that way. I believe I'm a good Catholic. I went to Catholic grammar school, Catholic high school, and I even taught at a Catholic high school for ten years. Do I believe that there's a reward afterward? Yes. Do I try to go to church every Sunday? Yes. If I don't, I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. So I follow the Golden Rule. I don't hurt people. You treat people nicely, the best you can. I've been ingrained in the traditional faith.

Do I turn the other cheek? Is that why I'm not blaming somebody? No. Who am I going to blame? I'm not blaming the entire group of Muslims. Are the people who did it representative of their religion? I don't think so. People did what they did. People who take the tour sometimes use the term “murder.” “These people were murdered.” “People were murdered.” I'm not looking to make it a dramatic thing, so I don't say, “murdered.” They died. They aren't here anymore. What is it going to accomplish to bring anger up? Is it going to bring people back? Is my wife coming back? Should I be more angry? I don't know. Maybe I should be more vociferous in my protesting. But that is not me. You can only be true to your own self.

I am still at work these days, now with the Brooklyn Navy Yard, doing the leasing. The navy yard is a three-hundred-acre complex, three and a half million square feet of industrial space, 98 percent fully leased, even in this economic climate. I enjoy it, because I'm dealing with people and out in the field looking at spaces. Tenants come and go. It's perfect for me; I love my work. With the Victim Compensation Fund and her own company retirement plans and options, Barbara has given me financial stability; I don't really have to worry about the future. I just wish that she could be here to be able to enjoy these benefits. So I try to give back as best I can. I do my work at Tribute. I do as good a job as I can with my navy yard job. I've become the president of my little tennis club in Brooklyn. That's what I have. Am I out traveling the world? No. Will I? I don't know. Maybe. If somebody comes into my life again, like my last relationship, which lasted for eight years, who knows? We did have great times. We did travel all over, but it just didn't work out. So what's my next chapter? I'm waiting to see. Fate.

I do not want to be known as Ray Habib who lost his wife on September 11. I was a teacher, I was a good husband, and I've done good things with Tribute and good work at my tennis club. That's how I want to be remembered : You know, He was a good guy. Nothing more, nothing less. And so, September 11 was something that was thrust upon me. I didn't choose to be part of it, but the fact is that it happened and I am part of it. I'll accept it, I'll absorb it, and I'll do everything that I can to continue to deal with it.

Robert Jackman was a bond-trading executive with the firm of Bear Stearns. He and his wife, Barbara, raised three children on Long Island—Ross, Erin, and Brooke. At 8:46 A.M. on September 11, Brooke was working on the 104th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Because of Brooke's love of literature, her family created a foundation in her memory to concentrate on literacy programs for children in need. Her sister, Erin, is now the president of the Brooke Jackman Foundation. Since this interview, Robert Jackman has passed away as a consequence of a long illness, bringing further profound loss to the Jackman family.

 

 

 

R
OBERT: I was at work on 9/11, running the municipal bond–trading desk for Bear Stearns at Forty-fifth between Park and Madison. My son, Ross, was working downtown for J.P. Morgan at the time. Brooke was in the World Trade Center, working for Cantor Fitzgerald.

BARBARA: I was on a golf course on Long Island.

ROBERT: We always had our [computer] screens up at Bear Stearns, and this thing comes across. At first you can't believe something like this happened. And then everybody's calling. We had direct wires to Cantor Fitzgerald.

I remember, when Brooke got the job there, saying to the guys I knew in the municipal department, guys who had maybe thirty years in the business, Take good care of my little girl. They were all nice, and that day I got a couple of them on the direct wire. Obviously they didn't know what was happening, what was going on.

BARBARA: Someone came out on the golf course to tell me they had gotten a call. I ran inside and saw everybody in front of the TV screens. My first instinct was to run into the city. I was in my car for about ten or fifteen minutes when I heard on the radio that there was no access. I remember just driving and I ended up at the police station not far from our house, telling them to call Cantor for me. I needed to talk to Brooke. And they were very nice and wanted to escort me home. They obviously knew. So I went home and just waited. My sister and brother-in-law came over, and before I knew it the house was filled with people who had heard. Most of them thought it was Bob who worked at the World Trade Center, never realizing it was Brooke. She'd only been working there three and a half months. She'd recently graduated from Columbia, and this was her second job. She had gone to Oyster Bay High School and graduated sixth in her class.

ROBERT: Excellent student.

BARBARA: My son-in-law and my daughter Erin were teaching at the time at PS 111 on West Fifty-third Street. Erin dismissed the kids when the parents came trying to get them and then ran to my husband's office on Forty-fifth Street. Ross, who was working in the building practically next to the World Trade Center, walked uptown. It took Ross a very long time after watching the building be evacuated, as he didn't want to leave the scene because he was waiting for his sister to come down. He had just gotten married a month and a half before. It was a terrible situation. They weren't going to let him stand there.... People were pulling him away.

ROBERT: They didn't want anybody hanging around down there. And Erin and Ross came up to the office, and we just said, Let's go search for her. I don't remember what the hell happened, but we just kept looking and looking and looking. I just remember passing all of the hospital triage units that were set up, and the thing that stuck in my mind was that they had all these doctors and nurses standing around doing nothing. There were no people. Nobody got out. It was almost like a Woody Allen picture or something. You know, What's wrong with this picture? And all these people waiting to help, and the victims . . . Being there was difficult for everybody because it wasn't long before you realized that nobody could have survived that.

BARBARA: And then they started the process of going from hospital to hospital to look for Brooke. The next morning I took the railroad into the city, and we went to the armory downtown. We went all over, looking for the list to see who was safe and who wasn't.

ROBERT: There were a lot of cruel things on those lists. There were names that were reported safe, but they were gone. My daughter's name came up. I got probably hundreds of phone calls. Everybody saw her name and thought she was okay. We created a poster, and my nephew, who was teaching at a high school in the city, would ride around on a bicycle posting them, because you couldn't get around.

BARBARA: As a matter of fact, not long ago a young woman from California sent me a poem. She said she was one of the artists commissioned at the time, and what she wrote about in her poem was Brooke. She had seen the poster of Brooke all over the city, and it was just haunting her.

Brooke lived on Twenty-eighth and Second, so every night on her way home from work she would go into the Borders bookstore [nearby]. Books were her passion, and she'd sit there and browse, looking for quotes and jotting them down. There was a candlelight vigil at the Kips Bay Borders, which put up a sign FOR OUR FAVORITE CUSTOMER.

About ten days afterward we went back to the armory to check the list. [Mayor] Rudy Giuliani was there. And I was at the table and I was checking her name, and he turned and said, “Nobody is alive.” That's how I found out. He felt terrible....

ROBERT: He didn't mean to say it the way it came out....

BARBARA: No. He took our family, the whole extended family, in and sat with us for about forty minutes. That's when we learned it was over.

ROBERT: Actually, in his book there's an article about that meeting.

BARBARA: His book
Leadership
.

ROBERT: Also, Brooke's phone call that we didn't actually receive was one of the last phone calls from the World Trade Center that got out before the systems went down, according to the FBI. She was semicontrolled but sobbing, on the 104th floor.

BARBARA: They were in the northwest corner. They took off their shoes to break a window to breathe.... They were all together. She left that message at our home. And the last seconds of the message were, “We love you, bye.” And then she remembered where I was and she called over to the golf club. The switchboard operator there really had no clue....

ROBERT: Everybody lost somebody that day—people we had met over the years, some very nice people. “Sorry we're in the same club” and “Sorry we had to meet this way.” Nobody wanted to join this club. It's a heartwrenching club.

BARBARA: Brooke had actually called the night before. We had an apartment in the city at the time. So the night before, I'd gone out to Long Island, because I knew I was going to be playing golf. She called me about ten o'clock, and I told her I was getting ready for the holidays [Rosh Hashanah began at sunset on September 17 that year], and I had gone food shopping. Then she told me that she wasn't going to stay on Wall Street. She had been declined by the Berkeley School of Social Welfare. She knew she could get into Columbia but had failed to try there. She said then, “There's something I've been saying since the beginning: There's more to life than making money.” And that sort of summed her up, the type of person she was.

I guess I believed that she was alive, that if anyone could get out, she'd get out. Not realizing that none of them could get out.

ROBERT: Brooke was in really good shape. She walked all over the city with her backpack. In our foundation now we give away book bags, and that's basically for her. She walked around with this backpack, with books and notes. She always was reading a book. I think she read a book a day, or parts of one. She always had notes. We cleaned out her apartment afterward, and in all the books we picked up there were notations about something she wanted to look up or remember. She was unbelievable.

BARBARA: Oh yes.

ROBERT: We were afraid when she was growing up that she'd be a complete nerd, but she was very well-rounded. And I think most of the kids that she went to school with would consider her a true friend. There must have been a thousand people at the service in Oyster Bay that September. After everybody in the family spoke, people came to shake our hands, express their condolences. This young man came up, a Sikh, and said, I have to tell you a story about your daughter.

BARBARA: And he had waited on line to tell us, for the longest time.

ROBERT: And he said what happened was, when he came into the school, because he was different, people wouldn't associate with him, talk with him, but Brooke did. Because Brooke did, he was accepted. She was that way; it didn't matter.

I think for us, and the process of healing, it's necessary to keep Brooke's memory alive. Keeping her alive will help us. I think, on occasions,
What would she do?
Brooke was outgoing, but she wouldn't want to be described like that.

BARBARA: She was way too humble.

ROBERT: She would always take the backseat and let somebody else take the praise. She was good at a lot of stuff, but reading was a great passion with her. When she was in camp in the summer, I am sure she would be under the blanket with a flashlight reading at night. And when the two older ones, who are a year apart—Brooke was the youngest—were studying for the SATs, sitting around the kitchen table, she'd help them with the words. And she was five and six years younger. She had a fantastic memory, basically a photographic memory. And when we were thinking about how to keep her memory alive, we knew it had to be something connected to literacy.