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| Chris Callis |
THREE THOUSAND MILES and three time zones west of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on September 11, Stanford was shaken, too.
The University awoke to a world on fire. Before most Stanford offices had even opened, the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center lay in smoldering ruins, the Pentagon was ablaze, thousands were dead, and President Bush had been spirited to a bunker somewhere in Nebraska. Throughout campus, work was forgotten as people clustered around radios and televisions watching and listening to news reports in somber silence.
It didn’t take long for threats of violence to reach the Farm. At 9:35 a.m., Stanford police received a message from a male caller who said, “Hoover Library will be gone in an hour.” Police immediately evacuated the Lou Henry Hoover building, the Hoover Memorial, Hoover Tower, Meyer Library and Green Library. No bomb was found, and the buildings reopened three hours later.
At noon, hundreds of students, faculty and staff gathered in Memorial
Church for a vigil and prayer service. President John Hennessy joined
other impromptu speakers during the ceremony to express support and sorrow.
“I ask that you keep in mind those whose lives have been affected
by this tragedy,” he said.
By early afternoon, a swarm of prospective blood donors filled the waiting
room at the Stanford Blood Center on Welch Road and overflowed into the
courtyard. Center spokesperson Michelle Gassaway said 400 units were collected
and sent to Sacramento for eventual shipment to New York. Over the next
few days, hundreds more people donated blood and called to make appointments.
Meanwhile, the Medical Center was dealing with problems of its own. A
5-year-old girl scheduled for a liver transplant was put back on a waiting
list when the FAA shut down all air traffic, preventing delivery of the
donated organ in time for the operation. And on Thursday, two days after
the terrorist strikes, a bomb threat forced the partial evacuation of
both Stanford Hospital and Packard Children’s Hospital. The emergency
room was temporarily relocated while police scoured the facilities, but
no bomb was found.
All intercollegiate athletic events through September 15 were postponed
or canceled. “The games are insignificant,” said athletics director
Ted Leland, PhD ’83, on September 12. Stanford’s football game
against San Jose State, scheduled for September 14, will be played December
1. Also postponed were the first two stops on Stanford’s “Think
Again” tour, a 12-city road show highlighting undergraduate education.
The Seattle visit was rescheduled for January 12 and the one in Orange
County for May 18.
Because the attacks occurred just eight days before freshmen and transfer
students arrived on campus, University administrators worried that some
might not make it on time. All but five of the 1,717 new students did—similar
to past years, according to director of residential education Jane Camarillo.
But for parents dropping off their sons and daughters, the goodbyes seemed
more difficult. And New Student Orientation, normally an unabashed celebration,
took on a more serious tone this year. “Orientation can be a surreal
experience, meeting hundreds of people and spending intimate time with
them,” says senior Sarah Koehler, the head peer-advising coordinator
for Ujamaa in Lagunita Court. “This year it seemed almost irrelevant
because of what had happened.”
But Koehler and the other residence staff members were grateful for the
incoming students’ sense of solidarity. “Two guys at Ujamaa—one
is a very religious Jew and the other is Muslim—spoke at the ‘Faces
of the Community’ program on September 23 about being best friends,
and we had some amazing conversations back at the dorm after that,”
she says. “People really opened themselves up and talked about how
they wanted to curb any hatreds or prejudices that are based on false
assumptions.”
That same sense of community was evident on September 14, declared a national
day of prayer and remembrance by President Bush. Thousands descended upon
the Inner Quad for a memorial service, which opened with an introduction
by Dean for Religious Life Scotty McLennan, followed by a Muslim call
to worship. Then members of the Jewish, Catholic, Protestant and Hindu
faiths each sang or chanted a prayer, each bracketed by a moment of silence.
Finally, a Buddhist struck a sounding bell several times.
As the crowd quietly filed out of the Quad, one young man turned to another.
“This is our Pearl Harbor,” he said. “Our lives will never
be the same.”
AFTER THE SEPTEMBER 11 terrorist attacks, the news media called on several Stanford faculty members to share their expertise. Below are some of their observations.
Steven Block, a professor of applied physics and biological sciences and an expert in national security and terrorism, discussed biological weapons, civil liberties and the explosive force of airplanes-turned-bombs with reporters from across the country. “I think it would be a tragic irony if [in the name of security] we gave up the very freedoms we are trying to protect as a nation,” he told Newsweek.
“Donkeys, seeds, water, money, books and ideas may prove more effective
than cruise missiles, Special Forces and new banking laws in preventing
the cancer of terrorism from spreading further,” wrote associate
professor of political science Michael McFaul, ’86, MA ’86,
and Linda McGinnis, ’84, former chief of mission for the World Bank,
in the September 30 San Francisco Chronicle. The writers also suggested
working to “strengthen the voice” of moderate Muslims.
In an essay in the September 23 San Francisco Chronicle, history
professor Jack Rakove praised the passengers on United Airlines
Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania: “The passengers deliberated,
and then voted, as democratic citizens are supposed to do, and apparently
decided to storm the cabin. The resulting crash was presumably the result
of that decision.”
“It may be that language can’t do justice to the horror of experience,”
wrote consulting professor of linguistics Geoffrey Nunberg in the
September 16 Los Angeles Times, “but it’s the only game
in town.” Nunberg characterized many of the terms used to describe
the attack—including “despicable,” “nefarious,”
“craven,” “infamous,” “dastardly” and “cowardly”—as
anachronistic and in some cases “primly Victorian.” The United
States, he said, needed “language that would reassert control of
a world that had gotten terrifyingly out of hand. A high Victorian indignation
serves that purpose well.”
THE FULL EFFECT of the September 11 terrorist attacks may not be known for months, but within days of the hijackings, alumni, faculty, students and staff were recalling their own brush with the events and their aftermath. Here are a few of their stories.
September 11 was Mike Odrich’s 38th birthday. A partner at
Lehman Private Equity Group, Odrich, ’85, was sitting in his 21st-floor
office at 3 World Trade Center that morning when he heard a deafening
whoosh followed by a spectacular explosion. He ran to the west
corner of the building, which looks directly across the street to the
twin towers, and saw that the north tower had been hit by an airplane.
“What happened shortly thereafter is still difficult for me to comprehend,”
he says.
After instructing his staff to vacate the floor, he returned to the window,
where “my field of vision was consumed by a large jet banking directly
into the south tower.” The explosion and fireball, he says, “are
imprinted on my retina.” He made sure everyone had evacuated, then
took the stairs to the street. Odrich had been out of the building about
one minute when the south tower collapsed. “I saw all the police
cars and fire rescue vehicles and workers completely enveloped by the
falling building. My heart just sank,” he recalls.
Then he ran. With a cloud of smoke and dust billowing close behind, Odrich
sprinted northwest toward the Hudson River, behind Stuyvesant School and
onto West Side Highway. Stealing a look behind him, he saw the north tower
come down. After several unsuccessful attempts with his cell phone, Odrich
used his wireless e-mail device to send a message to a colleague in Menlo
Park, who contacted Odrich’s family to let them know he was okay.
He walked to a friend’s house at 80th and Park, then took a cab to
his home in Greenwich, Conn. The first person to greet him was his 6-year-old
son, Parker. The little boy hugged him and said, “Dad, this is the
worst birthday of your life.”
A month later, Odrich still had not had a full night’s sleep. “I’m
up between five and eight times every night,” he says. But Odrich
is hopeful. “I know our country will get through this crisis,”
he says. “My group at work has come together in an unbelievable way
to function, and I’ve seen New York rally like I’ve never seen
before. We will be stronger going forward.”
Stanford development officer Donna Garton left the Warwick Hotel
in New York City at 6 a.m. Tuesday and took a cab to the Newark airport,
arriving at about 6:25. Garton, ’79, was scheduled to leave on United
Flight 93 to San Francisco at 8 o’clock, but when she was told at
the check-in counter that seats were available on a 7 o’clock flight,
she changed her plans and walked on board. About two hours into the trip,
says Garton, the pilot announced that because of “a national emergency”
they would be landing in Lincoln, Neb. Once on the ground, but still unsure
about what was happening, Garton joined three other passengers and rented
a car to drive to Denver, where her parents live. Listening to radio reports,
she heard that the airplane she had expected to take, a flight for which
she still had a boarding pass and ticket receipt, had been hijacked and
had crashed in a farm field in western Pennsylvania, killing everybody
on board. “I am so incredibly grateful, but it’s hard to be
happy when there’s so much sorrow,” she says.
Shortly after the blast shuddered through the Pentagon from the impact
of American Flight 77, Lt. Cmdr. David Tarantino ran to the crash
site to search for survivors. He heard a man crying for help from inside
the pile of blazing rubble. Trying to pinpoint where the voice was coming
from, Tarantino, ’87, shone a flashlight through a small hole in
the debris and saw the man sitting at his office desk, pinned in his chair
by a large fallen object. After some colleagues helped extinguish nearby
flames, Tarantino, a Navy doctor, slithered through the hole, positioned
himself with his feet against the object and moved it just enough to allow
the man to squeeze out of his chair. Retired Navy pilot Jerry Henson,
bloody from a head wound and choking from smoke inhalation, crawled to
safety with Tarantino. A few moments later, Henson’s desk was consumed
by fire and more debris crashed down on top of it. “I just want to
thank him profoundly, because he is the reason I’m here,” Henson
told NBC’s Dateline program a week later. “He has given
me the rest of my life.”
Ground-zero volunteer LISA GUILI, a medical student at Cornell,
spent 42 sleepless hours between the morning of the attack and Thursday.
She was assigned to a “chaotic” relief station established in
a bombed-out building near the World Trade Center, where most of the patients
were rescue workers suffering from smoke inhalation, dehydration, sprained
limbs or eye problems. One man, a 37-year-old Italian-American construction
worker, refused treatment and insisted that he be allowed to return to
the mountain of rubble where he and his brothers were searching for survivors.
“He was badly dehydrated, had swallowed some butane, was throwing
up all over the center, delirious, could not feel his legs, and was trying
to push his way out of the station,” Guili, ’00, recalls. “I
took a chance and started speaking Italian to him. It had a calming effect.”
Guili held the man’s hand for half an hour, waiting for his iv to
take effect, before releasing him to his brothers to take him to the hospital.
“They were so sweet—they told me if I ever needed a hole dug
to give them a call,” Guili says. Aside from the fatigue, two things
stand out in her mind: the destruction and the body bags. “Dresden
with taller buildings,” she says of the site, and “hundreds
of body bags.”
Mid-morning on the 11th, political science major MICHAEL SULMEYER
was in Washington, D.C.’s Dupont Circle, listening to former Clinton
administration policy adviser Dennis Ross deliver a speech about problems
such as suicide bombings in the Middle East. But when the question-and-answer
session was supposed to begin, Sulmeyer recalls, the program sponsor got
up and announced, “The Pentagon is burning, the twin towers were
hit, and we’re evacuating.” In “utter shock and confusion,”
Sulmeyer hastily retreated to his hotel a couple of blocks away. Sulmeyer
was one of nine seniors in the nation’s capital as part of Stanford’s
Honors College in international security studies. The group had already
visited the State Department and was scheduled to tour the Pentagon on
September 13. That visit was cancelled; but on September 12, the students
did meet with officials at rand, a think tank in Pentagon City. “You
didn’t need to be reminded on that day why it was important to study
international security,” says Scott Sagan, professor of political
science and co-director of Stanford’s Center for International Security
and Cooperation, “but to see a group conducting research provided
further inspiration for the students.”
Senior CHRISTOPHE LARROQUE spent most of his final week of summer
vacation stranded at a remote outpost of a Canadian maritime province.
En route to Philadelphia from Paris when the attacks occurred, Larroque’s
plane was diverted to a former military base in Gander, Newfoundland,
population 6,000. There he joined more than 12,000 passengers from 47
airplanes redirected from their original destinations. Larroque sat on
the aircraft for 18 hours as officials tried to sort out security precautions
and logistical details. Eventually he was bused to a Bible camp nine miles
from Gander, where he spent the next four days. Locals provided the passengers
with food, moral support and as much news as they could, says Larroque—“one
guy from town printed out Internet reports in both French and English
and passed them around, but we didn’t have a television so we never
saw any footage.” On Sunday, Larroque finally flew home. “The
thing that will stay with me is the kindness extended to us by the people
in Newfoundland,” Larroque says. “One of the volunteer groups
prepared our evening meal—enough for 220 passengers—and drove
100 miles to deliver it. They were just amazing.”
INDERJIT CHABRA was awakened at 3:30 a.m. on September 17 by gunshots
fired at his home in Stony Brook, N.Y. No one was hurt, and the assailant
escaped, despite being chased by a Nassau County police officer who lives
nearby. Chabra, ’95, is living with his parents while working toward
an MD/PhD at SUNY. “We are Sikhs, and my father wears a turban and
has a beard. Unfortunately, the pictures of Osama bin Laden being shown
in news reports resemble Sikhs,” Chabra says. He reported the incident
to the Hate Crimes Bureau and urged local government leaders to take a
public stance against vigilante acts.
VINCENT
MICHAEL BOLAND, MA ’01, was in the north tower of the World Trade
Center, working for Marsh & McClennan on the 97th floor. He was 25.
A native of Ringwood, N.J., he received his bachelor’s degree from
New York University in 1998 and his master’s in June 2001 from the
School of Education’s learning, design and technology program. Remembered
by a classmate for his “irrepressible sense of humor,” he had
worked developing technology solutions for the financial services company
for only two months. Survivors include his mother, Joyce; his brother,
Gregory; and his sister, Erin.
ULF
RAMM ERICKSON, ’48, MS ’49, was in the north tower of the
World Trade Center when it collapsed. He was 79. A civil engineer for
Raytheon, he worked on the 91st floor. Over the course of his career,
he managed design and construction jobs in Guatemala, Venezuela, Indonesia,
Japan, Australia and the Philippines. He and his wife, Helen, were married
in 1953 and had lived for the past 30 years in Greenwich, Conn. In addition
to his wife, he is survived by a daughter, Catherine.
WALEED
JOSEPH ISKANDAR, ’88, MS ’89, was onboard American Airlines
Flight 11, which hit the World Trade Center. He was 34. A business strategy
consultant for Monitor Group, Iskandar lived in London. Born in Beirut,
he came to the United States in 1984 to attend Stanford. Survivors include
his parents, Joseph and Samia; his sister, May Marconet; his brother,
Sany, ms ’85; and his fiancée, Nicolette Cavaleros.
BRYAN
CREED JACK, MBA ’78, was a passenger on American Airlines Flight
77, which crashed into the Pentagon—where he had worked for 23 years.
He was 48. Described by a colleague as a gifted mathematician, Jack was
a budget analyst in the Defense Department’s programming and fiscal
economics division. A native of Texas, he earned his undergraduate degree
at Caltech. Survivors include his wife, Barbara Rachko; his parents; and
his brother, Terry.
NAOMI
LEAH SOLOMON, ’70, MA ’71, was attending a conference at
the Windows on the World restaurant in the north tower of the World Trade
Center when American Airlines Flight 11 hit the building. She was 52.
Solomon was vice president of business development at San Francisco-based
Callixa and worked at the software company’s New York office. A valedictorian
at Gunn High School in Palo Alto and an accomplished pianist, she grew
up on Stanford’s campus. Her father, Herbert, PhD ’50, is a
professor emeritus of statistics. In addition to her father, survivors
include her mother, Lottie; and two brothers, Mark, ’75, and Jed,
’77.