Thunder Dog (16 page)

Fondly, Kay and Ted

If I had been thinking, I’m not sure I would have been so quick to respond to Joanne’s question on Wednesday. But my experience with Larry King was a positive one. As always, he was warm and encouraging, engaging me in a conversational give-and-take that highlighted my blindness and Roselle’s role in our escape from the tower. Afterward, I was glad I shared my story. Most of Tuesday’s news was both grim and disheartening; if my experience could serve as a bright interlude in an otherwise dark and desperate day, I was grateful and willing to do it. Our country needed hope and healing. So did I.

New York shut down for a few days. While the rest of the world experienced the events surrounding September 11 through the confines of a television screen, the attacks and the catastrophic consequences had taken place in our backyard. Everyone knew people who had died in the towers. Their untimely deaths caused shock waves that stretched out far beyond Manhattan and the surrounding bedroom communities. Then the funerals started. Some New Yorkers were attending four or five funerals a day.

The choice to move on wasn’t even a remote possibility during the weeks after. Reminders were all around us. One poignant story came from a reporter who noted the large number of cars left sitting at suburban train stations around New York. Over the next few days, those cars stayed, abandoned and gathering dust. In many cases the owners would never return.

During the days and weeks after, my body recovered. I was able to sleep okay, and I resumed my daily routines. But it was not the same with my heart and my spirit. There was no more normal. First and foremost, I mourned the loss of life and the tragedy of the many rescuers who had bravely stayed in the towers, doing their jobs even as the buildings collapsed. I thought often of the firefighters who passed us on the stairwell, the man who delivered the ham-and-cheese croissants that morning, and the two women who had been so badly burned. I wondered about the people on the floors above us in Tower 1, the people I rode the elevator with every day but didn’t know by name. Who among them lived? And who did not? I would probably never know.

I did get some good news, though. I was relieved to find out that all six Ingram Micro employees who had been in our offices that day made it out safely. And no Quantum employees were lost.

I was angry at the men who did this to us. Their twisted minds and motives are beyond my comprehension. I almost felt as though this group of nineteen people could not have been human; otherwise how could they have planned and carried out such an attack, resulting in deaths and grievous injuries to thousands of innocent people? I could not understand it. I still don’t.

Friends and family often asked if I had survivor’s remorse. I did not. I think it’s because there is no real answer to why Roselle and I survived when so many others did not. Traveling down that path, even briefly, led to an endless chain of what-ifs.
What if the plane had hit the 78th floor of our building, like in the South Tower? What if David and I had remained longer in our offices, working to power down the computer servers? What if I had waited for help with evacuation? What if we had tried to get to David’s car in the parking lot right across the street from Tower 2? What if the South Tower had collapsed in a different direction? What if a piece of glass or metal had hit one of us?

My mind explored these questions and many others, but I soon gave it up. I don’t have the answers. I’m not sure why I lived. But I do know this: since I am alive, I must be here for a reason. I agree with Billy Graham, who spoke during the national prayer service at Washington National Cathedral on the Friday after the attacks. He said that we may never know why 9/11 happened, but we don’t have to, because God is the sovereign One. He uses each of us in different ways, and I choose to trust that he used me that day. I know he used Roselle. The two of us interacted with so many others; some I remember and some I’ve forgotten. I don’t know exactly what will come out of the part we played in September 11. I may never know. But I do know it’s all about planting seeds, seeds of forgiveness, healing, teamwork, and trust.

After the Larry King interview, I began to get other requests. One of the major weekly newsmagazines contacted me and wanted to do an interview at their offices. They asked me to show up in the clothes I was wearing on September 11. But the clothes had already been sent to the cleaners; in addition, the whole idea seemed tacky and sensationalized. I decided not to do the interview.

When invited, I did begin to tell the story and there seemed to be quite a bit of interest. Along with the television, radio, and print media requests came invitations to speak to groups in person. At first I was hesitant, and I wasn’t sure what I had to offer. I walked down a bunch of stairs to get out of the tower.
So what?
Walking down the stairs shouldn’t be viewed as incredible or heroic. But I began to see that there might be value in talking about some of the things I learned growing up blind that went a long way toward helping me survive that day. And people listened.

Within a few days, I started working back at my Quantum job again, first at home, then in rented offices in New Jersey. But my relationship with the company soured quickly. As sales manager, I was castigated for the drop in sales. Somehow the powers that be did not understand the working situation in New York. Many of my best clients were busy attending funerals, not purchasing computer backup systems. As a city and a region, we were struggling to get back on our feet and find a new normal. It was going to take a while. But the pressure was on to focus on getting sales, and there seemed to be a suspicion from corporate that we weren’t out doing our job. Even so, I exceeded both the third quarter and fourth quarter sales goals. However, the message from corporate was that not enough was being sold in the Mid-Atlantic region for their satisfaction. My media interviews didn’t help matters. It was an extremely difficult time for me and for Karen. Both of us had been through a traumatic experience that we were still struggling to make sense of, and we lived and worked in a community that was still living out the aftereffects of the worst terrorist attack ever on American soil. The pressure I felt was tremendous; I have always taken my work very seriously, and I have always been harder on myself than on anyone else. But this time it was different. My priorities had shifted, and with the continued requests for interviews and speeches, I was beginning to get a glimpse of what my larger purpose might be.

Not long after, I got an offer from Bob Phillips, CEO of Guide Dogs for the Blind, to serve as spokesperson out of the campus in San Rafael, California. It was the very same place I went at age fourteen to meet my first guide dog, Squire. It was also the same school that trained Roselle. We took time to make our decision. Going from urban New York City to the lush green and gold hills of the Marin Peninsula on the other side of the country would be a huge change of pace. Taking the offer would also mean giving up my six-figure regional sales manager’s salary. But I had changed. We had changed. The money and the demands and pressures of my high-powered job didn’t seem as important as before. So Karen and I decided to take the offer. It was time to move back to California.

I worked for Guide Dogs for the Blind for six and a half years and had a wonderful time. From my office on the campus in San Rafael (with my “Dog Is My Co-pilot” poster) to the amazing people I had the privilege to work with, including Roselle’s trainer, Todd Jurek, my term at Guide Dogs was one of the highlights of my life. Being part of an organization that gives people back their confidence and their mobility through a partnership with a guide dog is a satisfying way to make a living.

The requests for interviews and speeches continued to grow, and eventually I resigned from Guide Dogs and went on the road full-time, speaking to thousands of people every year. I will never get tired of telling my story as long as it helps people. And I will never get tired of answering questions. (Here’s one of my favorites from a grade schooler: “How do blind people have sex?” Answer: “They same way sighted people do.”)

Roselle went everywhere with me until she retired in 2007 at a public ceremony at Guide Dogs. They also retired her name; no future guide dog will ever be named Roselle. Over the years she’s been showered with awards for her role in 9/11: the Heroes of Hartz award from Hartz Mountain Corporation, including a donation of twenty thousand dollars to Guide Dogs for the Blind; a British award called the PDSA Dickin medal, recognized worldwide as “the animals’ Victoria Cross” and given to animals that display conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty; the American Kennel Club’s (AKC) ACE Award for Canine Excellence; and special recognition from Guide Dogs for the Blind upon retirement for “displaying exemplary courage, steadfastness, and partnership in learning.” In addition, Roselle’s name was read into the National Congressional Record in recognition for her service.

I’ve stayed close friends with Kay and Ted Stern, who were Roselle’s puppy raisers. They took her home from Guide Dogs when she was just four months old and kept her for ten months of basic training. As you can imagine, they are very proud. “She is just a steady girl,” said Ted Stern in an interview.

One of the questions I get asked often is how Roselle was able to ignore what was happening around us at the WTC to concentrate on guiding. While our close bond and our teamwork played a part, Roselle’s trainer, Todd Jurek, said there is no way to prepare a dog to guide through a life-and-death situation like Roselle encountered on September 11. While Roselle’s abilities are in part due to a combination of good breeding and good training, “she is a very special dog,” said Jurek. “Most dogs in that situation would have flipped out, and that’s the truth. She is just a pretty amazing dog to be able to guide you calmly down the stairs with all that commotion happening. People ask me, ‘How did you train that dog to do that?’ I just put her through the training, and the rest was her will and her strong temperament. Roselle was fun, outgoing, and loved to play, but ultimately she was always a good worker and serious in her work.”

When she was still guiding for me, Roselle developed a serious health issue called
immune-mediated thrombocytopenia
(IMT), a blood disorder characterized by the destruction of blood platelets due to the presence of antiplatelet autoantibodies. The condition is an immune system disorder, most likely related to her exposure to the environmental toxins and irritants she inhaled in the midst of that tremendous dust cloud from the collapsing towers. We kept her on medication while she was still guiding to control the condition, but when her blood tests began to indicate changing kidney values, we decided to retire her. It was a very hard decision, but we had known the time was coming. Guiding is stressful both physiologically and psychologically, and we wanted Roselle to live a long and healthy life. After she retired, her kidney values went back into the normal range, and we continue to keep her on steroids, to stimulate blood platelet growth, and cyclosporin, an immune system suppressant.

These days Roselle is a senior citizen. The IMT has gone into remission. She’s still joyful and loving, with a gleam in her eye, but her joints are beginning to get stiff with age, and she spends most of her time napping in the sun streaming through the sliding glass door at the back of our house. She always jumps up to greet visitors with her wagging tail and body and a kiss. And if I were you, I wouldn’t leave any socks lying around where she can get to them.

Interdependence is and ought to be as much
the ideal of man as self-sufficiency.
MAHATMA GANDHI

M
any of the key moments of my life have revolved around airplanes.

The most obvious example is the hijacked 767 that destroyed my building ten years ago. But there have been others, and these airplane encounters always seem to propel me in a brand-new direction.

I grew up beneath the wings of jets roaring in and out of Edwards Air Force Base, where my father worked. The base sprawled out across Rosamond Lakebed, a former bombing and gunnery range chosen for its big, flat surface and the cloudless weather perfect for flying. During the early 1940s, the military began flight-testing the country’s first jet fighter aircraft, the Bell XP-59A Airacomet. Later, the rocket-powered Bell X-1 was the first in a series of experimental airplanes designed to test the boundaries of flight, and on October 14, 1947, fearless test pilot Chuck Yeager became the first man ever to break the sound barrier, in the X-1. This dustbowl in the high desert was the center of aviation research and advanced flying. Test pilot Scott Crossfield called this jet playground “an Indianapolis without rules.”

By the time my family moved to Palmdale, about an hour’s drive away, the test pilots were riding these rocket planes over 100,000 feet in the air and exceeding Mach 3, or about 2,000 miles per hour. Fighter jets such as the F-100 Super Sabre and the F-102 Delta Dagger streaked and boomed through the skies. At the very same time, I was riding through the streets of Palmdale on my bicycle, testing my own speed and sound boundaries under the shadow of their wings. I grew curious about the science of flight and how engineers used the laws of the universe to blast these pilots up into the edge of space.

I didn’t get to ride in an airplane until I was fourteen, on my way back from Guide Dogs for the Blind with Squire. Somehow he wedged his big golden retriever body under the seat in front of me and spent the next hour cozy and asleep, his head on my feet. As the plane lifted off, I remember thinking,
Now I can do most anything I want to do
. I felt free and alive. Having a guide dog for the first time was like breaking the sound barrier, and I knew my life would never be the same.

After college, I flew all over the country for business, and airplanes became as familiar as trains or taxicabs. I loved flying, until a plane tried to kill me. I was booked on American Airlines Flight 191 from Chicago to Los Angeles on May 25, 1979. But I finished my work a day early and exchanged my ticket for an earlier flight. The next day I was in a Los Angeles cab when I heard the report. Flight 191 had crashed shortly after takeoff, killing all 271 people on board, plus two on the ground. The left engine had fallen off the plane, and the aircraft had rolled over before crashing in a huge fireball in an open field less than a mile from Chicago O’Hare International Airport. The accident is now considered one of the ten worst airplane crashes in history. I should have been aboard.

After that, I began to look at life a little differently. My family became more precious. I took my faith more seriously and pondered my purpose in life.

A little over a year later, I was thrown off of an airplane. In the early ’80s, some airlines had begun harassing blind passengers, segregating them in bulkhead seats, taking away their white canes and stowing them in overhead bins, and forcing them to demonstrate their capacity to buckle and unbuckle seat belts. Blind people felt uncomfortable and in some cases were ejected from planes for refusing bulkhead seats.

In September 1980, I was refused boarding on a plane to San Francisco because the bulkhead seats were already taken. I waited for the next flight out and tried to board. Again, I was ordered to sit in a bulkhead seat. I refused. After discussions with the flight attendants, the captain, and the supervisor of ground personnel, I was forcibly ejected from the plane. My left arm was bent behind my back, my thumb was injured, and my watch was broken off my wrist. It was humiliating.

Most of the time, I prefer to defuse uncomfortable situations with humor, engaging people and trying to help keep every interaction positive. For example, airport security personnel often don’t know what to do with a guide dog and cause unnecessary delays by putting us through extra security checks. I have a choice to make. I can seethe with anger at the injustice, but if I went that route, I’d be angry most of the time. The truth is, I face discrimination every day. But persistent anger isn’t productive, and it isn’t fair to people who just don’t know any better. So I choose engagement. When security puts us through the wringer, I make light of it: “Go ahead and frisk Roselle. She loves it. Frisk her more!”

But that day on the airplane, my approach didn’t work. They were treating me like I was weak and helpless, and it was time to take a stand, just like my parents did when I got kicked off the school bus. Most people have no clue how blind people survive and function every day in the light-dependent world. When you are blind, most everything is risky. The world isn’t set up with us in mind. But we can and do cope. We use work-arounds, technology, creativity, persistence, and intelligence to overcome the barriers put in our way.

Later, I discovered the airline that ejected me had no blind seating regulation and that a blind person with a guide dog was allowed to sit in any seat on the aircraft. I was asked to testify about my experience at a public symposium with representatives of the Federal Aviation Administration and Delta Airlines.

Twenty years later, I was at work in the World Trade Center when four planes were hijacked and used to attack our country on September 11, 2001. The country has never been the same. Neither have I. There is grief and loss. There is also an opportunity for change and a chance to move forward. But to do that, we need to work together. That’s how the terrorists succeeded, with nineteen people functioning as a cohesive unit and demonstrating teamwork by planning, coordinating, and working together in secret to carry out the deadly attack.

To fight back, we must work together or suffer from our lack of unity and compassion for others, especially those who might look or act different from us. A wise man once said that all of us have disabilities; it’s just that most of them are invisible.

I am often asked if I believe that blind and other disabled persons are better off today than in the past. In some ways, I believe that we are. For example, Braille is easier and cheaper to produce now. Technology offers new ways to access information, travel more independently than ever, and, in general, live life with less difficulty than before.

But on the other hand, are blind people more socially integrated into society than we were fifty, twenty, or even ten years ago? I think not. I will know that I am truly integrated into society when people are interested in me because of something I accomplish rather than some routine task that appears daunting just because I am blind. I will know that I’m a real first-class citizen when I can walk into restaurants with friends and the servers ask me for my order rather than asking my sighted colleagues, “What does he want?” I will know that I have arrived when I can go to meetings or conventions where all the materials given to sighted people are automatically available to me in Braille or another accessible form. True and full integration is not easy. It starts with desire, continues with education, and comes full circle grounded in trust.

On that fateful day ten years ago, I trusted Roselle. And Roselle trusted me. We survived through trust and teamwork.

Recently I flew to Amsterdam to speak at a guide dog school. The event planners splurged and booked me first class. When I boarded, I relaxed down into the comfortable, padded recliner. I leaned back and put up my feet. My new guide dog, Africa, was curled up under the seat in front. But when I reclined, she lifted her head. I knew what she wanted. I patted my knees. “Africa, come!” Quick as a flash she unfolded her long legs and emerged, then hopped up in my lap. All sixty-five pounds. I stroked her head.
So much wisdom
.