I was thirty-five years old on September 11th, 2001. By then, I had been working in the bond room at the Chicago Board of Trade long enough to know the rhythm of a trading day. The morning rituals, the camaraderie, the jokes, the way the floor woke up and came alive with the opening bell. The scream of down ticks and the roar of up ticks.
What I did not know, what none of us knew, was that this particular Tuesday morning would be unlike any other. A day when the world would shift. A day when a colleague’s voice on the other end of my headset would vanish forever. It started out like every other workday.
The congress L carried me from Oak Park into the city, the train rattling over familiar tracks across the westside, the skyline growing larger at every stop. It was warm, unseasonably so, the kind of September morning that makes you wonder if summer has not quite let go yet. I walked into the Loop, coffee in hand, morning paper under my arm, White Sox cap pulled to my brow and into the Board of Trade building I went. The routine was comforting as I swiped through the turnstiles, nodding at the security guards, taking the escalator to the fourth floor.
Once I got up to the trading floor, it was like slipping into an old pair of shoes. I pulled on my trading jacket, shoved a water bottle into the pocket, and took that first deep breath of pit air… sweat, cologne, newspaper print, coffee, and adrenaline. I made the rounds, shaking hands and tossing hellos to my customers. Sharing a few quick jokes with the guys in the pit. That was our ritual, too, grease the wheels with camaraderie before the bell.
Then I grabbed my headset. That headset was my lifeline. Every day it plugged me into two worlds. One voice here in Chicago, Jeff, a cash trader with Rosenthal and one voice in New York, Jimmy O’Brien, OB, working as a bond broker at Cantor Fitzgerald.
Jimmy was thirty-three, a husband, a father, living in Park Slope, Brooklyn. He was the kind of guy who could bust your balls and make you laugh in the same breath. He had that unmistakable New York accent that could cut through the chaos of the markets.
Jeff was not on yet that morning, so it was just me and Jimmy shooting the shit as we waited for the 7:20 open. The conversation was easy, the kind of small talk that builds friendships across miles of wire. He told me he walked his dogs to Prospect Park and went home. He took it easy with his family, watching the Giants play the Broncos on Monday Night Football.
I told him about my softball game, how I struck out and had to buy the team a round of overpriced shots. He laughed hard, really leaned into it, busting my balls with that Brooklyn swagger. We had a running thing about me being the big Chicago Midwest hayseed guy and him being the marble mouth New Yorker. That morning was no different. For a few minutes, it felt like every other day.
Then Jeff clicked in. The trio was complete, and we went to work.
The open was quiet. No big numbers, no market shockers, just another Tuesday. I was quoting bids and offers to Jeff, feeding him prices while Jimmy worked orders in the cash market. In the background I could hear Jeff and OB volleying back and forth, moving size, pushing orders. The headset was alive with their voices, and I was right in the middle, the bridge between Chicago and New York.
Jeff suddenly shouted, “OB, you there? What the fuck—OB, am I filled?”
I looked up at the Jumbotron on the trading floor. The image hit me like a punch to the chest. One of the World Trade Center towers had black smoke pouring from the side. My stomach dropped.
I told Jeff, “Flip on CNBC. Look at what is going on at the Trade Center right now.”
An uncomfortable pause and then the line went dead. Jeff had hung up, no doubt trying to reach OB directly, trying to figure out if he was okay. Trying to make sure that trade was not the last thing they ever worked together.
I took off my headset and stared at the screen. The pit went still. Hundreds of traders, usually loud and raucous, stood frozen, eyes glued to the smoke curling out of that tower. The air felt thick, like we had all stepped into a different world.
Phones started ringing across the floor. Customers liquidated positions, locals got flat, and one by one, traders and clerks slipped out of the building. None of us knew what was next. Was Chicago the next target? Was the Sears Tower, The Board of Trade, the Federal building in the crosshairs? We had no roadmap for what we were seeing.
The Board of Trade did not close right away. That is something I will never forget. While chaos unfolded on live TV, the exchange dragged its feet, waiting. Finally, after the second tower was hit, after news of the Pentagon attack broke and another plane was unaccounted for, the order came down the markets would shut immediately.
That was it. The spell broke.
We surged toward the exits, jackets still on, papers abandoned, all of us funneling down escalators, through the coatroom, out into the streets. Hundreds of people, all at once, pushing into the Loop, desperate to get out of downtown. I bolted for the Congress stop, hopped the subway, and sat in a train car full of pale, stunned faces.
The ride out to Oak Park was a blur. Underground for stretches, disconnected from news, we sat in silence. By the time the train broke into daylight near Halsted, word rippled through that one of the towers had collapsed. Nobody was sure which one. North, South, it did not matter. A building I had seen with my own eyes was gone. Thousands of people were inside. My friend might have been one of them.
Back in Oak Park, the sky was shockingly blue. Thin, wispy clouds floated like nothing had happened. The air smelled of late summer, almost sweet like corn. It was surreal. I did not go straight home. Instead, I cut into Ascension Catholic Church, my parish. The doors were wide open. Inside, it was empty. I lit a candle and knelt, the waxy scent filling the silence. I prayed, though my mind was a storm. Tears came, hot and heavy. I did not know if OB was alive. Deep down, I already knew.
The sound of school bells rang outside. Children poured into the playground, screaming, laughing, chasing each other like it was any other recess. Their joy was piercing. I remember thinking, we just lost our comfortable world. Childhood innocence colliding with the harshness of what had just happened. America was under attack. We weren’t naïve anymore.
I walked the five blocks home slowly, still in a daze. It wasn’t even noon yet, but I craved a margarita from the Mexican place up the street. The bar wasn’t open. So, I sat alone in my apartment, flipping through channels, watching replays of the towers falling, trying to piece together scraps of information. I called colleagues, I called friends and I tried to reach OB over and over again. Nothing.
My girlfriend, the woman who would later become my wife, was taking graduate classes at DePaul that morning. She caught a train out to Oak Park as soon as she could. Her father, my future father-in-law, had been in his law office in the Loop, but he made it home safely, too. We checked in with family and friends, one by one, ticking names off a mental list, making sure they were accounted for.
But there was one name I couldn’t cross off.
Jimmy O’Brien didn’t make it out.
That realization sank in like concrete. He had been on the other end of my headset one minute, laughing about me striking out in softball, and the next, silence, smoke, collapse... Gone.
So much happened that morning, and by noon it felt like the world had aged a century. The millennium came in like a boxer rocked by an unseen uppercut. The trading floor, that sacred stage of my working life, was suddenly small and powerless. The rituals of yelling and screaming and hand signals seemed meaningless against the images of towers crumbling, lives ending and innocence lost.
I think back on that day often, not just the horror, but the details. The water bottle in my jacket pocket. The sound of OB’s last laugh. The pictures on the Jumbotron when the first smoke appeared. The rush of bodies at the turnstiles. The blue September sky in Oak Park. The empty church. The children’s laughter. The silence of my apartment.
September 11th, 2001 was the day America changed, but for me, it was the day I lost a colleague and a friend. The day a Brooklyn accent went silent forever on my headset. Years later they found six inches of Jimmy’s shinbone. September 11th quickly moves further away with time. I age through life continuing my career, getting married, having children, getting a divorce and OB will always be thirty-three.
Years throw their elbows, but the story keeps its shape. Sometimes I think about that last conversation with OB and how absolutely nothing in it would have made the highlight reel of our lives. Walking the dogs, watching football and me striking out like a bum. That is the point. The day before a world ends is never an opera, it is a soft shoe. It is a laugh you think you will hear again in ten minutes. It is a man in Park Slope walking back from Prospect Park with two leashes in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other, thinking about ordinary things. It is a Chicago guy playing softball with his buddies from the neighborhood, thinking about ordinary things. Two men, two cities, one headset.
