Six Years Since the Bell Went
Silent
Last Friday marked six years since the closing of the trading floor at
the Chicago Board of Trade, March 13th, 2020.
That was the day they announced
the floor would be shut down for an undetermined amount of time because of the
China flu. I remember saying goodbye to a few guys on the way out that
afternoon. I told them I would see them in a few weeks. Three weeks maybe.
Maybe a month if things drag on. I haven’t seen many of them since.
That building had been my
workplace for nearly five decades. From the late 1980s until the first strange
months of the 2020s. I count that as five decades, close enough for me. The
trading floor was my home in a way that few places ever are for a man.
I walked into that building for
the first time as an oversized boy who didn’t have much direction in life. I
didn’t know what I was doing or where it would take me. I just knew there was
noise and energy and a place for a kid willing to fight to make a living.
The first time I heard the
opening bell down there, the room exploded. Hundreds of men screaming bids and
offers, arms flailing, jackets waving, paper flying. It sounded like a riot and
an orchestra at the same time, and somehow, that chaos made sense. Over time
the noise became a language, and the pit became a neighborhood. The men around me
became something like brothers, even if half the time we were trying to take
money out of each other’s pockets.
Those pits were blue-collar arenas disguised as financial markets. My dad
told me something important the first day I started.
He said, “Remember something Moose. You are a
blue-collar worker. Don’t start thinking you are some financial wizard or
commodity guru.”
Forty years later I can admit
he was right. We were laborers of volatility. We just happened to wear colorful
jackets while doing it.
The last time I heard the
closing bell in March of 2020 I was no longer that oversized boy looking for
direction. I was divorced, bruised up by life, and well into middle age. The
world was about to shut down in a quarantine that made no sense to me then and
still doesn’t make much sense today.
We all walked out thinking we’d
be back soon. Instead, the doors closed and never really reopened. Six years
have passed since then.
The quarantine ended eventually.
Life staggered forward into something they called the “new normal.” The truth
is that something deeper changed in the rhythm of the world.
My kids lost something during
that time. They lost years of school hallways, lunchroom laughter, stupid jokes
between classes, and the normal friction that makes childhood what it is
supposed to be. You can’t replace those moments on a laptop screen. Those were
stolen seasons.
My father died during that
stretch as well. He passed away in a cold nursing home in Pittsburgh while the
world was locked inside the Covid bubble. The last time I spoke to him was on
an iPad. A lifetime of conversations reduced to a glowing rectangle held up by
a nurse wearing a mask. That memory still sits heavy on my chest.
Six years have moved fast.
Faster than I ever expected. I’ve gone from my mid-fifties to standing just
about at the sixty-year handle. Time moves differently once you cross that
line. Back in March of 2020 I had no idea what the next few years were going to
look like. The truth is I’m even more clueless about what the next six years
might bring.
My career will likely end
somewhere in that stretch. What began in a colorful trading pit filled with
screaming bids and offers at the foot of LaSalle Street will probably end at a
quiet trading desk in a suburban office building overlooking the western
suburbs of Chicago. Not quite the same soundtrack.
George will be a neurodivergent
man in his mid-twenties by then. Fritz will be stepping out into the world
after college trying to find his balance and build a life. Hazel, my dear baby
daughter, will be graduating from high school. She will probably have the
oldest dad in her class. That’s the truth.
And if I am honest with myself,
I sometimes worry about whether I will be scraping things together just to keep
a roof over whichever Shepkid happens to be living down the hall at the time.
Life doesn’t hand out pension
plans to guys who spent their lives yelling in trading pits. That’s another
thing those kids never quite understood during the glory days. The pit felt
like the center of the financial universe, but there were no union cards and no
guaranteed retirement waiting at the end of the road.
Just dust. Six years after they
shut that building down, that is all that remains. Dust and broken hearts.
The men who once stood shoulder to
shoulder down there are scattered now. Some are still grinding away behind computer
screens. Some disappeared into other careers. A few have already left this
world altogether. Some by their own hands and some because of a pill and a
bottle.
The next six years ahead feel
like an uphill climb, and if I’m going to be honest, I’m getting a little
tired.
I think about the movie Wall
Street sometimes. It came out right at the beginning of my career. Back
then I was the same age as Bud Fox, the young guy chasing the dream, hungry for
a shot at the big leagues. Now I’m closer to the age of Harry Lynch, the old
veteran sitting quietly in the corner office at Jackson-Steinem.
The senior citizen of the room. That
is how the wheel turns. The hardest truth about this stage of life is that
death starts showing up more often. You notice it slowly at first. Then one day
you realize you are attending more funerals than weddings and baptisms.
The guest list changes. So, when
I look ahead at the next six years, optimism doesn’t come easily. I don’t have
a fucking clue what is ahead.
More loss will probably knock
on the door. Time will keep moving forward whether I’m ready or not. My
children will step further into their own lives while I move further into the
later chapters of mine.
That’s just the way the
story goes, but one thing I do know is this: I was there.
I stood in those pits when the
bell rang, and the room exploded into life. I heard the roar of a thousand
voices chasing opportunity and survival in the same breath. When the final bell
rang in March of 2020, I walked out with almost forty years of noise still ringing in
my ears.
That kind of life leaves a mark.
The trading pits at the Chicago Board of Trade may be quiet now, but the echoes
are still there.
