By: Greg Beatty
Let’s Roll. We are told those were the famous last words stated by Todd Beamer of United Flight 93 on that fateful day, 24 years ago, on September 11th.
It still doesn’t seem real; it is a feeling I will never forget, nor millions of other Americans.
I was working in Columbus at a company called BISYS Fund Services. I was 33 years old, and although I had been out of college for several years, I still had not really found my place in a “career track” yet.
I had a business preparing taxes and offering financial planning services, but when I was married in 1999, it became evident that I really needed to have something more steady–and more importantly, with health benefits.
After some moving around for a few jobs, I landed this position and started on March 19th of 2001. It was pretty much “what the doctor ordered.”
BISYS provided record-keeping services for mutual fund companies. There were various departments offering custodial, transfer agency, accounting, tax, and regulatory services.
They serviced clients such as small banks that offered mutual funds that didn’t have the resources for such operations, as well as larger institutions that didn’t want to take on those tasks themselves.
I didn’t realize that such places servicing Wall Street existed in the Midwest. Although e-mail and internet technology had been around for a few years, many of the fund accountants who struck the NAV (calculating the Net Asset Value) of a mutual fund each day were in constant contact with traders on Wall Street via telephone.
The company was a growing company. It was full of energy and optimism. We had just broken ground on a new wing for an expansion to meet new demand.
As a finance major in college who realized he didn’t like nor was he any good at sales, it allowed me to be in the industry in a behind-the-scenes capacity with a regular salary.
I was employed in the Blue-Sky Department. The name is an odd name. There are many citations of its origin, but the one that I see the most is that many decades ago, a judge’s statement that, without proper regulations, promoters of securities (stocks, bonds, etc.) would provide promises as high as the “blue sky.”
Later, this evolved into the term for registrations and reporting to the individual states. Each state had different laws. It was my job to monitor sales and send various reports and fees to the states.
I remember that one of my clients, BNY Hamilton Funds (Bank of New York), had some trades coming into a state where they were not registered. It was my duty to obtain the OK from the client to start the process of registration so the trades could be completed.
These were trades that came through overnight. During this process, I had to walk over to an assigned co-worker, Chris, who would clear the flag in the computer to allow the trade to process when I showed him the client’s approval.
It was at that time that he showed me CNN news on the computer with the first tower on fire because a plane hit it. Of course, the reports were a little Cessna. Although this was odd and concerning, we went about our work.
The benefit, or in this case horror, was that since we serviced Wall Street clients, there were several TVs mounted throughout the offices tuned to CNBC 24/7. BISYS had a firm belief that we should be about current Wall Street events all the time. Many stood aghast watching the fire from the first plane when they saw the second plane hit.
One of our employees heard the terror on the phone in real time when he was speaking with a client across the street from the towers as parts of a jet engine blasted into his office!
By this time, work in the office had ceased. Then news came about the Pentagon with the “missing plane (93)” seen on radar in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and then gone. Of course, those of a certain age know the rest.
We were sent home to be with our families after the Pentagon was struck. I had a cell phone, but I couldn’t reach my wife because the lines were tied up.
Cantor Fitzgerald was one of our clients. You may have heard of them because they were near the top of one of the towers, and the company was basically eliminated.
It was able to come back later because some of the leaders of the company were going in late that day, since it was the first day of school in New York.
BISYS Fund services lost several clients that day. Even though we were in Columbus, it set up a series of events that our firm could never recover from. We ultimately had to be acquired by Citigroup in 2007.
It wasn’t the same after that. 2008 was a dark year for the banks, including Citigroup, which required a massive bailout—and more changes!
Through those years, all the way up to 2015, I toggled around in the financial services industry, including JPMorgan Chase for a time.
With the encouragement of my wife, I started teaching at night at some community colleges and eventually went full-time, leaving the corporate world. I have been absent from the corporate world for a little over a decade.
Now, as I teach, most of my students are “traditional” 18- to 22-year-olds, where 9/11 might as well be the Revolutionary War.
And Todd Beamer and his “Let’s Roll” statement? As some may know, his wife Lisa, who was pregnant at the time of 9/11, wrote a book of the same name.
I have read several books about 9/11, but I have not quite been able to get around to reading that one. Last fall, at about this same time, I finally purchased the book, but I have not finished it. I am at least 80% through it. It is my goal to finish it before 2025 comes to a close, but it is hard.
I wasn’t physically harmed, nor was my family, on 9/11. However, it certainly changed my life forever with the need to acquire more education (more debt) and a handful of expensive relocations for us.
As hard as that day is to reflect it is something we need to always remember.