Cape businessman lost 10 people he knew

The World Trade Center was a symbol of America's financial power. When those hijacked planes sent the towers tumbling down, the nation's financial sector was shaken at its very core.

The stock markets were closed until Sept. 17, and when the market opened, it immediately dropped about 7 percent. The Dow Jones industrial average lost 684 points, the largest single-day drop on record.

Wall Street is a place Robin Cole, president of The Rite Group in Cape Girardeau, knows well after working there during the 1970s and 1980s.

He watched the World Trade Center being built while he was attending graduate school just two doors down on Rector Street.

"I saw it go from a cavernous hole in the ground to the erected pair of towers that it was," he said.

He intentionally never returned to the site after the towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001.

At first, Cole -- a licensed pilot -- thought a plane must have gotten caught up in the clouds and hit the towers by accident. He'd flown by them numerous times himself and often thought about this possibility. He'd studied a similar incident when a B-25 bomber struck the Empire State Building by accident in 1945.

"At that point it had not entered my mind that it was either, A. a jet, or B. intentional," he said.

After listening to the radio at his office in Fairfield, N.J., about 20 miles west of Manhattan, he registered the serious and intentional nature of the attacks.

"I realized at the time that 100,000 people visit the World Trade Center every day. I knew, given the experience of the B25 hitting the Empire State Building, that from that point up everything was doomed," Cole said.

He expected as many as 30,000 people to be dead at that point. In fact, about 2,600 people died in the World Trade Center attack. Much of the south tower had been evacuated before the second plane hit.

"When the dust all settled, I knew 10 people who lost their lives," Cole said. "I'd expected the numbers to be much greater."

Cole had regularly attended meetings at the World Trade Center, taken the subway into its basement, parked in its parking garage and dined in its top floor Windows on the World restaurant.

"It was unthinkable that those buildings would come down. They had withstood a massive car bomb blast in one of the towers, which should have torn it down in 1993. It was an engineering marvel," Cole said. As the morning of Sept. 11 wore on, Cole became concerned about his own 75 employees at Comtec, a billing company where he worked at the time.

Many of them were of middle-eastern descent.

"I had never contemplated that these foreign nationals, most of whom were not citizens, could have been prestationed here by Al Queida," Cole said.

Cole consulted federal authorities who assured him none of his employees were on a terrorist watch list.

"I don't think anyone was prepared for an effective, direct attack on New York City," Cole said. "It has changed everyone who was there and everyone who observed it from a distance. We owe everything to those who in harms way stand protecting our freedom."

mmiller@semissourian.com

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