"Beginning tomorrow, I'm going to be there," Gil Scharf told his employees at Euro Brokers Inc. on September 17, 2001. "If you can't make it tomorrow, that's fine. If you can't make it next week, that's fine too. If it takes you a month, it doesn't matter." photo: Chris Hildreth

t 8:45 a.m. on September 11, 2001, Owen May was sitting in his car, its turn signal blinking, first in line to turn left into a parking garage beneath the World Trade Center. Gil Scharf had just finished a business lunch in London. Karen Preziosi was on a city bus headed downtown on the Avenue of the Americas. Then the minute hand moved forward, and life changed.

" The morning of the eleventh, I had the alarm clock set early," says May M.B.A. '83, whose investment firm, May Davis Group, had on September 10 put to rest a lengthy and difficult battle with a much larger financial company. The protracted struggle had nearly cost the firm everything, May says, and the settlement had come just in time to keep the doors open and allow the small company to begin to recoup.

" On Monday, everybody was high-fiving in the office," he says. "We could move on. As I was leaving, I said, 'Listen, I'll be here first thing in the morning, and we'll do what we need to do to get back in the game.' I was really happy. When the alarm clock went off Tuesday at six-something, my daughter was lying in the bed with me, kicking all over the bed, and I said, I'm going to hang out for just a little longer. And now I get up at 7:15 or so, really behind, and I rush and get into the car and start my work from the car."

Preziosi B.S.E. '84 had also planned an early arrival at her office. Vice president of information technology financial and business software at Euro Brokers Inc., she was responsible for software issues, and Tuesday morning, new software was being launched. A co-worker had offered to be the one to come in at seven that morning to deal with it, but Preziosi felt she should be there. It didn't happen.

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" Monday night the Giants were playing, and I watched the game to the end, a little after one o'clock," she says. "And when the alarm went off the next morning for me to go in early, I couldn't get up." Knowing her co-worker would be there, she left at her regular time, catching a bus in Sea Bright, New Jersey, sitting down by the driver and settling in for a ride that would have gotten her to the office around nine.

May, meanwhile, was driving in from New Jersey, making calls and assigning tasks. "I probably called the office fifteen times between my house and there," he says. "Everyone's saying, 'Owen, where are you?' I get down to just about West Street, I say, 'Listen, I'm a couple of minutes away, I'll be upstairs in a second.' 'Okay, Owen, we'll see you in a couple of minutes. Bye.' I get right in front of the Trade Center, and there's a red light where I turn in and park my car inside the garage every day, and I hear an explosion."

Construction noise is just part of the New York soundscape, and May says a large project had been going on nearby. "I'm thinking they're dynamiting. It was a little louder than expected, but, hey, there's a whole lot of rock. I see a woman looking up, and the blood had drained from her face and she was pale white. And I try to look up--I was too close to the building, and I had to look underneath my rear-view mirror. I see flames coming out, I see little papers coming out, just now sprinkling down, and I'm the first car in line there, and I call upstairs."

The offices at May Davis were in 1 World Trade Center, on the eigthty-seventh floor, a suite chosen by May in the mid-1990s when tenants had left after the 1993 bombing and rents were low. He built up the firm from the thirty-five employees who moved in to a high of eighty, then restructured in 2000 and settled at sixty. Fourteen of those employees were already at work that morning, and one of them answered May's 8:46 call.

" She's saying, 'What do I do?' and I'm counting windows. I look up at Windows on the World and I'm counting down," May says. "I don't want to tell everybody to run out the door knowing they're going to run into the fire, so I said, 'I don't know.' "

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On the bus, Preziosi was chatting with the driver. "All of a sudden, somebody says on the [dispatch] radio, 'Don't bring the buses toward Wall Street. There's smoke pouring out of the World Trade Center.' I got up to get a better look out the window, because we're still driving down towards Canal Street at this point, and I said, 'Oh my God, there is smoke.' So I get on my cell phone."

Preziosi reached a co-worker, who told her things were "okay; it's a small plane." "I'm like, 'It is not small. I'm telling you that I'm looking at at least a five-story hole in First Tower, you've got to get out of there!' And the bus stopped, right near Canal Street."

" I was sitting at one of our trading desks," says Gil Scharf '70, chairman of Euro Brokers Inc., a financial services firm with offices in New York City and in London. He was in the London office that week and, after lunching with a client, had taken a moment to check television news headlines. "All of a sudden, a flash comes across that a plane has hit the World Trade Center."

The London and New York offices have transatlantic telephone connections between the trading desks. "We heard that the plane hit Tower One, the north tower, and we were in Tower Two, the south tower," Scharf says. "I have guys on the link lines telling people to get out. Then the Port Authority came on the loudspeaker system and made an announcement that Building Two is secure, go back to your offices. We had people going down, and they heard that announcement, and some of them went back up."

In Tower One, the May Davis employees had begun to evacuate. On the street, May began to try to figure out how to get his car out of the way, and then he began to try to figure out how to get into the building to help his employees. As he stood below the towers, he recalls, "I'm watching this next plane from the Statue of Liberty. The day was so clear, it was so calm--it was a beautiful day--and I'm saying, why is this plane coming into the area? Don't they know there's a problem?"

In his eigthy-seventh floor office, May says, he had gotten used to the patterns of the air traffic that swirled around the southern tip of Manhattan. This plane didn't fit. Thinking logically, he decided it must be trying to dump water on the blazing tower. "Then I'm saying, this guy isn't dropping water. This guy's close! Maybe he's lost. Maybe he just doesn't know what he's doing. And as he's getting closer, I'm hearing him rev his engine up, and I'm watching him, and I'm standing there saying, push over, push over, because he's going toward the east side of the building, but he's tipping his wings so it looks like maybe he's trying to get out of the way, and now I see, this thing is going to hit. I'm standing there, I'm realizing that as he hits, I am right here" on the opposite side of the tower. "This plane is going to go through the building and it's going to come out the other side and it's going to kill me."

It was 9:02. In Tower One, May's employees were on their way down eighty-seven flights of stairs. In Tower Two, many Euro Brokers employees were evacuating, but some had remained--most at the trading desks on the eighty-fourth floor. Scharf was watching CNN in London. Preziosi--cell- phone service down--was waiting for a pay phone, hoping to reach her co-workers. May was standing below the south tower, "and I watched him hit the building."

" First, you're in shock," May remembers. "You have no clue. Then something real kicks in and says, 'Owen, you'd better run.' And I run real quick and huddle in a corner, just a little concrete corner, with a couple of women." Their lives were saved when the fireball shattered out sideways over the plaza instead of directly through the building as the first had done.

" You're just standing there," says Scharf of his reaction to seeing the explosion happen in front of him on television, but 3,500 miles away. "You can't say anything. And looking at the pictures, seeing the plane hit, you know the fireball probably went right through the trading floor."

" Out of the thousands of people leaving the area," May recalls, he was spotted by friend Derek Penn '79 M.B.A. '84. Penn talked May out of returning into the burning tower to try to find his employees. "It was fate that brought Derek to me. He was the voice of reason to get me out of there--no question I would have died had he left me."

Within ninety minutes, both towers had crumbled. Karen Preziosi was caught up in the tsunami of dust and debris, but survived by helping and being helped by strangers. Penn took May to his home, where he began making phone calls, trying to account for people. All but one of his co-workers survived. In the impact, explosion, and aftermath, Scharf lost sixty-one employees, including Peter Ortale '87.