A Decade of Hope

Robert Jackman was a bond-trading executive with the firm of Bear Stearns. He and his wife, Barbara, raised three children on Long Island—Ross, Erin, and Brooke. At 8:46 A.M. on September 11, Brooke was working on the 104th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Because of Brooke’s love of literature, her family created a foundation in her memory to concentrate on literacy programs for children in need. Her sister, Erin, is now the president of the Brooke Jackman Foundation. Since this interview, Robert Jackman has passed away as a consequence of a long illness, bringing further profound loss to the Jackman family.

ROBERT: I was at work on 9/11, running the municipal bond–trading desk for Bear Stearns at Forty-fifth between Park and Madison. My son, Ross, was working downtown for J.P. Morgan at the time. Brooke was in the World Trade Center, working for Cantor Fitzgerald.

ROBERT: We always had our [computer] screens up at Bear Stearns, and this thing comes across. At first you can’t believe something like this happened. And then everybody’s calling. We had direct wires to Cantor Fitzgerald.

I remember, when Brooke got the job there, saying to the guys I knew in the municipal department, guys who had maybe thirty years in the business, Take good care of my little girl. They were all nice, and that day I got a couple of them on the direct wire. Obviously they didn’t know what was happening, what was going on.

BARBARA: Someone came out on the golf course to tell me they had gotten a call. I ran inside and saw everybody in front of the TV screens. My first instinct was to run into the city. I was in my car for about ten or fifteen minutes when I heard on the radio that there was no access. I remember just driving and I ended up at the police station not far from our house, telling them to call Cantor for me. I needed to talk to Brooke. And they were very nice and wanted to escort me home. They obviously knew. So I went home and just waited. My sister and brother-in-law came over, and before I knew it the house was filled with people who had heard. Most of them thought it was Bob who worked at the World Trade Center, never realizing it was Brooke. She’d only been working there three and a half months. She’d recently graduated from Columbia, and this was her second job. She had gone to Oyster Bay High School and graduated sixth in her class.

BARBARA: My son-in-law and my daughter Erin were teaching at the time at PS 111 on West Fifty-third Street. Erin dismissed the kids when the parents came trying to get them and then ran to my husband’s office on Forty-fifth Street. Ross, who was working in the building practically next to the World Trade Center, walked uptown. It took Ross a very long time after watching the building be evacuated, as he didn’t want to leave the scene because he was waiting for his sister to come down. He had just gotten married a month and a half before. It was a terrible situation. They weren’t going to let him stand there.... People were pulling him away.

ROBERT: They didn’t want anybody hanging around down there. And Erin and Ross came up to the office, and we just said, Let’s go search for her. I don’t remember what the hell happened, but we just kept looking and looking and looking. I just remember passing all of the hospital triage units that were set up, and the thing that stuck in my mind was that they had all these doctors and nurses standing around doing nothing. There were no people. Nobody got out. It was almost like a Woody Allen picture or something. You know, What’s wrong with this picture? And all these people waiting to help, and the victims . . . Being there was difficult for everybody because it wasn’t long before you realized that nobody could have survived that.

BARBARA: And then they started the process of going from hospital to hospital to look for Brooke. The next morning I took the railroad into the city, and we went to the armory downtown. We went all over, looking for the list to see who was safe and who wasn’t.

ROBERT: There were a lot of cruel things on those lists. There were names that were reported safe, but they were gone. My daughter’s name came up. I got probably hundreds of phone calls. Everybody saw her name and thought she was okay. We created a poster, and my nephew, who was teaching at a high school in the city, would ride around on a bicycle posting them, because you couldn’t get around.

BARBARA: As a matter of fact, not long ago a young woman from California sent me a poem. She said she was one of the artists commissioned at the time, and what she wrote about in her poem was Brooke. She had seen the poster of Brooke all over the city, and it was just haunting her.

Brooke lived on Twenty-eighth and Second, so every night on her way home from work she would go into the Borders bookstore [nearby]. Books were her passion, and she’d sit there and browse, looking for quotes and jotting them down. There was a candlelight vigil at the Kips Bay Borders, which put up a sign FOR OUR FAVORITE CUSTOMER.

About ten days afterward we went back to the armory to check the list. [Mayor] Rudy Giuliani was there. And I was at the table and I was checking her name, and he turned and said, “Nobody is alive.” That’s how I found out. He felt terrible....

ROBERT: Also, Brooke’s phone call that we didn’t actually receive was one of the last phone calls from the World Trade Center that got out before the systems went down, according to the FBI. She was semicontrolled but sobbing, on the 104th floor.

BARBARA: They were in the northwest corner. They took off their shoes to break a window to breathe.... They were all together. She left that message at our home. And the last seconds of the message were, “We love you, bye.” And then she remembered where I was and she called over to the golf club. The switchboard operator there really had no clue....

ROBERT: Everybody lost somebody that day—people we had met over the years, some very nice people. “Sorry we’re in the same club” and “Sorry we had to meet this way.” Nobody wanted to join this club. It’s a heartwrenching club.

BARBARA: Brooke had actually called the night before. We had an apartment in the city at the time. So the night before, I’d gone out to Long Island, because I knew I was going to be playing golf. She called me about ten o’clock, and I told her I was getting ready for the holidays [Rosh Hashanah began at sunset on September 17 that year], and I had gone food shopping. Then she told me that she wasn’t going to stay on Wall Street. She had been declined by the Berkeley School of Social Welfare. She knew she could get into Columbia but had failed to try there. She said then, “There’s something I’ve been saying since the beginning: There’s more to life than making money.” And that sort of summed her up, the type of person she was.

ROBERT: Brooke was in really good shape. She walked all over the city with her backpack. In our foundation now we give away book bags, and that’s basically for her. She walked around with this backpack, with books and notes. She always was reading a book. I think she read a book a day, or parts of one. She always had notes. We cleaned out her apartment afterward, and in all the books we picked up there were notations about something she wanted to look up or remember. She was unbelievable.

ROBERT: We were afraid when she was growing up that she’d be a complete nerd, but she was very well-rounded. And I think most of the kids that she went to school with would consider her a true friend. There must have been a thousand people at the service in Oyster Bay that September. After everybody in the family spoke, people came to shake our hands, express their condolences. This young man came up, a Sikh, and said, I have to tell you a story about your daughter.

ROBERT: And he said what happened was, when he came into the school, because he was different, people wouldn’t associate with him, talk with him, but Brooke did. Because Brooke did, he was accepted. She was that way; it didn’t matter.

I think for us, and the process of healing, it’s necessary to keep Brooke’s memory alive. Keeping her alive will help us. I think, on occasions, What would she do? Brooke was outgoing, but she wouldn’t want to be described like that.

ROBERT: She would always take the backseat and let somebody else take the praise. She was good at a lot of stuff, but reading was a great passion with her. When she was in camp in the summer, I am sure she would be under the blanket with a flashlight reading at night. And when the two older ones, who are a year apart—Brooke was the youngest—were studying for the SATs, sitting around the kitchen table, she’d help them with the words. And she was five and six years younger. She had a fantastic memory, basically a photographic memory. And when we were thinking about how to keep her memory alive, we knew it had to be something connected to literacy.

BARBARA: She wanted to go back to social work and work with children. Somehow to combine the two. It was during the first week that we started the Brooke Jackman Foundation. We have a wonderful family, and they began working at it, and a lot of close friends wanted to do something. I remember that they mentioned at the memorial service that there would be a Brooke Jackman Foundation.

ROBERT: And that helped. When we first started going, I remember telling the doctor, “I just want my family to get as normal as they can.” I wanted to get back on track, and that was my job. Hopefully it’s done. And sometimes it’s horrible, for all of us. It’s just, like we said, it doesn’t go away. If I see two young girls walking down the street talking, and one looks like Brooke, I’m a basket case.

The foundation was very much a family operation in those first couple of years. So we did everything. Sometimes I don’t know how we did it. But it was just the will of the whole family to get together to do this. Well, once we announced it, there were all kinds of e-mails that went out at Bear Stearns. I can’t tell you how many employees we had at that time—it could have been twelve thousand. The guys in the Boston office did a whole solicitation of everybody there. Because I dealt with most of the other departments in the other offices out of town selling bonds, they all pretty much knew what we were trying to do.

BARBARA: Friends started sending in donations, and people from all over whom we didn’t even know, who had read about it in the paper. I can’t say how many donations came in—from Australia, Colorado Springs, North Dakota, France. A teacher in France. So many wonderful people.

ROBERT: The first couple of years we got a lot of money. We’re amazed that every year we’re doing okay, because in general, the further away you get from the event of 9/11 itself, the less interest there is in this. I think everybody in some way was affected by 9/11, whether they lost somebody or didn’t. From our point of view, every year is hard. Usually when you lose somebody, you have a mourning period, and it’s over. But whenever an article appears about 9/11, or another anniversary is honored, it’s a public matter. It’s an abrasion, always rubbing—it doesn’t go away.

BARBARA: Of course, nothing could ever truly take the place of Brooke. The ache that’s in your heart, it just never goes away. There’s always something that reminds you. I couldn’t walk into our town for two years. I couldn’t go into the local supermarket. I would go two towns away, because I would always remember something—she had her first car accident in that parking lot, or it’s a place she liked to hang out with her friends. I couldn’t go anywhere near that.

ROBERT: The first year we gave out one hundred backpacks. We were running around to Staples, buying the packs, filling them with books, and putting them out there. We had a bunch of friends come and help us pack, and we did that for about seven years, at the end of August, for the new school year. People couldn’t wait to help.

BARBARA: We eventually used the gymnasium of a school on the Upper East Side, and would sit there for a few days, assembling the backpacks. It was a lot of work. In the beginning there were three books, then four, and this last year it was five. Up until this year we also gave a little Walkman. We wanted the children to be able to listen to books on tape, because they don’t always have time to read them. Now we are using MP3 players, and people can download the books from our Web site. This year we also sent out a few hundred to Haiti.

BARBARA: This year we are giving out three thousand seven hundred backpacks. Now that’s way too many for us, and we have them filled in Chicago. We’ve found that the need grows each year, and that if you love to do something, you’ll do it. We just felt that books and reading are sort of the keys to empowering children for a better life.

ROBERT: What we found was that, for a lot of these children, reading was not being reinforced at home. That’s how we started our literacy program, where we involve families. We bring them in and give them dinner, and they play word games and different things with the kids. People can’t seem to get enough of it. Most of these programs run eight months or nine months.

ROBERT : The best thing was the parents that would come up to you—a woman who is now reading on the bus with her daughter as she’s going to work, or when she’s dropping the kid off in the morning, or in the Laundromat doing the wash, telling us that this has helped her in her job and with her daughter.

BARBARA: She said, “Now we’ve become readers. We read in the Laundromat, we read on the subway.” At a graduation ceremony another parent actually gave my daughter and son roses and said, “We have bloomed just like these flowers. We are readers now.” These are very touching. We get little notes all the time.

I also mentioned to a woman, when I went on a school trip, that the children didn’t have any hats or mittens, so now she has an organization called Stand to Knit that makes them. And we put them in the backpacks also. Erin is running it all now. She left teaching.

BARBARA: The only paid employee. After the second year I got shingles and I knew I needed help. She volunteered to run the foundation. She has a friend who gave us an office, computer time, telephone, anything that we need. It’s very nice. Very generous.

BARBARA: We also have Brooke’s Read-a-Thon, which is a two-hour event down at the World Financial Center, where we have officials, the fire commissioner, children’s authors, people from the mayor’s office, EMTs, and firemen who read to the children.

ROBERT: You know, when you go back to that day, I remember being in the office, and Brooke called. And some guy picked up the phone and said, “It sounds like your daughter.” I picked it up and there was no sound. And then, next thing I saw on the screen was the tower going down. And you just can’t believe that your child’s there. I think of the days that we spent going around the city and not admitting to ourselves the worst. I’m just amazed we were able to get through it. You know, you’re not supposed to have to give the eulogy for your child. That’s not supposed to happen.

Regarding 9/11: The only thing I think about is that somewhere one hand wasn’t telling the other what the hell was going on, and it should have been preventable. Those guys should have been caught or stopped. But, you know, these things have happened, and I’m sure maybe there will be more stories about what this group knew and didn’t tell that group. Because that’s the way the world goes around.

BARBARA: I attend a support group that my daughter Erin suggested. One of the facilitators lives in Chappaqua, near President Clinton, and he wanted to come down and talk to us, but the group voted for him not to come, because as a whole it felt that he didn’t do enough, that he could have prevented it. So in the back of my mind, the question is always there: What if he had done more? With the embassy or the Achille Lauro or—I don’t know. Maybe this wouldn’t have happened if he’d taken a stronger stand. But to blame the rest, al Qaeda, it’s like a blur to me. You can’t even put a face to it. I don’t know about blame for this whole thing, because I don’t think I’ve given it that much thought. I just go forward and do what we can do to change. And for me, change comes from education. That’s what I hope.

ROBERT: I am not a hater, but who knows what else will come? Someone else will be unhappy with the world because of the way it is. They want a bigger share for themselves. It’s been going on for centuries. I guess we are all trying to take our hate and make it positive.

BARBARA: I don’t think it’s hate. We just want to make something positive of this situation. I can’t say that I’ve ever hated anyone. Bob was in Vietnam, and he wrote a book that was published after he was home, letters he had written to his sister in an elementary school class. He wrote to them that he was in Vietnam to make the world safe for them. That’s how he perceived it. It’s ironic what happened with us.

ROBERT: Since 9/11, I think I’ve gotten a little more spiritual. Our kids and my wife have not. They find no solace in organized religion. They feel that organized religion or God or whatever you want to call it has left them. Because if there was a God, Brooke would be here.

ROBERT: Our rabbi was new to the temple at the time this happened, and he did a yeoman’s job. He didn’t even know us, but he was very comforting in the beginning, and still is to this day. I wouldn’t say he’s extremely religious, but he is extremely learned, and a mensch.

BARBARA: You know, I never thought I would be able to laugh again, because the ache you always feel is there, but you learn to cope, and I think that we are trying to do more than just cope. We want to show our grandchildren that it is a good world, it is a positive world.

ROBERT: The aunt that they never met. They always talk about her as if she’s in the room, which is a little hard sometimes. I hope that as they get older they’ll be helping out to raise money for the foundation, with lemonade sales and whatever. I really want them to know what happened, and maybe my analysis of it will help them down the road.

BARBARA: We want people to remember Brooke and everyone else who lost their lives that day. I have been looking at the designs of the 9/11 memorial. You know, I have a few questions about it. I don’t like how the names are being placed. I don’t know if I like it placed underneath, as it’s going to be. But this is what we have, and hopefully it will come out as beautiful as they are telling us it will.

ROBERT: The first time you go down to that open pit, it’s heartbreaking, like getting hit in the chest. A stabbing in the heart. And you walk around, and you say, This is where she is. We got a couple of fragments back [and] actually had a burial.

BARBARA: Brooke’s birthday was August 28. So the month of August, leading up to September 11, I feel washed out. It’s a terrible time. Sometimes I really don’t know why she went to Wall Street. When she graduated she went for book publishing, but she was bored with that. And then she went on the Columbia Web site and saw this opening that she applied for at Cantor Fitzgerald.

ROBERT: She went, interviewed, and was one of two out of a hundred who got hired. It was never in her makeup to be a trader or to do that type of thing. And I don’t know why she took that job. I keep thinking, Did she go there because I was there? Because my son was there? Why would she do that?

ROBERT: I think Howard [Lutnick, the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, a firm that lost 657 employees in addition to Brooke Jackman] did a superb job. He was in a tough position. His brother on the agency desk died. I must have seen the guy eight to ten times over the next two years. He would fly to New York to see all the families whose loved ones worked there, and was always sending little notes and stuff about people to us. In the beginning Howard got very bad publicity, and in the end I think he did an enormous job. I think he did the best he could, and he didn’t know what was going to happen to that firm. But he made a promise to everyone, and he stuck to it. Families who lost their sole support got health benefits for five or six years. They took care of their people, more so than any other firm I ever heard of. And now the firm is doing very well. I would never take anything away from the guy.

BARBARA: I just keep wanting to do more. So where do we see the future ? Hopefully we will grow. We did three thousand seven hundred backpacks this year, and we will get to ten thousand. Hopefully we’ll open more libraries, more literacy programs, more read-a-thons. We just want to grow.

BARBARA: I remember that Erin told me about the Susan Komen Foundation, which was started by her sister. And look how it’s grown. We said that someday we’re going to get ours to grow like that.

ERIN: We can evolve it as the world evolves. We have a library at a domestic abuse center. Children and mothers who are victims of abuse are cared for, and there’s a whole system of support for them. While they are there, there’s the Brooke Jackman library. And we also started one of our family literacy programs there for the mothers and their children. They come back to utilize it. When they first get there, after they’ve left their homes in the middle of the night and taken almost no possessions—one mother was with her two traumatized sons in the library, and our backpacks had just arrived, and they were the first two to get them last year. They were just amazed. They saw books, the backpack, the MP3 players, and they were, like, “How did they know? How did they know I need this?” We get to experience many stories like this, and they all inspire us to reach more and more children with Brooke’s love of books.