"Get The Hell Outta Here"

By Doug Graves © 2007

This week’s anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center provides the occasion for this story. It is the story one man’s struggle to survive and his need to find a deeper meaning to his life. It is the story of how one man faced unknown and fearful odds, summoned courage, focused on the needs of others, and brought himself and one other person through disaster to safety.
Whitehall High School graduate James Saganowich was a newly recruited employee of financial giant Morgan Stanley and was in the World Trade Center Building II to begin his new career with the Wall Street corporation. He and colleagues had taken a break from a training session and were going to breakfast in the lower levels of the building. It was Tuesday morning with a beautiful blue sky; however, from the mezzanine overlooking World Trade Center Building I he saw that the tower was “on fire and had debris falling from it.”
“Nobody seemed to know what had happened. There was a lot of speculation: bombs or helicopter or plane crashes were being considered. Then I heard the Port Authority order everyone out of the building and into the street.
“Still not realizing what had happened and having left my briefcase, wallet and phone on the sixty-first floor, I started back to get my stuff. I took the elevator back up to the meeting room where I had left them. When I got there the floor was eerily empty. As I walked down an empty hall two security guards ordered me to ‘Get the hell outta here.’ They escorted me to the stairwell and locked me into it.”
James Saganowich had grown up in Whitehall, Pennsylvania . After securing an appointment to the United States Military Academy he went to West Point for two years where he played football on the Army team. He transferred to Kutztown University and graduated in 1989 with a degree in Russian language. After selling securities in Florida and going through a divorce, he joined Morgan Stanley. They had just sent him to Manhattan for a training session with the firm.
Now, having been locked into the stairwell of a building and unaware of exactly what had happened, Saganowich still did not realize he was now in a desperate struggle for survival. “The stairwell was jammed with people walking down the thousands of steps to the street,” he said. “I was in no hurry and was still hoping to get out of the stairwell to go back and get my things.”
He slowly realized that something serious had happened to the building.
“We all knew something big was wrong. People started to panic. They were pushing and shoving. I was locked in a stairwell with a mob of frightened people. It was hot and dusty. Then I could smell kerosene. I began to grab people and try to calm them down. At about the fifty-ninth or fifty-eighth floor bloodied people with torn clothes started coming down. They had been in or above the impact zone where the airplane had struck the building. They were screaming and we stood aside to let them pass.
“Suddenly one of the women slammed into me as she came down the stairs. I grabbed her and kept her from falling. She looked in my eyes and said that we were going to die. I told her that it was ‘ok’ and that I would get her out.”
Saganowich, with the exhausted and fearful thirty-six year old woman, then began to focus on getting her through the stairway and into the street. Her name was Liz.
“She leaned more and more into me as we slowly moved down the stairs. The hot, humid air smelled of jet fuel,” he said. “Thank God I had Liz to focus on or I think I may have wigged out in there.
“We started to see firemen struggling up the stairwell as we went down. Seeing them soothed us and we started to feel safe for the first time in an hour. They were sweating in their gear as they climbed past us.
“We made in down the next thirty or so floors. People escorted us across the mall area. It was weird to see the huge empty space of the mall now devoid of people.
“We looked up at the smoke and fire. It seemed like miles up to where the fire was burning.
“We were safe.”
Saganowich and Liz were joined by Liz’s friend, Vanessa. Liz was worried about her missing fiancé, John, who had been in the building with her. People were now jumping from the burning building.
“I couldn’t watch,” said Saganowich. “I urged Liz and Vanessa to keep moving and we walked toward my hotel on the Upper East Side. We had walked about ten minutes when the tower collapsed. We saw a cloud of dust traveling toward us. Liz fell to the pavement, sure that John must be dead. We knew that people were dying, that the firemen and policemen were dying.
“I had no more positive words to motivate Liz. I had left them all in the building. I couldn’t say ‘John will be alright,’ not even one more time.
“I bent down and picked Liz up. I said nothing because you can’t say any thing to someone in that much pain that makes any sense. The three of us kept walking. Cars had stopped. People were standing in the street staring back at where the Trade Center had been. In Chinatown the people at a small tailor shop let Liz use their phone, but there was no news of John. Liz was silent and stared straight ahead.
“I used a pay phone to call my ex-wife in Florida and asked her to let my family know I was alright. Then we kept walking to my hotel on Seventy-Sixth Street. Fuzz Fetherolf, my childhood friend from Whitehall was there pacing on the street. We had earlier planned to meet at the hotel.”
“I still keep in touch with Liz. Her experience was different from mine. She lost half of the people in her company, but her fiancé, John did survive. She told me that she still has nightmares about that day. She told me recently that she wants to leave Manhattan.”
Saganowich was changed, too. He began to feel that somehow the financial industry was harming a lot of people around the world and that maybe it was contributing to the conditions that leave many people in despair. He felt that this might be empowering terrorists.
He is now a therapist in residency in Naples, Florida. He works for a non-profit community mental health facility in a chemical dependency unit. He is engaged now and though he makes a fraction of what he made working for a Wall Street financial company, it is enough. He is happy and still helps people in need. He is engaged to Debbie Gilmore and they plan to be married. Saganowich’s daughter, Taylor, also lives in Florida.
His mother, AnnJean Sarko, lives in Treasure Island, Florida near his brother, Jerry Saganowich, a retired professional wrestler. His sister, Lisa, lives in Boca, Florida. His father Jerome Saganowich, Senior is deceased.