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Health & Fitness

My World Trade Center Memories

Who knew that having a long term two-year temp job at the World Trade Center would take on a totally different significance today with the 10-year anniversary of the attack on the Twin Towers.

It seems like it was only yesterday when between my junior and senior year at NYU I saw an ad in the paper to learn word processing at a school that taught it near Times Square.

I signed up and took this five-week course to learn on the WANG word processing equipment. Before there was the Internet, cell phones, texting, pagers and even fax machines, there was only a green-tinted type on a screen—simple word processing.

After I graduated from NYU, I took a waitering job at Fiorello’s Café, which is a famous restaurant across from Lincoln Center that has a big pre-theatre and post theatre crowd. I worked there for a while and then a friend in my acting class was working at a new restaurant, Jerry’s Bar and Mesquite Grill on 23rd street near the Hudson River.

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This was just the beginning of the Mesquite grill phenomena in cooking. Jerry was a co-owner I think of the Roxy and this was his first restaurant. Sade's Smooth Operator played too many times on the restaurant's jukebox each night.

While I was working there one evening, I waited on a woman who owned a temp agency under her name, Irene Cohen, and she invited me to start temping with her agency. So there I was working my first temp jobs as a WANG word processor.

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I worked for her agency for a while and then I went on to work for Personnel Pool and several other agencies. I was able to move my hourly rate up from $10 to $11 to finally I was getting $13 an hour. This was 26 years ago and today in 2011 workers would love to get $13 an hour.

I ended up with this long-term assignment at The World Trade Center north tower working on the 104th floor for Shearson-Lehman American Express in Creative Services. This was a fun job, but we had to wait around at our desks for the work to come and well, we had to kill a lot of time. There was no fun internet of today’s world to fill in these idol hours, so I had start packing a brief case with my own personal work to do.

Sometimes a telephone call would come from a woman who would then try to describe how to make the document better in a chart form, which was not easy to do on this WANG word processor.

My immediate supervisor was a fun woman named Leslie McEwen, who was an opera singer and thought I was so funny and I made her laugh really hard and I made all the other co-workers and other temps laugh all day too.

There also a nice woman named BJ McIntyre and we all thought nothing of working on one of the almost top floors of the World Trade Center.

I would take the E train subway from Hell’s Kitchen downtown right in to the underground mall at the World Trade Center and then take two separate elevators to get to the 104th floor. Each elevator was really big inside and you could hear the air and the elevator sway on the way up in both elevators.

On a break or lunch hour, I would take the two elevators down to the underground mall to get a frozen yogurt, lunch or an Italian water ice.

On other days down in the mall, I would buy a lottery ticket when it was over 50 to 100 million in a jackpot. I had to also go up a floor or two to the 105th or 106th floor, as there was a concession that sold lunch sandwich items.

I could also buy discount half price tickets to any Broadway musical or play or off Broadway show at the TKTS booth that was also in the lobby of one of the World Trade Center towers.

These were also the years of my being out at the theatre and nightclubs every night until many times to sunrise. Then I would get home and shower and shave and go to work with no sleep in me and work the full day at The World Trade Center.

It was a much more simple and innocent time back then as no bombing had begun in the early 1990s at the base of the World Trade Center’s parking garage yet and terrorism was something that happened in the mid-1980s to other countries, but not in the USA.

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