Papers filled the sky. Everywhere Jim Campbell looked, there were papers.
It was like a parade was marching down Fifth Avenue.
Campbell looked at the other tower. Flames flickered from broken windows.
He could have pulled up a chair and watched. Again and again on Sept. 11 he had to fight the urge to be a voyeur.
"I sat and watched in amazement, not realizing the damage on the north side of Tower One," he would later write about his survival of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
On Sept. 10, Jim Campbell was the CEO of Ventaso, a software company in San Francisco. He was working 60 or more hours a week, firing off emails at all hours of the night, having chest pains. The tech bubble was bursting, and he had traveled to New York City to wrap up a financing deal with Morgan Stanley. That's what brought him to the 64th floor of Tower Two on the morning of Sept. 11.
People are also reading…
Ten years later, the specifics of Campbell's life have changed dramatically, directly because of the terrorist attacks: He's a developer in Tucson, not CEO of a software company in San Francisco. And yet, whatever effects he felt after the attacks, and whatever changes he saw in the nation in those next raw days, have diminished with time. In some ways, he said, it's like he and the country are back at Sept. 10.
"September 11 and those 90 days after really defined a lot about me for the next 10 years," he said. "Now, did it have diminishing returns as far as impact? Absolutely."
We were sitting at the Cup Cafe at the Hotel Congress downtown talking over lunch. (Campbell threw caution to the wind and ordered fish and chips)
Campbell, 55, is a big man with the kind of handshake that swallows you up. Easygoing and yet totally Type-A, Campbell is probably best known for two high-profile real estate projects in town: student housing on the parking lot just east of the Rialto Theatre, and the planned Sawmill Restaurant on top of Mount Lemmon.
He sometimes says pretty heavy things, and then follows them up with a disarming and light giggle that keeps the mood on the level.
"Do I feel a brotherhood with humanity still, like I did that first week?" he said. "No."
Then he giggled.
"Does it really take so much pain and trauma for us to realize that really we all are in a big boat together here?"
In Campbell's view it does - and then it fades away.
After he watched the towers fall, Campbell spent most of the night lost, escaping from what he had just survived. He wandered around Manhattan until he found a bar to drink "as much beer as I could consume." Escape was a big part of that first night for Campbell. When he and a colleague finally met up, they wandered around Manhattan all night and talked about ... work. They were searching for Sept. 10.
"We couldn't comprehend it," he said. "The normal world. We were talking about the normal world. This is the way life was yesterday."
On Sept. 12 he rented a car and began the long drive back to his family in San Francisco. Each day on that trip, he would wake up in the morning and cry. He had a flag in his rear window. He would stop and talk with strangers, finding solace in their words. He felt a sense of unity that he says we have lost.
Campbell describes his reaction to 9/11 in very distinct parts. There is the immediate reaction of feeling lost. And then there is the week driving across the country mourning the loss of thousands of people. He can vividly recall faces of people he saw the morning of 9/11. People he knows did not make it out of the towers like he did.
The next phase is the rush for change. In the 90 days after 9/11, he left his company, sold his home in San Francisco and bought a home in Tucson, where he grew up. In 90 days he changed his life - and all of those changes arose out of his immediate reaction to Sept. 11.
After Sept. 11, Campbell sought to bring balance to his life and not work so much. But these days he is working all the time and has come to accept that that's just how he is wired. Work is a vehicle for meaning, and now at 55, he is looking for a way to leave his mark on Tucson.
Sept. 11 has become a time to pause in his life, to reflect on the firefighters who rushed into the building and the woman at Morgan Stanley who rushed Campbell out of it. This year will be no different. The immediate feelings have faded away, but the attack is still with him in everything he does.
"It's like a wave where its biggest impact is the closer you are to it," he said of the change he once felt. "And the farther you get away from the wave, it diminishes, and sooner or later, you just don't see it anymore."
Contact Josh Brodesky at 573-4242 or jbrodesky@azstarnet.com
