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After the Ashes: The Perseverance of Vanguard Direct
After escaping Ground Zero a year ago, employees at New York distributorship Vanguard Direct boldly and tirelessly forged ahead. The company lost its home on Sept. 11, but never its identity.
At 8:46 on the mild, bright morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Millie Camacho's computer died, causing her to swear silently at Vanguard Direct's information technology department. During her first 16 years at the printing distributorship, then located in Lower Manhattan on the 18th floor of a historic building at 90 West St., Camacho had wanted a desk with a window overlooking the city. She got her wish earlier that year, but wasn't looking out of it when American Flight 11 slammed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
Camacho, Vanguard's customer service supervisor, says she heard what sounded like a car backfiring. The noise paled in comparison to the thunderous boom she and other Vanguard employees heard during the World Trade Center parking-garage bomb of Feb. 26, 1993. Now when Camacho looked up, the scene surprised her: Small flames and black smoke rose from the North Tower a few hundred feet to the north, and paper rained down like confetti. The South Tower, less than 100 yards away and slightly to the northeast, stood unharmed. Curious, she rode an elevator to the lobby and stepped outside for a smoking break. Some jerk hit Tower 1, she remembers thinking. Some plane must have flown off course. That, of course, wasn't the case.
Vanguard employed approximately 55 people at 90 West St., and many of them congregated in the hallway. Robert O'Connell, the company's president and a DMIA Board member, turned on his radio. A soft-spoken father of three, O'Connell was alarmed, but he assumed the plane was a Cessna. Out his office window and through renovation scaffolding, he could see only as high as the 50th floor of the North Tower. On the street below, he spotted a truck on fire. "We were comforted somewhat by thinking it was just an accident," O'Connell says.
Terror at the Towers
The moment Camacho stepped outside to have a cigarette, she realized that whatever hit the North Tower was bigger than she had thought. "The streets were littered with body parts and pieces of the plane," she says. "It was a sickening, quiet scene." Camacho went back inside and rode the elevator up with five other people. At 9:03, as it reached the 15th floor, she heard an earsplitting shriek and a thunderous crash.
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