“My childhood came crashing down alongside those towers.”
Steven Jacobson proudly standing at his post atop One World Trade Center roof, circa 1981.
During thunderstorms, he would scale the ladder inside the tower’s 360-foot antenna to make his adjustments. Over the 22 years he held this job, the signal crashed for a total of only two hours. One time, he even revived the signal using his shoelaces. After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, my dad stayed at his post well past midnight until the signal came back on air. His fellow engineer and close friend, Vic, had called the office while picking up lunch at the cafeteria in the Trade Center’s food court: “Steve! Explosions! Smoke!”He returned home covered head to toe in soot. Later, WPIX awarded him employee of the month with a plaque he proudly displayed to everyone who visited our home.
I deemed my family cursed. My oma fled Nazi Germany alone when she was 18 years old. She hid when the Gestapo arrived and eventually escaped when a well-connected uncle bribed an SS officer to smuggle her onto a boat in a burlap potato sack. As I grappled with the reality of my father’s death,I became terrified of feeling the enormity of the experience, convinced that feeling a sliver of heartache would propel me into a black hole of emotion.
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