Chloe Wohlforth '07 was sitting in her junior year French class at Greenwich Academy in Connecticut when a classmate walked in late saying that an airplane had crashed into the World Trade Center.
Wohlforth's father worked there, but the thought that he was in any kind of danger didn't cross her mind. A few minutes later, Wohlforth's mother and grandmother came to the school to pick up the 16-year-old and take her home.
The next few days were a blur.
Wohlforth avoided reading newspapers and watching television. She didn't want the friends and extended family gathered in her home on the house phone too long, just in case her father tried to call and couldn't get through, in case he was in a hospital or just struggling to get home to Greenwich from lower Manhattan.
She didn't want to think about the possibility that her father might never come home.
Her mother Susan, however, felt certain her husband had died. "The moment she heard that the second tower had been hit, my mom knew he was dead," Wohlforth said.
The remains of Martin Wohlforth '76 were among the first 50 to be recovered and identified from the site of what was once the World Trade Center. His funeral was held on Sept. 22. He was 47 years old.
Though the immediacy of the carnage of September 11 has dissipated, for the families of the thousands who died — including 13 Princeton alumni, ranging in age from 23 to 64 — the last five years have been difficult. The details of that day have been etched permanently into their lives, and they grapple both with the challenges that face everyone who loses a loved one and with those unique to coping with 9/11 deaths.
The stories of Martin Wohlforth, Catherine MacRae '00 and Robert Cruikshank '58 are stories of people who are now gone, suddenly vanished into the wreckage of buildings and airplanes. While much of the country has moved on from the initial horror of what happened, family members say that nothing can take away the sting of unexpectedly losing the ones they loved.
A father lost
A few days after 9/11, Chloe Wohlforth, an only child, ventured with her mother to lower Manhattan to post missing-person signs and try to grasp the significance of what had happened.
Though she doesn't remember much about the day and did not go within 10 blocks of the smoldering wreckage of Ground Zero, Wohlforth remembered being overwhelmed by what she saw in the city. "I couldn't believe the mass of people, the mass of fliers, all over the city," she said. "Everyone says it, but it was surreal."
Wohlforth was invited to see the site by boat but decided it would be too tough to go. Though her father had worked in the World Trade Center since 1993, she had never visited his office. "I couldn't conceive of seeing the site with nothing there," she said, "especially since I didn't know what it looked like up close when the buildings were there."
Her mother Susan saw the site by boat with a group of 9/11 widows. "My mom was a lot more together than I was — probably to protect me — but it was still hard for her to go there and see it," Wohlforth said. "I'm glad I didn't go."
Martin Wohlforth was a managing director at Sandler O'Neill & Partners, an investment bank. He woke up at 4:50 each morning to catch the 5:55 train from Greenwich, Conn., to his office on the 104th floor of the South Tower.
Wohlforth attended his 25th reunion three months before 9/11 and had a last chance to see his Princeton friends, Chloe Wohlforth said. A member of the golf team during his years at the University, Wohlforth won a golf tournament at Reunions but was characteristically humble and didn't tell his wife and daughter. It was a classmate who told Susan Wohlforth about her husband's win. She established a memorial fund in support of the golf team following 9/11.
Though Chloe Wohlforth long knew that she wanted to go to Princeton, her father tended to stay away from discussing his time at the University with her. "My dad didn't want to build expectations for me," she said. "But he loved Princeton. I know he would've been happy to see me here."
Wohlforth's three years at Princeton have helped her learn more about her father after his death. "Being here means that I am in the same place he was. Sometimes it's a great feeling to know he was here, sometimes it's so sad."
"I've grown up differently without my dad than I would have if he was still here."
A bright future, darkened
The future for Catherine MacRae held great promise until it was robbed from her less than a year and a half after she graduated, while she was in her office on the 93rd floor of the North Tower.
An economics major who graduated with highest honors, MacRae was "an extraordinary person," her father Cameron '63 said. She played on the varsity squash team, tutored teenagers in Trenton and served as treasurer of Pi Beta Phi, in addition to being an "enthusiastic" member of the Ivy Club.
"Cat really, really loved Princeton," her father said. "It was probably the highlight of her short life." MacRae said that "there are no words to describe" what it feels like to be the father of a 9/11 victim.
Catherine's boyfriend Andrew Caspersen '99 said that after "seeing what the MacRaes have gone through, it's clear there's nothing worse than losing a child" because Cameron MacRae and his wife Ann must deal with both the personal pain of a child's death and the anger of a death to random violence.
"It's an immense personal tragedy. No matter on what side of the political spectrum one is, if you've had this happen to you, you have to be sickened that politicians seek to base their political campaigns on the tragedy of September 11," Caspersen said. "It's really quite nauseating, it's really sad."
Cameron MacRae remembers his daughter with a deep sense of admiration.
"Cat was one of these unique people who was not only very beautiful and very well-liked by everyone, but also, she excelled at both English and mathematics," her father said. Her high school, The Brearley School in New York, established a prize in her memory for a high school senior who does well in English and math.
Though she accepted a job at Goldman Sachs following graduation, MacRae was soon lured to a financial analyst position at Fred Alger Management, where she had worked since September 2000.
"It was really a post-business school kind of job," Caspersen said. "But Cat could do it ... She was recognized within the first year as an exceptional employee" and was promoted a month before 9/11.
Caspersen and the MacRae family founded the Cat MacRae Memorial Fund soon after 9/11. The fund sponsors educational endeavors for underprivileged children in the northeast United States, including a library at Brooklyn Jesuit Prep and a math program at Children's Storefront School in Harlem.
The fund is a way to "take this tragedy and funnel all the anger and the grief ... and turn it into something that's a nice positive," Casperson said, adding that "it's a way to keep her spirit alive, not just for us selfishly, but for people who'd never come across her."
Some of MacRae's friends from Princeton have donated to the fund, as have some of her father's classmates. More surprising were the contributions from Princetonians she had never met, those who were compelled to give by what they'd read or heard about her, Cameron MacRae said.
Never knowing grandpa
Though his first grandchild had just been born, Robert Cruikshank '58 didn't look like a grandfather, and lovingly cringed when his son Douglas '87 encouraged his infant daughter Lindsey to say hi to grandpa.
When Robert Cruikshank met new people, they said he seemed to be in 50s, not months from 65. He acted younger than his age, too: He was an active skier, golfer and tennis player, and had gone on an Outward Bound trip a few years earlier.
When American Airlines Flight 11 struck World Trade Center One, Cruikshank was in the 92nd floor offices of Carr Futures, a brokerage house where he was an executive vice president. An expert on monetary affairs, he had served in the U.S. Army after Princeton and had been chairman of the executive committee of the Chicago Board Options Exchange.
Though his family knows nothing of the final minutes Cruikshank spent in the burning North Tower, "knowing him, he was taking care of his staff until the end," Marianne, his wife of 39 years, told the Chicago Tribune in 2001. She died of cancer in 2004.
The family established a scholarship fund in Cruikshank's name at the University, which has supported one student per year for the last three years.
Douglas Cruikshank said his daughter Lindsey, now five-and-a-half, and son Robbie, 4, never got to know their grandfather — never had a conversation with him, never played a game with him, never hugged him. Now it's hard for him to know that his children's lives will be without both paternal grandparents, each taken in a different tragedy.
September 11 has changed how Cruikshank, a managing director at Lehman Brothers in New York, thinks about his life and what really matters. "You think you're invincible," he said, "but this shows that bad things can happen to good people, [that] things can happen that are beyond your control."
"You have to enjoy the time you have a little more, carpe diem, don't worry about the small things: That's been a big takeaway for me," Cruikshank added. He tries to be home for breakfast and dinner with his wife and children "whenever possible ... because time will fly by and you never know when it will be too late."
In the five years since 9/11, Cruikshank said he thinks some people have become "desensitized to the tragedy — if it doesn't happen to you, it fades much faster." He's observed coworkers become frazzled after a security breach and then avoid taking the subway for a few days. But they go back to their usual routines when the immediacy seems to have subsided, just as the nation has since 9/11.
"It's a type of myopia," he said. Terrorism "is not ever going away."
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