Informed Speculation

Please note: this post is part of an extraordinary day of blogging, as 2,900+ bloggers each remember one of the fallen of September 11th, 2001. This post will remain up top all day; for details on this effort, please see here.

One thing is clear: Todd Christopher Weaver was an adventurous man. This was not a man who drifted through life waiting for it to happen; instead, Todd was the sort to wrestle life to the ground and make it beg for mercy (in a happy coincidence, he was born on New Year’s Eve). He died a young man of 30, yet his biography reads like that of a man in his sixties.

This was a man who took his college sweetheart, Amy Lawson, all the way to Japan, where he taught for a year; upon his return to Chicago, he became the youngest senior consultant in the history of J.H. Ellwood and Associates; and he was, incredibly, a vice president with Fiduciary Trust Company International at the age of 30, with an office on the 94th floor of the World Trade Center’s South Tower that day that United Airlines Flight 175 crashed though the 78th – 84th floors in the most-viewed moment in history.

His is not the face of an arrogant man, though; indeed, an instant likeability radiates from his bespectacled visage. He looks like a modern-day Richie Cunningham: smart, nice, and sociable (Scott Kenagy, who worked with Todd, remembers his dry sense of humor and the respect he commanded from his coworkers; Bill Rauckhorst, who taught Todd at Miami of Ohio, remembers him as very bright and personable). He had a taste for New Order and PIL, we learn from a friend’s remembrance, so it’s safe to assume he liked to dance; we also know he was an athlete at the Western Reserve Academy, the prestigious boarding school for high-schoolers in Hudson, Ohio, wearing the number 54 (WRA has a memorial scholarship in his honor).

Of course, no one reaches the level of success that Todd reached without a lot of drive, and he was competitive, in a wholesome way:

Once, on a skiing trip with his wife and his in-laws, Todd Weaver discovered that he was not the best skier in the family. The best by far was his wife, Amy Lawson. “But he was determined that he was not going be beaten by anyone,” said his father-in-law, Ted Lawson. So Mr. Weaver studied up and took lessons, and the next year surprised everyone by blasting down the mountain, the proud new Best Skier of the Family, his brand-new bright yellow jacket clearly visible to all.

To my knowledge, we don’t know the details of Todd’s death that horrible day; we do know that only 18 people above the impact zone in the South Tower survived (though many had decided to leave before the second plane hit), so even a man as well-positioned to overcome the odds as Todd had little chance by the sheer fluke of his office location. Fiduciary Trust had offices on floors 90 and 94-97 of the South Tower, and lost 87 employees in the attack; altogether, 600 people lost their lives in the South Tower on September 11th.

I hope I’ve done at least a small amount of justice to the memory of one of them. 

A native of Stark, Ohio, Todd is survived by his wife, Amy, and his parents, Marilyn and Dennis.

This September 11th, I don’t want to push any particular agenda; this is a day of mourning, not partisanship.  I only have one thing I would like you all to keep in mind: each of these nearly 3,000 people was a unique individual.  Not all were as accomplished as Todd, but all of them had a life snuffed short by an incredible act of cruelty.  Pray for the souls of the departed, if you will, and pray for the continued recovery and solace of those who loved them, and thank God for every day that you have, good or bad, because tomorrow is not promised to any one of us, high or low, rich or poor.

Sources: Newsday; Wikipedia; September 11th Victims; New York Times; and other sources as linked above