Last week’s tragedies in New York and Washington dramatized just how closely we on the West Coast are tied to the people and places nearly 3,000 miles away. It seemed everyone in OC’s business community knew somebody who was transacting business in or near the World Trade Center at the time of the terrorist attacks. Media reports, phone lines and e-mails teemed with accounts of loved ones and associates either caught in harm’s way or luckily avoiding it. Here are two more of the latter: A last minute change of plans kept UCI Medical Center Chief Ralph Cygan off of American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston’s Logan airport to LAX, one of the two planes that crashed into the twin towers. Instead, Dr. Cygan grabbed an earlier flight to San Francisco, which was safely diverted to Des Moines, Iowa, following the terrorist acts. Meanwhile, there was a sigh of relief at Allergan on word that CFO Eric Brandt and R & D; head Les Kaplan were safe in New York. They had a meeting scheduled in the WTC just three hours after the first plane hit
….The mood was sadder at ICN Pharmaceuticals: “It’s touched our corporate family directly,” said spokesman Peter Murphy at mid-week, referring to Wall Street contacts who he said worked with the company on a daily basis. “Their offices are gone and their fates are only known to God” The first “war” of the 21st century was an electronic media event, to be sure, but it also revived a journalism relic,the newsstand edition. Times and Register racks throughout the county were uncharacteristically empty, the papers snatched up by readers who couldn’t get enough news about the unfolding events or who wanted the papers as keepsakes. The papers received calls from many outlets for more copies. The day of the attacks the Register put out two special editions, the first since the Persian Gulf War. “We went to Home Depot, Lowe’s and an ‘Osh’ store and bought a bunch (150) of those cash aprons. We got quarters from the bank and gave people a cash apron and quarters and a location,” said publisher Chris Anderson. He figures the Register sold at least 50,000 extra copies. A Times spokeswoman said rack sales tripled; the day after the attacks, the Times increased its press run by 180,000 copies, then increased it another 50,000 when the first batch flew off the stands The day before the tragic events, Chapman celebrated its 10th anniversary as a university (before that it was a college) with skydivers, the unveiling of a statue of founder C.C. Chapman, a ribbon for President Jim Doti and another move up in U.S. News and World Report’s annual rankings. Ten years ago, the magazine ranked Chapman 93rd in the western master’s university category. Now it’s 14th. All of those distractions must explain why the arrival of EE RR as a part-time prof went virtually unnoticed.
