Another man flies the flag for so many broken ties

MELONE E-mail: Click here Archive

© St. Petersburg Times,
published October 2, 2001

Almost every day, even two weeks later, Peter Farina breaks the big rule in every grown man's playbook. He cries.

Or he argues with his wife. He wants war. She doesn't.

But crying and arguing leave him stuck where he is, caught up in the echo effect of the attack on the World Trade Center. More than 5,000 people are dead under that rubble in New York, and the ground beneath the feet of people a thousand miles away has shifted.

Farina, a bond broker at William R. Hough & Co. in St. Petersburg, lost eight of his buddies on Sept. 11.

They had wives and kids, maybe a divorce or two, and always a long commute into Manhattan. They had favorite restaurants, favorite cocktails, favorite sports teams. And when Farina had to go to New York -- he was often a visitor on business at the trade center -- he'd go out for dinner with these men.

The men worked for Cantor Fitzgerald, the bond firm that lost two-thirds of its 1,000 employees when the first plane struck the north tower of the World Trade Center. The firm occupied floors 101-105. The plane hit about 20 floors below, leaving those above trapped.

Farina, who is 48, learned about the deaths one by one, as the aching days passed. He found some information on the Web, and when that failed, by calling other New York traders.

A network of relationships, with men he talked to several times a week, had been blown out of the sky. For bond traders rely on phones more than computers. They become phone friends, comfortable with one another in a way that only distance makes easy to achieve.

"You talk on the phone for hours, you bargain for a price, you ask about alternative investments, and after that's out of the way, it's the personal side," Farina said.

It's the personal side the way men tend to play it, by talking about things, not themselves.

For Farina and his friend James Suozzo, the thing was the Mets. Every time Peter and Jim got on the phone, they dissected the team up and down, front to back. They did this for what seemed like every other day of the week for 10 years.

The last time they talked, the Wednesday or Thursday before the plane hit, they were hoping the Mets would finish above .500 for the season.

Peter Farina explained this in a voice full of hopefulness and tension. He was on the desk at William R. Hough in St. Petersburg, at the height of the trading day. He was a busy man, with a big hole in his middle.

If Jim Suozzo were still alive, Peter is sure he knows what they'd be talking about, in their long-distance chats, after the deals were done. They'd be going on about how maybe, just maybe, the Mets will win the eastern division of the National League.

What hopes he and Jim had.

Peter even knows what would happen if the other seven men were still alive. Some were Yankees fans, and because every man on the trading desk shared the same phone, there would likely be a five- or six-way call in which the conversation would fly back and forth, wildly, across the two teams.

All these small pleasures have been taken from Peter Farina.

They stood for so much.

Now he grapples with what to do, other than go to work every day and to hide his tears at the office.

He would send Jim's wife a sympathy card, but he never knew her and doubts she'd recognize his name.

He did pass the hat around William R. Hough and raised $3,000 for the families of the victims at Cantor Fitzgerald.

And at his home in Riverview, Peter Farina fashioned a flagpole out of the stem of an old beach umbrella and an aluminum tube and attached the flag to it. He stuck the pole in his front yard, and at night, a spotlight shines on the flag, so that the world will know what goes on in the heart of Peter Farina.

- You can reach Mary Jo Melone at mjmelone@sptimes.com or (813)-226-3402.

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