Naples man in new book mourns maverick company, and how employees persevered after 9/11

A train missed, a convenience shunned. Because of both, Ed Zier is alive and talking today, reflecting on Sept. 11, 2001, as he gazes at a sparkling Florida morning through his glass living room doors. 

Four of his coworkers, all people he knew personally, died in the attack on the World Trade Center Towers that day. Baseline Financial Services, the 77th- and 78th-floor business in the South Tower that housed them all, nearly became corporate history at that very moment, when it took the direct hit of the second terrorist attack.

Zier, who now lives in Naples, has wrapped both Baseline's human toll and corporate vulnerability into his own story of 9/11, "Undaunted." Its publication date, not coincidentally, is Sept. 11.

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"Undaunted" chronicles the history that brought Baseline directly into the path of United Airlines Flight 175. The company's rise, and its determination to survive its destruction, bookends harrowing personal stories of Zier's coworkers that day, intense narratives of their escapes.

"Undaunted" began as a wintry day project in 2005.

"I wanted this so my kids, and even grandkids, would know what dad — papaw — had gone through," Zier emphasized. 

"But I struggled with writing the book early on from the standpoint that I saw two different stories here," he said. "Which one should I write?"

An existing lease bought time

One dark narrative comes from Baseline's 78th floor headquarters in the World Trade Center's South Tower, which took the direct hit of the second terrorist-controlled plane.

His coworkers who survived had sensed trouble with the North Tower strike and most of them already had taken to the steps to bypass jammed elevators. By good fortune for which Zier will be forever grateful, nearly all of the 96 Baseline employees who were working at that hour made their way out of the building.

Nearly all. 

Several on the 77th floor, directly below the strike to the South Tower, survived, but would be knocked over, "like bowling pins," Zier recalled one saying. The impact of the strike cut all the power, and they had to begin by groping their way in the dark down the only passable stairwell, with the 767's jet fuel gushing around their ankles.

Another, quirkier narrative is why this small company was even in the building. Baseline was a maverick startup under an entrepreneur whose employees received free weekly shoeshines and crisp $100 bills every time it passed the milestone of 100 new clients. There were buffet lunches several times a week.

Baseline founder Rob Patterson insisted on competence, originality and teamwork. This was a no-ego zone.

Its clients — 10,000 of them eventually — valued Baseline's quick-read, smartly curated statistics, distilled on a daily web page that portfolio managers all over the country were using. Its staff treasured its team mentality and its independent culture, even after it was acquired. 

That would not jibe well with its corporate assimilation into Thomson Financial, who had bought Baseline's lenient parent company, Primark, in 2000. But Baseline had already signed a lease in the technology-friendly South Tower of the World Trade Center, assuming a lease at such a good price, the team was pinching itself, Zier said: "We were used to ripped carpets. This was more than a step up."

"We were a tag-along (as part of the Primark Corp.). But being small, and being in the World Trade Towers, we figured they'd leave us to our own devices," Zier recalled. "And they did."

So while its employees worked above all of New York, Baseline operated under the radar of its $19.06 billion parent.

'Get home now!'

The book also relays Ed Zier's miraculous sideswipes with 9/11. He had planned to be at Baseline's headquarters, which were split between the 77th and 78th floor of the South Tower, before catching an afternoon flight to San Francisco for a meeting.

That schedule was Zier's thrifty decision. As Baseline's chief operating officer, he saw the $2,000 price tag on the only two morning flights from Newark as excessive. JFK was offering a $400 afternoon flight. He booked it.

Those Newark flights could have been more costly than Zier ever dreamed. One of them was Flight 93, the flight destined to crash into a Pennsylvania field when passengers rushed the terrorists who had taken over its cockpit. 

On the morning of Sept. 11, Zier was having other issues. Heavy traffic kept him from the 8:02 a.m. semi-express train from Radburn, New Jersey. Zier had to settle for the 8:08 local, with four time-consuming stops along the way.

Broadway. Plauderville. Garfield. Rutherford. Those stops, breaths of fate, held Zier back so that he had not yet crossed the river from Hoboken Terminal into New York before the first plane hit the North Tower at 8:46 a.m. 

He had, however, gotten a seat on a New York-bound train. It never moved. The announcement of a "police action" at the WTC told its passengers they would need to find a detour route.

And for some reason, his cellphone wasn't working.

When he emerged from the terminal, Zier and all the commuters at the street level saw, from a skewed perspective, what was stopping their transportation: Something had hit the World Trade Center's North Tower. A Cessna, perhaps?

Zier's cellphone was useless. But eventually he found a pay phone to call his wife, Mary Tara, and tell her he was not going to fight the inevitable snarl of traffic in the city.

Her revelations were terrifying. And her tone was frantic.

"This is horrible. Get home now!”

Mary Tara Zier recalled a tortured half hour without communication: "I watched live as the plane hit the second building. I did not know where he was."

The book unspools scenes of Ed Zier and six other commuters piling into a taxi at the same time, and bribing the driver to take an illegal load limit — seven men crammed into its back seat— to Bergen County.

It also relives the stories of nearly a dozen Baseline employees as they worked their way down from its offices. One was barefoot; one was seven months pregnant. A woman they found on the staircase was bleeding and one stripped off his shirt to wrap her arm as they added her to their small caravan.

Not long after their emergence, they had to run for their lives as the South Tower collapsed behind them. 

'It was so weird'

After Zier's emotional arrival home in Franklin Lakes, he had one immediate goal: to let his daughters know he was safe.

It would be an Oscar-contention role for him. In an era without juvenile cellphones, the classes at High Mountain Road Elementary School were unaware of the horror just miles away. 

A number of their parents, like Zier, worked in the twin towers. With those uncertainties, the school had decided to keep the events quiet and let the children learn about it from their families. So Zier was permitted only to see each girl separately, with any mention of what was happening in New York forbidden. Thinking fast, he met the two in their hallways and offered them an innocuous, but bewildering, explanation: 

“I have cancelled my California trip and will be home tonight to play with you.”

"To say it was out of the ordinary was an understatement," recalled Kerriann Zier, his older daughter. Kerriann, now 30, has vivid memories of it "like it was yesterday. It was so weird.

"I remember he hugged me for a long time."

The Ziers engineered an after-school detour to a friend's house for the girls. As their mother was explaining the attacks on the way home, their father was making phone searches for all headquarters employees.

That was after he had suffered through several hours unglued. "I sat there, probably crying, in my living room. I didn't know what had happened. I thought all 170 employees had perished," Zier said.

"I had lost my ability to think correctly — we didn't have all 170 employees in there on the early shift."

But phone calls began to come in from his coworkers. Managers who could be contacted started making phone checks, and Baseline's San Francisco sales office would keep the list as employees were accounted for.

At that point, as Zier recalls it in "Undaunted," he faced a dilemma: 

"I found myself at an emotional fork in the road as I saw two seemingly incongruent paths ahead of me. One path required me to stay focused on the WTC site, seek updates, and mourn for the families who were in dire straits waiting for any news.

"The other path involved seizing the moment, in the name of all survivors and clients, to resurrect Baseline so that good people would still have their careers and clients wouldn’t be let down."

'Just show up. Just get there'

"If you don't know how the company was founded and this special culture, you would not appreciate why I thought people were acting in such a team-oriented way to get out and rebuild," Zier explained of his book.

There was such passion for Baseline's survival that its client server distribution manager, Peter Haller, called Dell that very afternoon and ordered replacement computers on a rush basis, before Zier even spoke with him.

Simon Chen, Baseline's chief product and technology officer, had grabbed his laptop before descending the 77 floors from the tower. That laptop housed a fully functional client copy of Baseline that had been updated nightly. 

He and Alfredo Guzman, Baseline's pricing manager, pulled together critical employees the next day. Task One was to learn whether they could emotionally handle the intensity of recreating its main system over the next week after what they had been through. Guzman himself had made that 77-story descent. 

On Sept. 13, the first of two tag-team groups drove in a two-hour procession to its Philadelphia software development center. Housed in nearby hotels and sharing  desks, they began to reproduce the system so it would run seamlessly from there before the New York Stock Exchange, which 9/11 had shut down, re-opened Sept. 17.

"We were working close to 24/7," Zier said. 

Patterson, their founder, had to rely on that core group to forge a plan. He was stranded in Key West, where he and his wife had gone to buy a retirement home. No planes were flying; rental cars were impossible.

"We knew odds were against us. We were up against the wall, so to speak. When I drove to Philadelphia with two of the managers in my car, I had no plan. I had no idea what we were going to do," Zier recalled. 

He was following an old Woody Allen adage — that 70 percent of success in life is just showing up.

"Just show up. Just get there. You can't effect anything without being there with the team, with the resources laid out in front of you so you can see what's missing."

The principle worked. On Monday morning Sept. 17, when the stock exchange bell rang, Baseline's essential financial data was ready for desktops across America. Zier looks back on it today as a miracle powered by Baseline's personal, nurturing environment. 

'We go into this building, it's over'

This would be a sober celebration. There were too many funerals of coworkers, neighbors and friends. And there was a diplomatic dance to find new quarters that would keep Baseline's emotionally buffeted employees away from the World Trade Center Towers. And away from Thomson, who was suggesting that Baseline rehouse itself in their headquarters. 

"Rob and I knew. We go into this building, it's over. Because they'll come and find our best programmers. And they have a right to do that," Zier acknowledged. "They own us. We're their company.

"It would advance the integration — to the demise of Baseline."

In the end, the proximity of Thomson to the WTC site saved them for a time. The company understood that Baseline's people needed space to continue creating its high-profit $50 million in revenue.

But the visibility from 9/11 thrust Baseline into a higher profile for assimilation into Thomson's strategic vision, which in 2001 returned revenue of $7.23 billion. 

Within two years, Baseline suffered the fate of so many acquired corporations; it was streamlined out of existence. By that time, Patterson had retired. Zier had left the company. 

"I could not find another Baseline afterwards," he lamented. And, he added, he tried.

The spirit among its employees lives on, however. This particular morning, Zier is wearing a golf shirt bearing the title "Baseline Reunion 2004." He interviewed some 50 colleagues and friends, who were generous in sharing their experiences, he said. 

Rob Patterson, Baseline's founder, would not be among them. He died in 2017. 

Zier concludes his book with tributes to the four coworkers who died on 9/11.

"Those were the interviews I most dreaded," he admitted of his talks with their families. "I didn't know how these people would react to it. I was worried they would not like it, that they would be annoyed. 

"Just the contrary. They were thrilled that someone was going to keep the legacy of their loved one alive.

"I'm proud to be the one who offered that avenue for them."

"Undaunted" (Koehler Publishing, 353 pages) is available by order from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Indiebound for $7.99 on Kindle; $18.95 paperback, $27.95 hardcover.

Harriet Howard Heithaus writes for the Naples Daily News/naplesnews.com. Reach her at 239-213-6091.