Volume 77
Number 4

Health for All

Fear of Flying

Flying II: High Anxiety

Virtual Vietnam

Uncovering the Past

Wired New World

Enigma: Physics Band

Emory University

Association of Emory Alumni

Current News and Events

Emory Report

EmoryWire

Knowledge@Emory

Sports Updates

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


WILLIAM F. FALLON, the father of Emory College freshman Christopher Fallon, was a general manager of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. He died September 11 in the attacks on the World Trade Center. Fallon was 53.

“Bill was a very confident, self-disciplined, extremely balanced man who was completely devoted to his family,” Fallon’s wife, Brenda, wrote in a statement about her husband. “He was a very intelligent, warm friend and conversationalist. His smile and laugh and wit lit up many a social gathering.”

A native of Yonkers, New York, Fallon graduated from Villanova University in 1970 with a degree in psychology. He participated in NROTC and was later a lieutenant j.g. in the U.S. Navy on the admiral’s staff.

Fallon was an active church member and a marathon runner, and had lived with his family in Rocky Hill, New Jersey, for eighteen years. A veteran of the New York and Philadelphia marathons, he had planned to run the Paris Marathon next.

The Fallons’ favorite vacation was hiking in national parks in the West, including Bryce Canyon, Utah, and Glacier National Park. The family spent last summer hiking together.

“Bill was so proud of Chris, his only child,” Brenda Fallon wrote.


For CHRISTOPHER W. MURPHY ’92L, earning a law degree from Emory University was just another in a long series of successes, including an undergraduate degree from Yale and an MBA from William and Mary. Murphy had recently started working as a senior research analyst at the New York investment bank Keefe, Bruyette, and Woods when a plane piloted by terrorists struck the World Trade Center’s south tower, where his office was located, on September 11. Murphy and nearly half the 170 others working in the office died.

After the first plane hit the north tower, Murphy called his wife, Catherine G. White. He told her not to worry.

“I asked him whether he was getting out,” White said. “He said, ‘They asked us not to evacuate.’ He thought it was for the safety of those getting out of the other building. That’s the kind of person he was.”

A husband, father, businessman, lawyer, athlete, and friend, Murphy is remembered most as a sailor. He was at home on the water from the time he was a boy, went on to become captain of the Yale sailing team, and, following in the wake of his seafaring Norwegian grandfather, sailed a boat across the Atlantic after college. Murphy was generous with his skill: he taught teenagers to sail through a program called Sail Caribbean, where he met his wife. His older daughter, Hope, two, was learning to sail before she could walk; Hannah, less than a year old, accompanied the family on boating jaunts.

Known for his warmth, his sense of humor, and his adventurous spirit, Murphy grabbed life with both hands and held on. He bungee jumped in Australia, sailed the Great Barrier Reef, and bicycled across France. His easygoing confidence impressed those who knew him.

“There was something about Murph that was so comforting,” said Bradford B. Worrall ’93M-’94MEDI, who knew Murphy at both Yale and Emory. “He was the sort of person you’d want at the helm of anything.”


 

EHTESHAM U. RAJA ’98MBA, an Oxford University-educated economist, had worked as an adviser to the Ministry of Commerce and Trade in Islamabad, Pakistan; a security engineer at Citibank on Wall Street; and a staff analyst for the city of New York before coming to Emory.

“I can assure you of a perfect score during my study at your prestigious university,” he wrote on his Goizueta Business School application.

Raja, twenty-eight, died September 11 while attending a conference at the World Trade Center. He was a Muslim from Lahore, Pakistan, but friends say he had embraced the American dream.

He drove a $70,000 BMW 740iL, worked for TCG Software in Bloomfield, New Jersey, and was thinking of marrying his American girlfriend.

Sometimes he and his best friend, Maneesh Sagar, a Hindu from India, would talk about how friends from Pakistan had become Muslim fundamentalists. “He hated how fundamentalism rears its ugly head,” Sagar said. “To all of us, religion is more a spiritual and personal thing than dogma.”

The weekend before he was to attend the conference at the World Trade Center, the two went out partying, ending up at an Indian restaurant talking over tea and skewered lamb until 5 a.m. “It was a guy’s night out,” Sagar said of the last time he saw his friend.


 

TODD H. REUBEN ’83B played on Emory’s varsity soccer team during his college years, and he loved coaching his eleven-year-old twins, Jeffrey and Jason, in the sport.

“Both boys are incredible athletes, which was clearly passed on from Todd,” says his brother-in-law, Michael Levy ’85B. “He was there for them every step of the way.”

Reuben, who lived in Potomac, Maryland, and was a partner at the corporate law firm Venable in Washington, D.C., died September 11 aboard American Airlines flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon. He was forty.

Reuben graduated from Goizueta Business School in 1983, became a certified public accountant, and received a juris doctorate from George Washington University in 1989.

He met his wife, Vivian Levy ’83C, at Emory, where he was in Hillel and Tau Epsilon Phi fraternity, and she was in Delta Phi Epsilon sorority. “The connection that brought us all together was Emory,” Michael Levy says. “And the Emory community really came together for us after the tragedy.”

Reuben was an avid Washington Redskins fan who was exuberant after the team won the Super Bowl in 1982. At his memorial service September 16, his brother, Keith Reuben, held up a Redskins season ticket and said that his brother’s seat would remain empty at every game.



 


 

 

 

Emory honors the heroes of September 11 in New York City, February 28, 2002.

 

© 2002 Emory University