For the last year or so, his business address has been 1 World Trade Center. In a phone interview last Sunday, three facts surfaced among all others:

        1) Mr. Hingson and his visiting colleague from California, David Frank, made it down 78 flights of stairs to safety before the two towers collapsed.

        2) Mr. Hingson happens to be blind.

        3) Despite his brush with death, he is assuming the business-as-usual attitude encouraged by our government, telling me he expected to close a $750,000 deal Monday morning.

        Mr. Hingson was preparing breakfast pastries and a PowerPoint presentation at 7:50 a.m. Sept. 11, when Mr. Frank arrived and began setting up laptops in preparation for the day-long event the two men were hosting. They were in Mr. Hingson's office, looking for a letterhead for printing the list of names of expected arrivals for World Trade Center security, when the building “groaned” and dramatically leaned in first one direction and then the other.

        “I've lived most of my life in California,” Mr. Hingson says, “and this was much worse than any earthquake.”

        Paper and debris were flying, and Mr. Frank saw fire from the floor above when he looked out Mr. Hingson's window. Their first reaction was to get the few early guests headed out the door. Next, the two men strapped on personal computer bags, and Mr. Hingson fetched his yellow Labrador guide, Roselle, trained for him by Guide Dogs for the Blind in San Rafael, Calif.

        With Mr. Frank shepherding the way ahead of them, Roselle guided her master to safety, down 78 flights of smoke and fumes and water, and through city blocks of chaos and confusion.

        Everyone was panting — from dehydration and smoke inhalation — and Roselle was no exception. Still, Mr. Hingson says, although he and his wife have spent nights comforting his dog through noisy thunderstorms, she proceeded from the 78th floor downward in a more or less business-as-usual manner.

        For the first 30 flights or so, Mr. Hingson said there were only a few other people in the stairwell. Somewhere in the 40s, traffic picked up, both descending and ascending. Those ascending were, of course, firefighters laden with axes, fire hoses, and oxygen tanks. Repeatedly, firefighters asked whether Mr. Hingson was all right, if someone was with him. There was a considerable amount of clapping one another on the back, well-wishing and blessing, he says, as the firefighters, upon assurance that Mr. Hingson was fine, trudged upward.

        Mr. Hingson was not the only person with a disability to work in the World Trade Center and was not the only one to be counted among those who miraculously survived. Roselle was not even the only guide dog. Mr. Hingson says anotherC employee, a woman who uses crutches, was carried to safety by co-workers. Still another disabled employee perished in his wheelchair, along with a friend who refused to desert him.

        Vivian Yacu and Omar Rivera, who are both blind, are programmers for the New York Port Authority and also escaped. Although the three blind people did not know one another, they all happened to work on the same floor: 78.

        In the lobby, Roselle greedily drank from the water spilled from sprinklers. Caked with ash and grime, the two men and one guide dog plodded through black smoke, around blockades and heard the bone-chilling sounds of the towers shuddering to the ground. They are counted among the miracles of the day — a fact not lost on either of them — and disability, in the end, played about as much of a role as it does in more mundane activities: little if any.

       Contact Deborah Kendrick by phone: 673-4474; fax: 321-6430; e-mail: dkkendrick@earthlink.net.
       

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