Remembering the First Attack

It may seem, at first, a curious way to fight terrorism, to soften a blow so terrible that Edward Smith sometimes still feels its ache as if it landed yesterday.

One day before the one-year anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the 40-year-old CEO will lead golfers through 18 holes at a Simi Valley course, raising money for victims and their families with every drive, pitch and putt.

It is his way of doing his part, of remembering those still reeling from last year’s attack on the World Trade Center.

But it’s also a way of remembering another terrorist attack. One that struck the same building nearly a decade ago. One that claimed the life of his wife, then 7 months’ pregnant with their first child, a boy they had decided to name Eddie.

“A lot of people reached out and helped me and now I’m in a position to be able to help others,” said Smith, a Porter Ranch resident and president and chief executive officer of SMTEK International, an electronics manufacturer in Moorpark.

Smith and a handful of others staged the first United We Stand tournament three weeks after the 2001 attacks. It raised more than $80,000 in relief aid and mirrored a tournament hosted annually in New York by family members of those killed in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

“I think a lot of people after 9/11 wanted to know what they could do to help,” said Smith, his New York accent still strong. “We’re all looking for ways to make a difference, to show there’s another side to this and to say we are not going to be beaten down.”

Smith wasn’t looking to lead the charge against terrorism. Despite his years as a traveling salesman, he is naturally reserved and more likely to bolt from the public spotlight than bask in it.

In fact, he remained publicly silent for more than a year after his wife and five others were killed in the first World Trade Center attack, speaking openly for the first time in 1994 when four of the men who carried out the bombing were set to be sentenced to life in prison.

“Nobody could have ever prepared me for the feelings I was experiencing: I had lost my wife, my best friend, my idol, and my son,” Smith told the judge in front of a packed courtroom that day.

“We would never get to hear Eddie say his first word, to say ‘mommy,’ ‘daddy,’ ‘love.’ We would never get the opportunity to see Eddie walk or go to school,” he said. “We lost all this because the four men you are to sentence today wanted to terrorize the people of the United States.”

The phone woke Ed Smith early the morning of Sept. 11. He was living in Simi Valley but was away on business at the time, staying at a Phoenix hotel. A co-worker called and told him to turn on the TV.

The television glowed to life in time for Smith to watch the south tower get hit. He thought immediately of the warnings issued by some of the bombers convicted of the 1993 explosion.

“They said if they had had more money, more resources, they would have taken the buildings down back then,” Smith said. “I saw one event as a continuation of the other.”

Six people were killed and 1,000 injured in the 1993 bombing--only a fraction of the thousands killed and injured when terrorists few two jetliners into the Twin Towers on Sept. 11.

But Smith said whether it is one fatality or 1,000, the scale of carnage means little to family members left behind and reeling from loss. Smith lost the love of his life, a dark-haired Ecuadorean woman he met in 1982 while making sales calls to the B-2 level of the World Trade Center.

Monica Rodriguez was a secretary for the New York Port Authority. They were engaged three months after they began seriously dating in 1989, and were married Aug. 31 of the following year.

They bought the Long Island house Ed grew up in and refurbished it from the ground up. By mid-February, they were shopping for furniture for the baby’s room.

Days later, a bomb blast would tear apart what then seemed like a perfect dream, a glorious time that Smith spent singing and reading “Winnie the Pooh” books to his baby, or sometimes just listening to his heartbeat inside his mother’s womb.

He tried to capture it all in his courtroom statement the day the bombers were sentenced.

“I tried to make it focused on the people, not the cause,” he said of his statement. “It was never really about a cause anyway. What God would want civilians killed in his name?”

Although he left New York for good the day after the bombers were sentenced, Smith continued to play in the golf tournament established in memory of the victims of the 1993 attack.

The tournament raises money for scholarships, including one in the name of Monica Smith at the Long Island campus where Ed Smith attended high school.

So it was a natural for Smith, after so many people he knew said they wanted to do something for the victims of Sept. 11, to propose a similar tournament on the West Coast. Friend and former neighbor Andy Clark helped lay the groundwork. And the management at Wood Ranch Golf Club, where Smith was a member, donated use of its course.

“It’s a really great cause,” general manager Mark Kelley said. “So many people were really touched by the events of last September, it was really a no-brainer.”

The plan calls for staging the tournament every year on the Tuesday closest to Sept. 11. Smith, Clark and others are so committed to the idea that they have formed the We Will Never Forget Foundation, a nonprofit group that will collect and distribute proceeds from the event.

Smith said he hopes Tuesday’s event draws 150 golfers and raises $40,000. Registration is still open, and golfers can call 532-2800 Ext. 103, for more information. Or they can just show up at the golf course, starting at about noon.

“It’s about coming together and overcoming what they’ve thrown at us,” he said. “It’s about making something good out of something bad.”