A Man Who Was Proud to Work on the 91st Floor

By Víctor Manuel Ramos | STAFF WRITER

September 18, 2001

Frederick Kuo worked on the 91st floor. (Newsday Photo / Paul Bereswill)

When his employer started moving its offices to southern New Jersey, Frederick Kuo Jr. asked to keep his office on the 91st floor of Two World Trade Center.

Kuo, 53, of Great Neck, liked that the old offices were closer to his home. He liked that it had been his place of work for the same firm for many years, through company growth, name changes and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Most of all, he liked the view.

Just five days before the attack, Kuo brought his wife, Teresita, to the office. He proudly took her to the window to show her the sparkling Hudson River, Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.

Kuo, a mechanical engineer, reluctantly had made an arrangement with his company, Washington Group International, to work out of his home instead of moving to Princeton. He wanted his wife to help him pick the bookcases and other furniture he would need for his home office.

Before his move, though, he had some important work to complete. Kuo, who had a specialized knowledge of power plants, was scheduled to travel to Saudi Arabia on Sept. 8, but the electric-plant work he was to oversee was postponed.

Many factors, his wife said, seemed to have conspired to put him in his office when the hijacked planes crashed into the buildings.

After the first plane hit last Tuesday, Kuo urged everyone in the office to evacuate, but he stayed behind and called his wife. Kuo could get in only a few phrases before he realized the imminent danger.

"A plane just hit tower number one," Kuo told her. "I saw three people fall from the building. Number Two is OK." Then he stopped, for a moment. "Oh my God, something is happening here. Gotta go."

Teresita Kuo, a gynecologist who does medical reviews for Nassau County, could hear glass shattering in the background as the phone connection was lost.

Her husband, a highly devout man, chairman of the board of elders at the Community Church of Great Neck, and an avid tennis player is among the missing.

At the church, he played a role uniting different segments of the community, she said. He is "half Chinese, half Filipino, but all-American, because this was where he grew up," she added. His family lived in Flushing before moving to the Great Neck area, where he attended the public schools. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

For their 30th wedding anniversary on Oct. 17, the Kuos had planned to continue a family tradition and vacation at the Thousand Islands of the St. Lawrence River in Ontario with their four children, Frederick James of North Andover, Mass.; Melissa of San Francisco and Michael and David of Great Neck.

Those plans are now on hold. "I have known him for 31 1/2 years, and I consider myself the luckiest person with having such a man for my companion and my husband and father of my kids," Teresita Kuo said in a calm voice. "It's very strange, I am normally very emotional, I cry at movies, but for some reason I feel kind of peaceful. We all do."