A Decade of Hope (56 page)

CAMERON: It's a journey, and it's not over.

Rudy Abad was in the process of retiring from Merrill Lynch, where he was first an analyst, then a broker and options specialist for nearly twenty-five years. When his wife, Marie Rose, died in the South Tower, Rudy returned to his native Philippine Islands, where he was determined to build a memorial to her that would be as meaningful and as consequential as the life taken from her.

 

 

 

I
am one of five children and was born in 1945, right in the middle of a brother and three sisters. We were a modest and unassuming family. My parents determined to give us sound educations, and all five of us went to one of the better schools in Manila. I cannot say that I had a really happy family, as my parents were very involved in their work. But so were other parents. Our relationship was not as good as what I might have seen in the families of friends of mine. But it was okay.

My father was a businessman, basically in advertising, and my mom was by his side the whole time. When we were kids it was already a multimilliondollar business, and so we were very comfortable. We had our own car, a very decent home. We were not in the very, very rich category, but we were certainly not lacking for anything.

I went to a school called Ateneo, probably the most prestigious in Manila, which was something like going to Harvard. But after my first year of college I came to the States to continue school at Berkeley, right at the time of Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement. Being a student from a foreign country, I stayed out of it, as I didn't know what was going on, and I really was not interested. I took a degree in business and have a master's degree in finance.

It was a difficult time. I had never been alone and was used to having a crowd around me, with me as the leader, and here I was in a foreign country, where I really just stayed on the sidelines. From a very early age I had leadership qualities, and in any undertaking I was the one who was doing the talking, the planning. At Berkeley I definitely knew that I was not in my environment, and that I had a lot to learn. As a foreigner with English as a second language, I was behind the eight ball. But I knew where I stood and I accepted that.

I had come to the States planning to go back home to either help my dad or actually work with him in his business. Part of my education, though, was also having to go to work, for I did not want to add to the cost my dad had in putting four other children through school. This was also a little bit of a learning process for me, because in my younger days I never worked, except to do schoolwork. I had two jobs that became fairly important to my life. One was as a waiter on weekends at the golf and country club. The second was at Berkeley after I posted a notice on a bulletin board [saying] that I was looking for a job. One day I got a call from a placement officer offering work cleaning the school, which was very much against my ego—a person of my background cleaning school floors? Those two jobs broke me down, taking all the time and pride from me. Actually, I got used to them, got to like them, and told myself,
Okay, I'm going to be the best waiter and best cleaner around.
But it was an awakening, being brought down to earth like that.

When I got a job with Merrill Lynch, the stock brokerage house, I started at the very, very bottom. I was two years away from graduating college, and they had an opening for a board marker. During those days, when they had those ticker-tape things, we used a board to mark down when they [the stocks] changed prices, and that was my job. At the time, I was going to school at night, taking fifteen credits and working five hours a day. But again, I was probably the best board marker that office ever had. Very shortly after I graduated I was fortunate to be hired there full time. I started to work in San Francisco and moved there. And Merrill Lynch was really the starting point in my life—a real job, with an office. I learned how to mingle with people. I could now think about goals. I was allowed to do eighteen months of training. So I learned a lot.

I started really liking the environment and what I was doing in the United States. It was far different from where I had come from, but it made me want to develop the ability to make money, to buy things with my own money, and not have to depend on anybody. That felt good. I was always eager to work. Anything that had to be done, I volunteered for. I had bosses who recognized my wanting to do things and to further my ability. Eventually that paid off, because when they needed to appoint a supervisor, I was recommended. That was the opening that I had been looking for. I then eventually became the lead assistant operations manager. My operations manager was one of the brightest people I knew, and I always picked his brain. We were close enough to have gone to basketball games, but there was always that line that I never crossed: He was my boss. But I knew that someday I wanted his job or one like it.

Eventually I was transferred to New York and enrolled in what they called operations management school, which prepared me to be an operations manager somewhere in the Merrill Lynch system. I completed that and I was assigned to Newport Beach, California, where I did well. I did not have authority over the brokers, but I made sure they were compliant with everything that they needed to be compliant with.

On June 30, 1970, just before that assignment, when I was still in New York training, I met Marie Labeglia. Marie was from Queens and had been accepted into a program for high school graduates with Merrill Lynch. I was in my office one day and saw four girls go by. I asked who they were, and one of the guys said, Oh, those are the new June grads. Merrill Lynch's June Grads Program had been established to hire new graduates at the firm. The guy who spoke looked at one of them and said, “She looks like a cutiepie doll.”

But I said, “I like the scrawny one.” Marie was eighteen, I was twenty-four, and I fell in love with her the first moment I saw her—a scrawny little thing, plain, just my type of girl.

Marie later went on to Queens College and graduated as one of the outstanding students in the United States, summa cum laude. She was also a Phi Beta Kappa, and I still wear her Phi Beta Kappa key, which I had made into a necklace. She was a superintelligent person, and you could talk to her in many subject areas. Very modest and from a very modest family. Her father was a train inspector in New York, her mother, a dressmaker. She and her brothers lived a very simple life.

I didn't start a relationship with Marie at Merrill Lynch because I was one of the managers and that was naturally taboo. But one day she came to me and said, “Can I talk to you?” She felt badly, because she had applied for the job to keep a friend of hers company, but she was accepted and her friend was not. She had thought, what the heck, I'll try it for the summer, but when the summer was over she wanted to go back to school, and she did not know how to tell her managers. She asked me, “What should I do? Should I go back to school?”

I said, “Yes, that's a no-brainer; you go back to school.” I told her I would take care of the problem, because she felt like she had misrepresented herself, and I told her not to worry about it. I would let them know.

So we kind of started having a friendship then—hello, that kind of thing—but still nothing serious. The last day of her job I asked her out to dinner; it was no longer a conflict of interest. We went out to dinner in Chinatown. I did not know what to expect at that time, but after that we had our first phone call, and then it was a series of phone calls, one hour each time, two hours, every single day. I don't know what we discussed, but it was just very pleasant to talk to her, and I would save time for her. One thing she made clear to me: We are just friends. She knew that I wanted more, but she made it very clear that that was all it was going to be. Once in a while I would ask her out, and every six weeks we'd go out for lunch or dinner. But every time I came too close, she would remind me, “We are just friends.” The conversations every day continued, and I looked forward to them, to the point that I had become satisfied to just be friends with her. That's what I told myself. And that went on for a year. I was not content, but there was nothing I could do.

Marie lived with her parents in Richmond Hill. They were Italian Catholic, went to church every Sunday, a very close family, and she kept me from them for a long, long time—over a year. She did not want to introduce me, and though I didn't ask why, I kind of knew, as did she, that they would object to my being brown skinned and foreign.

Maybe a year later, another girl and I started dating, but my conversations with Marie every day continued. I told this girl about Marie—I'm that kind of a guy—to the point where it began bothering her. So she asked me to break it off with Marie. I went to Marie, who said, “I like you a lot, but really, nothing is going to happen with us.”

So I said, “Well, if that's the case then I have to break off with you.” So I did, and began concentrating on Doreen, the young woman I was dating.

About a week later Marie called up and said, “I don't know what I'm feeling; I really don't know what this is. The only thing I know is that I feel for you more than just a friend.” And I thought,
Oh, my God, now what do I do?

But it was not a difficult decision to make after that. The opportunity was there, and shortly afterward I broke off with Doreen and started my relationship with Marie. This relationship lasted probably close to a year, and it was happy—dating and all that, and clean, as she wouldn't let me go past second base. But then I was assigned to California, and was basically told to go or I'd be out of a job. So I went, and did a good job there, and Marie and I continued our telephone conversations, two hours a day. We also had over two thousand pieces of correspondence during the one year that I was there. A card, a letter; sometimes I'd be writing three times a day, she'd write me three times a day. And this was [during] her going through her college, getting her Phi Beta Kappa and everything. So all of my time was going to letters, and all of my money was going to long-distance calls.

Then I started missing her a lot and went to my boss and said, I think I've done a good job. He agreed, and then told me that San Diego was opening up. The San Diego office was everybody's dream, and I thought,
Oh, my God, it looks like I'm being offered San Diego
, but I had to ask him to please send me home. They recognized that I had accomplished quite a bit, so I got my wish and was sent back to New York, where I became assistant manager for the biggest office in the system, at 165 Broadway.

When I came back to New York, Marie and I got engaged, and in November 1974 we were married. Though I now had a very big job, I was not satisfied with it, and after a while they told me that it was time for me to be reassigned to my own office and they set me up in Chicago. It was the first time in her life that Marie had ever been separated by real distance from her family, and it was a difficult adjustment for her. I watched her crying for a year. She wouldn't say anything to me, but she was very unhappy and ended up getting a menial job at a grocery store. She couldn't get a better position because she hadn't had any experience yet. I was afraid if I was brought back to New York, they would switch me again to another office, so I took a job and said [to her], This will be my last move, and then they are never going to move me again. So in 1977 we came back to New York, and I went into sales—basically starting a career all over again.

Marie, at the time, began working for William Rogers, who was the secretary of state, but one day applied at a bond house on Wall Street, FB Cooper. Marie was very bright, always smiling, and had the best personality, so she was a very easy hire, and because she was intelligent, did her job very well. But FB Cooper had to close for lack of cash, so they recommended her to Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, an investment banking firm. She was fortunate enough to be hired there as an administrative assistant, making a very nice salary, and from there just moved up the ladder, time after time after time, until eventually she was the highest-ranking female in the company: senior vice president.

Marie was everybody's friend, was always being kind to people. When I attended Christmas parties or gatherings with her, they would make sure we were at the best table—that's how popular she was. She was very downto-earth, very honest. In all the years I knew Marie I never heard her say anything negative about anybody. If she felt that way she just would keep it to herself.

During those years the standard executive salary was about a hundred thousand dollars. She eventually passed me. She was the senior vice president at Keefe, and I was an options specialist at Merrill Lynch, a certified options principal. I was a broker and not one of those hotshot traders, as I was not looking for drama or glory or anything like that. I just did my job and brought home not as much money as I could. Almost always the Merrill Lynch bosses would tell me that I could double what I was making, but that was not an incentive for me. Marie and I were living a very comfortable life; not having any children, our lives revolved around each other. We had no debt, we had no finances to worry about. We did everything in cash. We put things on credit cards, but when the bills came we paid them. The one thing we allowed ourselves to do was go on vacation, and we went to Hawaii every year. What she loved most was to read books, and would bring a dozen books to Hawaii, finishing them all. Aside from Hawaii, we had our weekends to do whatever we wanted, and we would go shopping in Philadelphia or to the Amish country.

We also went to the Philippines to visit my family, who, while caring for us, planned our entire visit, what we were going to do, at what time, and all of that. Marie was so dear she never said anything: It was my family, and it was fine with her. And her heart was so big. The first time we got to Manila I was in shock, because I had been gone so long. It had been poor when I left, but driving in from the airport, I was struck by the poverty, the needy children. When we had to drive through the really desperate areas, I remember looking at her and seeing her cringe. She would cry, and I would just hold her hand, as I was moved, and tell her, “You know, this is not the country I left.”