Sunday, October 10, 2010

Edelman Works the Cantor Grief Center at the Pierre Hotel After September 11, 2001,



Transcript [Mike]
...at the grief center, and Edelman has pulled together a whole team at the grief center. And, so for the next ten days or so, what I did was work with the media at the Cantor grief center, and there's nothing I've ever done in my career, or imagine I'll ever do, that was this...was as important as that work...and the fact is,[ as mourning?] as that work, you know, one of the most touching things that happens to me, is that I'll have people come up to me on the street who were related to Cantor in one way or another, and say, "I remember you from those days, and thank you," and that's much more meaningful than anything, anything back than I ever get.

And then what Edelman does was just incredable, like what we did in those days, I remember Noel Cloud,  I'm looking at Brett because he knew him well, she was one of the main coordinators of this, so there were people who were doing actual Cantor work, you know, so being on site, people like Mike Halloway back at Edelman, because they needed to be in a kind of a quieter place, where they're dealing with the thousand's of media requests that were coming in. But then we had this whole group of people who just volunteered, and I have this image of just...maybe the night of September 12, or September 13th, of it being four in the morning and this team of 30 Edelman people, essentially, you know, to be morbid for a second, alphabetizing the photos of the people that were unaccounted for, and going through checklists of, what we knew, what relatives were there, and it was just like...the way they were dealing with this incredible difficult thing was---they were doing it! Like they were doing it in a smart efficient way, and just the number of different people who were helping out was really...it was just amazing, um, and um, there's a really, there's such a difficult time, and I kind of can't believe that I'm at a point where I can even talk about it at all, because it was so, so awful...

So Mike, can I make a quick segue then? [continued]


See: Edelman.com, "Taking a Walk to Ground Zero,"

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