Todd Beamer's DJ

[yoniman]

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/14/f...in-pieces.html

It's all about health, happiness & family. The rest are just necessary inconveniences we have to deal with.

[Jackie Daytona]

I need cliff notes. It won’t let me read the article.

[Mendota]

The link makes you pay to read it. Can anyone cut and paste the text body of the article?

[Wahlberg]

When you go into incognito mode and then refresh the page and press ESC while it reloads, you can/should be able to read it.

Whole article below:

The instrument itself is a two-tone Oyster Perpetual Datejust, with a 41-millimeter case, an unusual grooved dial of 18-karat gold, a gold-and-silver Jubilee bracelet and a signature flip-lock clasp. It is a chronometer, which is to say a precision watch that enables its wearer to measure elapsed time, not in the way a stopwatch might, but with great accuracy. It is a Rolex, one of millions of wristwatches produced over the decades by this notable producer of high-end timepieces, and when originally sold it cost roughly $7,700.

Smashed now, charred and fragmented, missing its crystal, the sweep-second hand and what would appear to be the minute hand and also half the bracelet, the watch still tells time, in a sense, but only one time. Frozen in a small indicator window of Todd Beamer’s Rolex is the number 11. That was the date in September 2001 when four terrorists hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 and crashed it into a reclaimed strip mine near Shanksville, Pa., killing Mr. Beamer and all onboard.

Of the 800 or so recovered artifacts on view at the National September 11 Memorial Museum, many relate to the telling of time. There are crucial timeline reconstructions of the day’s events. “Time as a concept, as in timepieces, is a consistent thread” in any historical rendering of the events of that fateful day, said Jan Seidler Ramirez, chief curator and director of collections at the museum.

“So, yes, there’s the Beamer watch, which takes on a whole aura because his particular story is quite well known,” Ms. Ramirez added. “But there are also other timepieces that speak to that timeline and narrative in another way, since everybody more or less wears a watch, this intimate object that has touched the body.”

There is a wall clock from the offices of the Department of the Navy at the Pentagon. There is an antique chronometer that Richard Guadagno, a 38-year-old biologist who managed the Humboldt Bay National Wildlife Refuge in Loleta, Calif., had on Flight 93 as he prepared to return home from a visit to New Jersey, where he had celebrated his grandmother’s centenary. But there is also a dainty wristwatch worn by Margaret L. Benson, a 52-year-old Port Authority worker last seen alive outside a Borders bookstore adjacent to the twin towers. By all accounts, Peggy Benson was a no-frills woman whose single vanity was her watch.

Each is symbolically resonant, and yet Mr. Beamer’s shattered Rolex has been an object of deep fascination for many of the museum’s 720,000 visitors, perhaps because it carries an extra freight of meaning. Unlike so many who committed heroic acts that day, those who died and disappeared and those who survived, the 32-year-old Oracle executive and father is remembered widely for a kind of battle cry.

“Let’s roll!” were Todd Beamer’s last recorded words, uttered as he and his fellow passengers made a brave if futile attempt to overpower the Al Qaeda operative Ziad Jarrah and his fellow terrorists.

In the years since, the phrase has been used so often — by a sitting president, musicians, athletes, movie and TV actors, writers and commentators, Nascar drivers and the Air Force — that, in an almost paradoxical sense, the real Todd Beamer risked getting lost again to the grander historical narrative.

Like so many relics at the museum, Todd Beamer’s Rolex also bids to arrest that process, evoking something intimate by providing both a record of a death and equally a window into a life. “It’s an anthropological constant that we relate to our memories through things,” said Felicity Bodenstein, an associate lecturer at the University of Paris, Sorbonne, and who has written extensively on secular relics. When we contemplate an object like Todd Beamer’s Rolex, she added, “Because it is immediate, because it is sensory, we are allowed to enter directly into a personal, intimate relationship with a historical figure.”

And in the case of a figure like Todd Beamer, a person hijacked by history, a surviving relic functions, “as a passport into a moment in time,” Ms. Bodenstein said — one rendered more powerful because it records concretely the instant when all time seemed to stop.

“The function of the watch is supposed to be to tell time,” Todd Beamer’s father, David Beamer, said last week from his home in Jacksonville Beach, Fla. “What it doesn’t tell is what time it is anymore. What it does tell is what time it was.”

That is, Todd Beamer’s Rolex marks the moment when he and a group of fellow passengers became, as David Beamer characterizes them, “soldiers” in the war on terrorism; when in the struggle to overpower the hijackers they helped bring down a jet whose intended target, many remain convinced, was the White House or the Capitol in Washington. “It marks the time that a successful counterattack on Flight 93 came to an end,” he said.

It would be more than a decade after the 9/11 attacks before the watch came into the museum’s possession. Like many other relics in the collection, it was lent by a family member, Todd Beamer’s wife, Lisa, along with one of her husband’s business cards recovered from wreckage scattered across a broad debris field near the disused Diamond T strip mine in Stony Creek Township, Pa. Like most of the objects that have entered the collection, the watch and accompanying business card presented curators with an unprecedented array of challenges, both practical and emotional.

“Normally, in a different sort of museum, we talk about correcting whatever the problems are” with an object, said John Childs, who is in charge of conservation services at the museum. “Obviously, in this museum, the condition is a large part of the story of the object, and so our goal in a sense is to preserve the deterioration.”

The greater difficulty for those charged with handling objects like the open-toed Kenneth Cole pumps that Florence Jones wore to escape the World Trade Center; or Giovanna Galletta Gambale’s wallet, with its Lenscrafters coupon and Banana Republic credit card; or Mr. Beamer’s watch when they enter the collection is to preserve a necessary professional detachment. The function of religious relics, after all, is to “materialize an otherwise abstract past,” as the scholars Robert Maniura and Rupert Shepherd have noted. Certain of the secular relics in the National September 11 Memorial Museum almost too powerfully do just that.

“There are these moments when you’ll come to the next object and, for whatever reason, it has a significant impact,” Mr. Childs said. “The watch, because of whose watch it was, has an important resonance. Frankly, I’m not going to talk about what it means that it was recovered because I don’t want to go there in my own mind.”

Little in the brief text panel accompanying Todd Beamer’s watch frames it as anything but a potent symbol of an untimely and tragic death. Yet it is equally a reminder of the buoyant life that preceded it, said those who knew him, an exuberant souvenir of a man his father described as a “proud capitalist.” That the timepiece is a Rolex is not incidental to the impression.

Few objects of personal luxury are more reliable markers of milestones than a fine timepiece. And few watches in the world have ever enjoyed a status equivalent to that of Rolex, according to Reginald Brack, senior vice president for watches at Christie’s, which recently added a retail component to its auction business to accommodate a fast expanding market for fine vintage timepieces.

“A Rolex is the quintessential measure of success,” he said. “It says, ‘I’ve made it, I’m successful, I’ve arrived.’ ”

That Todd Beamer had finally arrived seemed assured when he was promoted from salesman to account manager at Oracle, the software giant. Only the week before the Sept. 11 attacks, he and his wife, Lisa, had traveled through Italy on a trip paid for by his employer. The couple returned to the United States on Sept. 10 and Todd Beamer rose early the following morning to catch Flight 93 out of Newark airport for San Francisco.

“Todd’s watch was a fine watch,” said his father, David, a former executive for IBM. “He was a successful guy, was providing for his family, did a whole bunch of right things and decided, ‘Hey, if it’s O.K. for Dad to have one, I can.’ ”

David Beamer’s own Rolex was a career reward he gave himself in 1983 much as his son would do decades later. “I was vice president at Amdahl Corporation and we ran a sales contest,” Mr. Beamer explained. “We told the guys if you sold X amount of this storage project, you’ll get a Rolex. It was the most successful sales campaign known to my experience.”

When some of the men who had scored a watch took to ribbing colleagues with their constant requests for the correct time, David Beamer headed directly to his local jeweler. “I got to the point where, hey, I need to buy one,” he said. “I’m tired of not owning one.” He bought an Oyster Perpetual, a model kept in almost constant production by the Swiss company since soon after its founding over a century ago. David Beamer still wears it. Unlike his son’s watch, it continues to keeps good time.

“Todd’s watch is frozen, “ David Beamer said. “I hope that, even though it doesn’t tell time anymore, it speaks to people, reminds them that you need to know what time it is right now. Clearly the world is not safe yet. The same enemy hasn’t waved any white flags.”

[Xerxes77]

Nice story

[1665fan]

Wow that’s crazy…..RIP…..sad time for sure

[jb335]

really eerie with the 11 in the date window still visible

[bob sims]

A datejust with a chronometer and diver dial?

[HappyPrince]

Originally Posted by bob sims

A datejust with a chronometer and diver dial?

Looks more like a Turn-O-Graph

[Stan Cooper]

Originally Posted by HappyPrince

Looks more like a Turn-O-Graph

It looks like a Turn-O-Graph to me too, but I don't think they made any in 41mm.

[Rafeeq]

Thank you, Jesse and Whalberg. The pic is haunting yet still beautiful, and the article is sobering. That day was bad enough for the rest of us, but I can't imagine the folks left with only these scattered mementos of their loved ones. Tonight I feel for them again.

[Old Expat Beast]

It's a two-tone Thunderbird. If you search Google for todd beamer rolexforums.com there are quite a few threads to read.

[Jackie Daytona]

Originally Posted by Wahlberg

When you go into incognito mode and then refresh the page and press ESC while it reloads, you can/should be able to read it.

Whole article below:

Thank you!

[yoniman]

Originally Posted by Rafeeq

Thank you, Jesse and Whalberg. The pic is haunting yet still beautiful, and the article is sobering. That day was bad enough for the rest of us, but I can't imagine the folks left with only these scattered mementos of their loved ones. Tonight I feel for them again.

You're welcome and thank you Whalberg.

T'was a poignant reminder of the time we live by and leave behind.

It's all about health, happiness & family. The rest are just necessary inconveniences we have to deal with.

[Stan Cooper]

Thanks, Adam. Those articles confirm Todd Beamer's Datejust is indeed a two-tone 36mm Turn-O-Graph Thunderbird.

[ltmgeller]

Thanks for sharing. Never forget.