By:Jeff Lipton
Former Lawrence resident Gary Lambert fully realizes if he hadn't pressed the snooze button on Sept. 11 before he went to work at the World Trade Center, he would not be alive today.
That move bought him an extra 15 minutes, which probably saved his life.
Lambert, 42, has worked for Cantor Fitzgerald for five years and is vice president and sales manager of the division of Global Information Services, the market data arm of the company.
Lambert attended a reunion at Camp Keeyumah in Pennsylvania the weekend before Sept. 11, where he met with about 50 other ex-campers, many of them Five Towners. Most of the weekend he played full-court basketball and when it was time to get up at 7 a.m. to go to work on that fateful Tuesday, he said his muscles were very sore. So when the alarm clock rang, he shut if off and woke up 15 minutes later.
He usually arrives at the 105th floor of the north tower between 8 and 8:30 a.m. to attend an early-morning meeting. But on Sept. 11 there were no meetings to attend, which also meant he could sleep late.
He said he took the express bus from his Manhattan home on the upper east side as he does about three days of the week. The other two days he takes a cab, which cuts the time in half. But I was in no major rush,said Lambert, a 1977 Hewlett High School graduate who lived in North Woodmere and Lawrence Bay Park.
He departed the bus and was about three minutes from the tower when the first hijacked plane hit his building. When I came off the bus, I heard an explosion,he said. I looked up and saw a big hole in my building. Just below our floor was a plume of smoke and fire.
I thought it was a twin-engine prop plane that I figured flew too close to the World Trade Center,Lambert said.
He said he walked toward the Millennium Hotel at Church Street and Trinity Place for safety reasons and then saw a second plane plunge into the other tower. At that point, I knew it was terrorism. It was surreal, unfathomable, indescribable, like a movie. I said,
