Finding solace and a new beginning in Wisconsin

by Kari Bellingham

It was early on a bright, cloudless morning in New York City. Glenda Noel-Ney, a successful businesswoman, was rushing through her morning routine, trying to get her 9-year-old son Pierce to school while hurrying to make a 9 a.m. meeting at her downtown office. Already running late, Noel-Ney hopped on a different train than the one she normally took into Manhattan from Brooklyn. As she stepped off the subway, she felt an impact beneath her. It was 9:03 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001. Her first thought was that a bomb had gone off nearby. But as she rushed toward the stairs, a man grabbed her arm. “Ma’am, you don’t want to go outside,” he warned her.

Annoyed, she pushed him aside. As she emerged from the subway tunnel into the warm fall sun, she couldn’t help but marvel at what a beautiful day it was. But then she heard a strange crackle in the air. When she looked up, her heart stopped.

In front of her, a huge billow of smoke poured from the World Trade Center. Angry flames licked outward from the building. To her horror, Noel-Ney realized people were dangling from the building. “It was one of those completely surreal moments,” Noel-Ney says. “I stood there, just expecting a Hollywood director to come from somewhere and yell ‘Cut!’” 

As she struggled to take everything in, she slowly began walking through the streets of downtown New York. When she stopped, a man standing next to her put his arms around her. Together they learned a plane hijacked by terrorists had flown directly into the World Trade Center, causing the carnage before them. When people trapped in the building began jumping from the windows, he told her not to look. When her cell phone didn’t work, he let her use his.

Even though her office at the American Express headquarters building, where she worked as manager of philanthropic programs, was directly across the street from the World Trade Center, Noel-Ney still felt compelled to go there. But the man holding her by coincidence, an engineer who had worked on some of the downtown buildings, told her the angle of the World Trade Center indicated it was about to fall. She should get out of the downtown area, he told her. Although she refused to let herself believe that the landmark towers she, as a native New Yorker, had grown up looking at nearly all her life were possibly going to drop, something in the man’s voice made Noel-Ney listen.

Confusion and clogged telephone lines had prevented Noel-Ney from contacting Pierce’s school to let him know she was OK. By the time she got there, Pierce was in his classroom crying. He was sure something had happened to her. The frightening events left both Noel-Ney and her young son shaken. Over the next several days, the mother and son began an ongoing conversation about what had happened. Even though Noel-Ney had not been hurt, she was a single parent and for Pierce the thought of losing his mom deeply upset him. He repeatedly asked, “What will I do if something happens?” His questions reverberated with Noel-Ney, causing her to begin rethinking her priorities. “To have this conversation with such a young child is very difficult,” Noel-Ney says.

Noel-Ney herself struggled for some time to make sense of the events of that day. More than 4,000 American Express employees were in Lower Manhattan the morning of Sept. 11, and 11 lost their lives. Eight more were hospitalized and dozens more lost family members, friends and loved ones. The American Express headquarters building also sustained considerable damage, forcing thousands of employees to work from interim locations, including Noel-Ney, who started working from her apartment. As part of American Express’ Philanthropy division, Noel-Ney’s job after the attacks was to coordinate the company’s response to the tragedy.

After Sept. 11, Noel-Ney called a counseling helpline American Express had set up for its employees. The person at the helpline emphasized that Noel-Ney needed to do what was best for her and Pierce. So when friends of hers living in Madison invited her to come out and stay with them, Noel-Ney accepted, viewing it as a safe haven of sorts. She had been to Madison before and enjoyed it. She thought it might be just what she and Pierce needed to overcome the lingering effects of Sept. 11. A friend set up an office for her to work out of in Madison and she and her young son made the journey. “Pierce and I got on a train and made a little trip of traveling from New York to Chicago. We stayed in Madison for 10 days at first and I saw a different kind of lifestyle here,” Noel-Ney says.

In New York, Noel-Ney was used to a fast-paced career filled with long hours and a hectic schedule. She rarely ever picked her son up from school before 7 p.m. and mornings were a race to get to the office. Even weekends were often filled with work, with Noel-Ney frequently working Sundays to stay on top of her workload. Pierce couldn’t go to and from school by himself, and Noel-Ney was even nervous to let him play in the hallway of their apartment without supervision.

In Madison everything was different. Noel-Ney had ample time in the evenings to spend with her family and her weekends were seldom spent at the office. Pierce rode a bus to and from school by himself and was free to ride his bike around the neighborhood and play with other kids outside. “One day I was just standing at the window watching Pierce play outside, and I started crying. It’s just a different way of life here,” Noel-Ney says. “That’s the appeal.”

Yet, while Noel-Ney’s personal life was gradually healing, her career at American Express was rapidly beginning to crumble. Noel-Ney’s managers became frustrated with how far she was from New York. Things finally peaked when, according to Noel-Ney, in a conference call one of the directors at American Express snapped at her, saying, “What the hell were you thinking to leave?”

“I just lost it. I said that we all have different priorities, but my priority is my son and to feel safe. I am working and doing all the things I was asked to do and how dare you yell at me for leaving,” she says. “But the whole situation made me think about what is really important in my life.”

Noel-Ney decided she wanted to stay in Madison and began looking for a new career. A friend put Noel-Ney in touch with Karen Crossley, the vice president of the University of Wisconsin Foundation in Madison. This meeting blossomed into numerous job interviews for Noel-Ney, who was initially hired by the UW School of Veterinary Medicine. When a position at the UW Foundation as a director of development for the College of Letters and Sciences opened, Noel-Ney applied for the job and got it.

Now the 42-year-old Madison resident works with UW alumni to reengage them with the university and raise money for a few of the College of Letters and Sciences schools and programs, including the School of Music, the physics department and the religious studies program. “It’s something I thought I would never do,” Noel-Ney says. “But it’s great to talk to people who love the university and who were shaped by what they learned from faculty members here. It’s a lot of fun, and I can’t believe I’m getting paid to talk to all of these great people about the school.”

It is this enthusiasm for her job that her co-workers find infectious. “She’s highly energetic, and she brings a great spirit to the job,” says Walt Keough, vice president of administration at the UW Foundation. Noel-Ney also brings a wealth of connections and an uncanny resourcefulness to the table. “She has brought to our organization so many interesting contacts from arts and philanthropic organizations in New York and she really enjoys reaching out to alumni,” says Anne Lucke, another director of development for the College of Letters and Science at the Foundation. “And because she has such interesting experiences, people really enjoy talking to her.”

And although Noel-Ney says she makes less money in Madison than she did in New York, her paychecks go a lot further here. “At first it was amazing to me that my son was here playing outside, we were living in this nice apartment and I had this really fun job.”

Noel-Ney says she is able to add this job onto the list of other interesting, dynamic positions she’s held at other organizations. In addition to working at American Express, she also worked as the assistant director for the Institute of African American Affairs at New York University and as the coordinator of cultural affairs and special programs at Philip Morris in New York. However, the difference with this job, Noel-Ney says, is the warmth and openness of her co-workers here that she never found anywhere else. “People have opened their doors, their hearts and have given me so much information,” she says. “Madison has a way of just being magical like that. It’s just been welcoming to me. I never would have believed an environment like this existed.”

Even her social life has been shaped by acts of kindness. The wife of a dean at the veterinary school welcomed her into in her social circle, introducing her to many people Noel-Ney now considers her good friends. Another friend in Madison, knowing how active Noel-Ney had been in the arts community in New York, arranged a luncheon for her to meet many of the women in Madison who are involved in the arts. And a year ago, Noel-Ney received an invitation from Lt. Gov. Barbara Lawton asking her to join the State Arts Board.

“Glenda brings extensive experience in arts philanthropy from her time in New York. I was very excited when I heard she had come to Madison,” Lawton says, adding that Noel-Ney’s youthfulness and unique arts perspective were reasons to name her to the board. “She has not disappointed. She’s very bright, articulate and has already made a tremendous contribution to the board.”

From her perspective, Noel-Ney says her work on the board is yet another example of the experiences, both personal and professional that Wisconsin has offered her. “There are opportunities here. You just have to be open and seeking.”

And perhaps one of the biggest rewards in moving to Madison was being closer to a man she considered a good friend, William Ney. Although they had met in New York and communicated frequently over the phone, it wasn’t until Sept. 11 that the two realized their feelings extended beyond friendship. “When everything happened with 9/11, that was our turning point. We realized our feelings were really deep and that life is too short,” Noel-Ney says. She and Ney married Sept. 25 of this year.

Noel-Ney, who was born in Trinidad and moved to Brooklyn when she was nine-years-old, only moved from the New York to attend Buffalo State University and live in Europe for several months. Now, she considers Madison her permanent home.

Although she misses certain things about New York, her tight-knit group of girlfriends, the vibrant arts community and the unbeatable shopping, she says the three to four times she has visited the city since leaving have left her feeling claustrophobic and ready to return to Madison. It’s not that New York has changed, she says – it’s that she has. She has gotten used to getting in her car and driving where she needs to go rather than getting on the subway or catching a cab. She now finds it a hassle to wade through the swarms of people covering nearly every street in New York. And, of course, the city is a constant, painful reminder of the traumatic event she will never forget. Her priorities and goals are simply not what they were three years ago, her career has taken a distant second to her family and friends. In Madison she has found a place that has allowed her to heal and is now affording her the space to grow.

Here she has a new family, a more relaxed lifestyle and a rewarding career. She says her job at the UW Foundation is challenging, requiring her to work with three different boards and travel occasionally. She says she has worked some late nights and visited the office occasionally on Sundays, but she is trying to keep her first priority her family. “It seems that her experience has honed her priorities in terms of family, quality of life and the kinds of trade-offs that have to be made,” Lucke says.

Still, Noel-Ney admits she has had to make sacrifices in her move. While Madison provides her with a sense of safety and, she says, fits the Midwest cliché of a quiet, peaceful place where people know their neighbors and are openly friendly, she left a lot behind in New York. She misses being able to walk out her front door and find herself in the middle of some of the nation’s best art institutions and exhibits. Yet, despite the stereotype that New Yorkers are somewhat aloof, Noel-Ney says she has a very strong network of friends in the city whose dedication and camaraderie can’t be beaten and she has gained more than she’s sacrificed. “When my friends come here, the first thing they say is, ‘I understand why you’re here,’” Noel-Ney says.

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