Flo Jo

Florence Jones and her shoes

Photo Credit:  National September 11, 2001 Museum

At 9:03 am on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, the murderous cowards who had hijacked American Airlines Flight 175 shortly after its departure earlier that morning from Boston's Logan Airport, flew the jet into and through the south face of the South Tower of the World Trade Center.  The jet hit the building between its 77th and 85th floors.  

Florence Jones worked in the South Tower.  She worked on the 77th floor.  She was in her office when American Airlines Flight 11 - hijacked earlier that morning after its departure from Logan Airport - was flown like a missile into the north side of the North Tower at 8:46 am, exploding into the building between its 93rd and 99th floors.  She went upstairs to the 78th floor to tell colleagues there that they should begin to evacuate.  She then took the escalator back down to the 77th floor to, herself, evacuate the building.  Shortly after she returned to the 77th floor, Flight 175 hit the South Tower, killing her colleagues on the 78th floor to whom she had just spoken.    

She and a small group of colleagues from the 77th floor banded together and started the desperate, treacherous descent down a smoke-filled stairwell, holding one another's hand and looking out for one another.  Florence was still wearing the dress shoes she had work that day for work.  Someone suggested to her that she might be safer without her shoes on - given that they had not been designed for a 77 floor descent.  Florence agreed.  She took them off and carried them the rest of the journey down.  Of the final twenty-five people to emerge from the South Tower on September 11, Florence Jones was number eighteen.    

Her shoes, which thereafter sat in a box under her bed, are now on display in the National September 11 Museum in Lower Manhattan.   In 2021, right around the 20th anniversary of the attacks, Florence Jones received a telephone call from twenty-year-old Jake Campbell, whose mother Jill had worked with Florence and who had brought then-baby Jake to the office back in 2001.  Jill Maurer Campbell had been at work that morning - on the 78th floor of the South Tower - and was one of the colleagues to whom Florence Jones had spoken that morning after the North Tower had been hit regarding evacuating their office, which tragically they never had the chance to do.  

Jill Maurer Campbell died on that terrible Tuesday morning.  When he telephoned Florence Jones in 2021 to ask her about his mother, she was happy to oblige his request.  She told Jake that the happiest she had ever seen his mother was when she brought him into the office.  She told Jake of Jill's warmth, her smile, and her overall goodness.   

-AK