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Risk-Taking as Way of Life

We didn't want to live life in a cupboard," said Shannon Curry Green, describing her husband, Andrew. He had already had one brush with death, when, at 18, a pot of oil caught fire on his family's stove and exploded as he tried to carry it outside. He spent the summer in the hospital and emerged with physical scars and a breathtaking drive, a person who embraced risks "professionally, athletically and emotionally," his wife said.

He crammed all kinds of activity into his days, skiing and kayaking like an expert and playing the drums à la Led Zeppelin. He loved art, and was looking forward to seeing the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. His interests crisscrossed time and space. "A friend of ours summed it up," said Mrs. Curry Green, an artist who hopes to design a memorial to the trade center victims. "He is the person who could go from talking about a book that just came out to telling a knock-knock joke from sixth grade."

He was aboard American Airlines Flight 11, on his way back to Los Angeles, where he was director of business development for eLogic, after a day of meetings in Boston on Sept. 10. That night he had called his mother from his hotel and asked whether it was too late to run up to her house in Chelmsford, Mass., for a visit. Of course not, Pat Green told him. He arrived at 10:30, and the two of them sat up until 1 a.m., talking. "That was a gift," she said.

Profile published in THE NEW YORK TIMES on February 12, 2002.