Gary Bird: He Needed the
Horizon
He
was a corporate cowboy. Gary Bird worked in risk
management, but his great joy was riding horses. He was
practically born in the saddle. His mother was riding
horses when she was eight months pregnant with him, until
her doctor stopped her.
He lived in Tempe, Ariz., where he kept three quarter
horses. He rode as often as he could, including multiday
trail rides. His wife, Donna Killoughey Bird, and two
children, Amanda, 15, and Andrew, 13, rode, too, but Mr.
Bird was the avid one.
If he wasn't surrounded by open spaces, he would get
edgy. In 1984, he was in New York for four days to attend
a conference. By the fourth day, he told his wife, "I'm
really claustrophobic here, because I can't see the
horizon." As she put it, "It was a case of `don't fence
me in.'"
Mr. Bird, 51, took last summer off and spent a good
part of it training a new filly named Dani. On Sept. 7,
he rode the filly with a saddle for the first time. On
Sept. 10, he began a new job as senior vice president at
Marsh & McLennan. He was to work out of Phoenix, but
spent the first two days in New York for meetings. On
Sept. 11, he had a three-hour meeting starting at 8:15
a.m. at the Marsh offices in the World Trade Center. He
told his wife he'd be home in Tempe by 8 p.m. for
dinner.
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