09/11/2026
"Well-rounded is too pale a term for Maile Rachel Hale," began her official New York Times obituary, written twenty-five years ago by a Williams-Mystic alum journalist. "Her heart was in dancing: ballet and, later, modern. She was a chemistry major in college. And at 26, she was the chief operating officer and vice president of Boston Investor Services, overseeing the management of billions of dollars."
On Sept. 11, 2001, Maile was in New York for a conference, beginning that morning with a breakfast at Windows on the World, and died in the terrorist attacks.
Maile was a Williams-Mystic student in the fall of 1995, a shy Wesleyan chemistry major from Hawaii with a love of chocolate and dance. With her class, she traveled offshore on Atlantic waters, ventured to the rapidly disappearing island of Nantucket (where she participated in the WM Student Erosion Index, an unofficial measurement of Nantucket's shifting shores) and was in the second WM group to travel cross-country on a field seminar to California.
Today, a bench by the river at Mystic Seaport Museum honors her, and the thousands of other 9/11 victims, with a plaque reading, "We shall never forget the beauty of life and those lost and injured on that day."
