Harvard Graduate Dies in Sept. 11 Attack

Michael B. Packer ’76, an e-commerce entrepreneur who built harpsichords in his college years and maintained a lifelong love for the music of Bach and Liszt as he introduced a major Internet commerce project to the world’s largest brokerage house, died in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. He was 45.

Packer, who was a managing director at Merrill Lynch, usually worked in the firm’s offices in the World Financial Center. That complex, which is near the World Trade Center, was spared during the attacks. But on Sept. 11, Packer was delivering a keynote speech to an e-commerce conference on the 106th floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower.

Packer was a leading figure in the financial and technology worlds. At Merrill Lynch, he headed the firm’s major effort at online trading—enabling customers to do business with the investment giant directly over the Internet for the first time. In 1999, Institutional Investor, a prominent trade publication, named him one of the country’s top leaders in online finance.

Packer was an executive at Simon & Schuster in 1999 when officials at Merrill Lynch tapped him to lead a major new Web-based initiative called “Direct Markets.” Merrill Lynch had widely been seen as lagging behind in Internet commerce, and Packer’s task was to design a new interface that would make online trading secure and easy. But since competitors had used the technology for years, he had to help Merrill Lynch catch up.

“He loved when people say things can’t be done. That’s when Michael got interested,” said his wife, Rekha D. Packer ’76. “Michael took it as a challenge.”

Because Merrill Lynch had no experience in Internet technology, Packer hired small start-up firms to create the Web applications that powered the new online trading system.

Science and technology were Packer’s areas of expertise from his undergraduate career. He concentrated in applied sciences and engineering at the College, graduating magna cum laude.

It was also as an undergraduate that Michael met his future wife. They found each other accidentally, when Rekha came to his room looking for his roommate and instead met Michael.

Though he studied engineering and she studied English, the two found common passion in the monumentally long operas of Richard Wagner.

“It was love at first sight,” his wife said. “I loved opera and he didn’t mind sitting for hours listening to it.”

The two complemented each other in their musical tastes. His record collection had plenty of early music, such as Vivaldi and Bach. But she loved Beethoven and Chopin and other composers of the Romantic era.

“We put our collections together,” Rekha said.

Under his parents’ influence, Packer developed an early inclination for music. As a child, he once played the piano for legendary cellist Pablo Casals. He had learned how to build harpsichords as a prep school student at Phillips Exeter Academy, and as an undergraduate, he built and tuned harpsichords for the music department.

He also enjoyed woodworking as a hobby and spent the summer after graduation working in the machine shop in the basement of the Science Center.

As Currier House residents, Michael and Rekha Packer grew close to the Currier music community—an illustrious group that included Yo-Yo Ma ’76. They recently met up with Ma in June at the 25th reunion for the Class of 1976.

Though in his academic and professional life Packer specialized in highly technical subjects—such as his thesis on fluid dynamics—he felt at ease in the humanities and had a knack for explaining his own work at a layman’s level, said Ronald M. Soiefer ’75, a college friend.

“He roamed at will in my areas of expertise,” he said. “And yet the rest of us could step gingerly at best in his areas.”

This past summer, Packer and his wife took their children on a trip sponsored by the Harvard Alumni Association. Along with graduate students and other Harvard families, they listened to lectures on the Illiad and the Odyssey as they toured the Aegean Sea.

He also organized popular birthday parties for his two children—once taking young guests to sit in the cockpit of a private plane, another time bringing a bulldozer to his neighborhood so the guests could ride along as it was driven up and down the driveway.

“Some people have magicians come,” Soiefer said. “[But] they had a science teacher come, show them different scientific things, how fluids would change colors, turn to gases, how magnetism worked.”

Family and friends held a memorial service for Packer in Scarsdale, New York, where he and his wife had gone in recent years to listen to choral music. A second memorial at a Merrill Lynch office in New Jersey brought out about 600 people.

Packer is survived by his wife, Rekha, and his two children, Sarita and Jonathan.