Thursday, October 1, 2026
A simple handwritten request at the bottom of a fourth-grade student’s letter — “Please write back” — stayed with Tom Brown, a former New York City firefighter who’s now a Baldwin fire commissioner, for 25 years.
On Sept. 17, the letter finally made its way back to the student who wrote it.
Brown visited Meadow Elementary School in Baldwin to talk with students about his experiences on Sept. 11, 2001. But he had another purpose as well: to surprise fifth-grade teacher Emily Clark, the former Emily Bascelli, who had written that letter to him 25 years ago, when she was in fourth grade.
“I’ve made it a point to try and read every letter I could from anywhere in the world we got it from,” Brown said.
Brown was a lieutenant at Ladder 18 in New York City in September 2001. He was promoted to captain in 2003, but said injuries eventually prevented him from continuing work.
In the aftermath of the attacks, Brown received letters from children and families across the country, thanking firefighters and offering their support. One group of letters came from Emily Goldberg’s fourth-grade class at East Broadway School in Levittown. Goldberg had no personal connection to Brown or his firehouse; her grandmother simply lived near the station, which led Goldberg to select it for the students’ letters.
As Brown read through them, one letter stood out.
It was from Bascelli, then a fourth grader. It had a colored American flag on the top half, and a note and drawn pink balloons on the bottom. It ended with a simple request: “P.S. Please write back!”
“No one else asked to be written back,” Brown recalled. “She was the only one who even said that, and something simple like that just took me for no reason. … It just kind of stuck with me.”
In the weeks after the attacks, Brown said, firefighters worked 24-hour shifts, and spent many of their days off attending funerals. After he received the students’ letters, he did something different on one of those days off: He went to East Broadway School to meet Goldberg and her class.
He arrived at the school unannounced, and spoke with the students about 9/11. Weeks later, he received a framed photograph of the class signed by the students, along with letters from their families.
This year, Brown rediscovered the letters in a box at his home in Baldwin. He contacted Goldberg and arranged to return to East Broadway on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, where he spoke to fourth-graders, teachers and administrators. During that visit, a faculty member mentioned that Bascelli, now Emily Clark, was a teacher at Meadow Elementary in Baldwin — where, in a coincidence that was nothing short of remarkable, Brown’s wife, Barbara, had worked for 25 years. She had left the school just months before Clark was hired.
Brown contacted Meadow Principal Yolanda Martin and asked if he could visit. Martin agreed, and kept the surprise from Clark.
“I knew we had to make it happen,” Martin said. “It was an opportunity to use this extraordinary connection to have a teachable moment for Emily’s class on the power of writing and showing how young people can make a difference.”
Clark initially thought Martin was stopping by her class to observe a literacy lesson on Sept 17. Then Brown walked in.
“As soon as I saw his face, I knew who he was because my friend who works at East Broadway had sent me all of these pictures of him speaking to her students on 9/11,” Clark said. “It was really just a special small-world coincidence.”
Seeing her childhood handwriting again made her emotional. Brown had also saved the letter from Clark’s parents, which thanked him for speaking with their daughter and helping her understand the events of 9/11.
“My parents were expressing their gratitude because I came home speaking about that assembly when I was in fourth grade,” Clark said. “That was really impactful, too.”
Just days before Brown’s visit, Clark had taught her own students a lesson about showing gratitude to first responders. On Sept. 11, she showed them a cover of an October 2001 issue of The New Yorker, depicting children dressed for Halloween as firefighters and police officers, titled “Local Heroes.” After discussing the importance of showing gratitude to first responders, Clark had her students write letters to them.
Clark plans to continue that tradition.
“I had them write letters to first responders, and now after what happened today, you better believe we’re going to keep it going,” she said. “I’m going to remember this forever.”
“It doesn’t take a lot to make people happy,” Brown said. “A simple little letter like this to someone you care about or love or wished them luck in their endeavors made a tremendous impact on my life. It only takes a little bit.”
