Meadow Elementary School Teacher, Emily Clark, Covered in the Baldwin Herald

Excerpt from article:

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.

n 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.

Read the full article online in the Baldwin Herald>>