Thomas P. Farrelly

Smiles and Personal Bests

The math teacher courted the nurse.

Before a school field trip, the teacher addressed a "permission slip" to the nurse's parents, who were deaf: Could she go as chaperone? On condition, he added, that she marry the teacher?

The math teacher proposed to the chaperone on top of the World Trade Center.

That was April 1978, when the twin towers were were young themselves. By Sept. 11, 2001, the math teacher, Thomas P. Farrelly, who was now a computer programmer at Accenture in the trade center, and his wife, Virginia, had four nearly grown children. The daughters ran on their college cross-country teams. The sons were Eagle Scouts. In August, Mr. Farrelly, 54, took his sons and fellow scouts, who called him Smiles, kayaking in Maine. "He always told us to keep smiling," said his oldest child, Erin, 22. "It was the way he approached things."

Ms. Farrelly suspects her father would have remained a math teacher had the salary allowed him to raise his large family. He was good at it. He had tutored his children, their cousins, his friends' children. "I think teaching was what he liked best," she said.

He coached cross-country, too, and attended the children's meets. Personal bests impressed him. "He always asked if we did a P.B.," Ms. Farrelly said.

Thomas P. Farrelly — the P is for Patrick — was born on St. Patrick's Day. His mother used to tell him the parade was for him. For a while, Erin Farrelly says, he believed it.