How One Unexpected Phone Call Nearly 30 Years Ago Led Billy Joel to Visit Boy Dying of Cancer

When he was a student in elementary school in the early ’90s, Adam Platzner spent countless days in the schoolyard talking about music with his friend, Ben Fogel, who was obsessed with one pop culture icon in particular — “Piano Man” singer, Billy Joel.

“He was fascinated with Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley and their relationship and his music,” Platzner, now 39, tells PEOPLE of his friend, who he met at a private school in Connecticut around 1992. “We were so young and little and we would just be covered in orange from eating Doritos all through the break, and talking about all this nonsense. He just had a lot of amazing energy and was a really great, positive kid that stood out.”

The duo, who were about 10 years old when they struck up their friendship, spent the year bonding over snacks and chats on the playground, and when summer break came to an end, Platzner looked forward to the time he’d spend hanging out with Ben in the new school year.

But when the day came, Ben was nowhere to be found.

“We both kind of started school that year and then hung out, became friends, and then the following year, he didn’t come back,” Platzner recalls. “He always had such a presence, so it was noticeable that he wasn’t there. I was looking forward to our time hanging out at recess. But he just wasn’t there.”

When Platzner later asked school administrators about where Ben had been, he’d discover his friend had been diagnosed with leukemia.

“It was heartbreaking. It was sad. I wanted to immediately reach out to his family and I didn’t know, being young, how to do that and what was going on,” Platzner, who now lives in New York, recalls. “I wanted to do something about it. I wanted him to get well, but I wasn’t a doctor, I was a child.”

Because he had just been elected to the school’s student council, Platzner felt compelled to do something that would bring a smile to his friend. Yet, when the council brainstormed ideas, like baking cupcakes or videotaping personalized messages for Ben, Platzner felt it wasn’t enough.

“I think that the first instinct that anyone has when someone is really sick is to help, to be helpful,” he says. “You don’t know how to cure cancer. It was really like the first time I’d ever had to deal with something like that in my life, someone so close to me being so sick. It was really impactful and I wanted to do something really big for him.”

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Thinking back to the many conversations he had with his friend, Platzner came up with what he thought was the perfect idea — why not have Billy Joel visit Ben?

While the council laughed at the idea, Platzner asked for permission to use a school phone, walked to a nearby conference room on his own, and dialed 411, a free directory assistance service that was popular before the rise of the Internet and smartphones.

When an operator answered, Platzner asked to be connected to the Make-a-Wish Foundation.

“I told them, ‘Hey, I need Billy Joel to come over to my friend’s house, he’s really sick,’ ” Platzner says, laughing at the idea of a kid making the request. “They transferred me around to a bunch of different people and I kept telling the story over and over again. They took notes and they said they would get back to me, so I left the school’s phone number.”

A few weeks later, Platzner was called to the headmaster’s office, where he was told that the foundation called back with news that Billy Joel had agreed to the visit. All thanks to a phone call, what everyone else had considered a longshot was about to become reality.

Not long after that call, Joel made the trip to Connecticut and spent a day with Ben, playing the piano with him and even gifting him a harmonica. One of the lasting mementos from that special day is a picture of Joel flashing a big smile next to a beaming Ben.

“Billy went up without any entourage, just came alone, drove himself, and was never in the press, doesn’t talk about it,” Platzner says. “That’s a credit to him.”

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In December 1994, nearly two years after his visit with Joel, Ben passed away. Platzner — who, today, serves as a co-founder to a mobile media technology company — still thinks of his friend to this day.

“I love Ben and he taught me so much. He taught me a lot just by his example and his enthusiasm,” Platzner says. “When you’re a kid, you have these experiences that really shape your ideology, how you approach things. You have people that impact you and Ben was a really special guy that made a huge impact on me.”

Of course, it was Ben’s own contagious passion and energy that led Platzner to believe he could somehow bring one of the biggest rock stars on the planet to their tiny town in Connecticut.

“I think that Ben was a dreamer, that he very much was excited about life and growing, and he very much embraced the idea that you can do anything,” he adds. “As kids, we would talk about all sorts of crazy things that you can achieve. So in that spirit, in the spirit of Ben Fogel, that is what continues to inspire me today. If you can dream it, it can happen.”