'PEOPLE' LOVES PENPALS

By Pete Weatherby

Under the headline 'Red Letter Day', People Magazine featured a story last August about two pen friends who finally met in person after being divided by an ocean for 37 years. It all started in 1964, when a 10-year-old Girl Scout named Caren Gottesman from Jericho, N.Y., was trying to earn her Girl Scout badge. Her assignment was to write to an overseas pen pal in Essex, England, just outside London, whose name was Carol Clarke - also 10 years old. So Caren wrote her first letter to Carol with the basics about herself - her name, age, where she lived, and problems she was having with certain subjects in school. Carol immediately replied, telling her new pen pal the same kind of things.

Their letters continued twice a month, and their friendship grew deeper as they shared their teenage joys and heartbreaks of school and boyfriends. The years went by...both married, had careers and family. They exchanged photos, sometimes talked on the phone, and confided in each other in a way they probably never would have if they'd been living closer. Being an ocean apart, they felt secure in their privacy.

In 1980, Carol Clarke, a receptionist, went through a divorce and faced the job of raising four children. She shared the problems, the joys, the disappointments of this new turn in life's road with Caren, as they had always shared everything else in their lives. They had grown up together as girls and women, going through the good times and the bad, and the bond between them was unbreakable.

It was Caren who had the brainstorm in 2001 as she was planning her 25th wedding anniversary. She wanted to meet Carol...she would go to London! So last August, Carol Clarke waited in a London hotel room, peering through the window on a drizzly morning for the van she knew her best friend in the world would be in. And there she was...Caren Gottesman stepped out of the van onto the curb, weary after the long flight, and Carol knew her immediately from her photograph. She raced downstairs and out into the street, and the two women hugged amid tears of joy. "It's you," was all Carol could manage to say. She didn't need to say anything else, not after 37 years.

In Carol's home in Essex, they talked endlessly, swapping stories and exchanging gifts. Gottesman gave her friend a laptop and a gold charm bracelet inscribed with the words "37 years of memories." She received in turn from Carol a fruit-and-flower basket and a gold earring and necklace set. But it wasn't the gifts that meant the most to them...it was meeting each other at last, hugging, laughing, crying. Neither one could ever remember the other NOT being a part of their lives through the mail for all those 37 years.