"The Joy of Penpalling"

By Sandra Lee Smith, California

Pen pals, we know, come in all shapes and sizes; and best of all, can be all ages! One of the beautiful things about having pen pals is that you can get to know someone perhaps a great deal older (or younger) than yourself, someone who likes some of the same things you do and who you might never otherwise get to know.

My first penpal, when I was about ten years old, was a distant cousin who lived in Michigan. My family visited hers one summer and since Pat was close in age to me; We exchanged addresses and began writing our first letters.

Then in high school, a teacher asked if any of us would like to have a Vietnamese penpal. My new pen pal’s family was political refugees from Vietnam; and mind you, this was in the 1950s. She attended a Catholic girl’s school in New York, run by the same order of nuns who taught at my high school. Ann Nam Hai andI corresponded until after graduation. I often wonder what happened to her after that; I lost track of many people after getting married and moving to California in 1961.

The move provided many new people to correspond with; my parents, childhood girlfriends, siblings, and former classmates. But it wasn’t the same as having a penpal.

In my early 20s, the floodgates for penpalling was opened to me with the discovery of a magazine called Women’s Circle, found on a rack in a Safeway supermarket. Some of you may remember those Tower Press magazines; Women’ Circle, Women’s Household and Women’ Comfort.

The Tower Press gimmick, if you want to call it that was to publish letters and, if you included it, photographs. You could write something about yourself, your family, your hobbies and interests; and request penpals. And this is how I found many of the penpals I still have, 40-something years later.

One of the first was my penpal Betsy, who also collected cookbooks (the first letter I wrote to Women’s Circle was a request for cookbooks. I wanted to start a collection. At the time I just knew I was interested in club-and-church cookbooks, little guessing how vast my own collection would become). Betsy collected cookbooks and helped me get my collection started.

When my children and I went to Ohio for summer vacations, Betsy and her husband drove south from their home in Michigan to take my children and me for a week’s vacation at their home. We spent a glorious week searching for cookbooks at flea markets (wherefundraiser cookbooks could often be found, back then, for as little as ten cents; at the end of the summer, I had to ship boxes of books home). A few years later, Betsy and her husband, along with their children, would pay us a visit in California.Other penpals came into my life.

The same year, 1965, I became acquainted with Eileen, who lives in Australia. Now there’s an interesting story about my introduction to Eileen and her family. I had actuallywritten a letter to another woman in Australia, someonenamed Margaret, whose letter was published in Women’s Circle, requesting penpals. Margaret received such a flood of letters that she didn’t know quite what to do; so she took stacks of them to her tennis club, spread them out on a table, and invitedanyone interested in “An American pen friend” to helpthemselves.

Eileen found my letter and was captivated because we both had husbands named Jim and sons named Steve. That initiated a friendship that has lasted 41 years, surviving the death of Eileen’s son Steve, a separation from her husband (they were eventually reunited and are now living in a retirement village inWestern Australia) and my own marriage breakup, along with all the pathos and drama of raising children; her two daughters,my four sons.

Eileen and her husband love to travel; in 1980 they traveled all over Europe in a little Volkswagen bus; then they crossed the Atlantic and visited us where, at the time, we were living inFlorida. They wanted to go; round the USA but discovered that renting a camper or trailer of some kind would be exorbitant. I asked my husband “Can’t we lend them our camper?” And he agreed (the two Jims hit it off as soon as we met at Miami Airport!). So, they traveled all around the USA, eventually making their way to Los Angeles where they met my best friend Rosalia and her husband. When they returned to Florida, we spent two weeks together, mostly sightseeing, but also cooking up many delicious meals and introducing them to a lot of American foods.

It was also not long after we moved to Florida that I realized I was lonely for the friendships I had forged in California; and so I wrote another letter to Women’s Circle, explaining that I had a new home, would like new friends, and was interested in corresponding with anyone who, like me, thought about andplanned all year long for Christmas.

Two of the letters I received were from women closer to my mother’s age than mine but they loved Christmas! One lives inOhio, the other in Louisiana. And we continue correspondingtoday.

One of my favorite friendships blossomed with meeting, via the Inky Trail, a woman close to my own age, who lives in Oklahoma. I think we became acquainted through one of those friendship booklets that used to circulate years ago.

Does anyone remember those? You would staple together about a dozen small pieces of paper (about the size of small post-its, which had not yet been invented) and on the front write“Friendship book for.....”; and include the name & address of a friend or penpal. On the back you pasted on one of your own address labels and requested that the person filling the last page “send it home” to the person for whom it was intended. Sometimes you dressed it up with a little floral sticker or something cute. Then you’d send it to one of your other penpalswho would send it to someone else;and so on.

Well, Penny and I began corresponding with each other; andin 1971 when my husband, four children, and I drove across country to visit relatives in Ohio; we stopped off in Oklahoma to meet Penny and her husband and children. We spent the night with them and next day after a sumptuous breakfast, she sent us on our way with a big bag of her special chocolate chip cookies.

When we arrived at my parents home in Cincinnati, my dad kept saying “Now where did you say you met these people in Oklahoma?” (Penpals were a foreign concept to dad!).

Magazines such as Women’s Circle and Women’s Household have disappeared (although the Home Cooking magazine, I discovered, is still being published). Possibly the advent of computers and email led to their demise. Fortunately, however, we have Inky Trail News to make up for other penpal magazines so that we can still forge friendships with men and women throughout the world.

And if you do a search on search engines such asGoogle.com, (for those of us with computers), you canfind a wealth of information, such as organizationsthroughout the world dedicated to bringing people together.

I would have never learned so much about Australiaif not for my Aussie penpal. Over the decades they have traveled throughout the world and all around Australia and Eileen always writes lovely descriptive details of their experiences; in less than six months they will be going to China, so I will receive letters telling me about their experiences in that country.

Another fairly new penpal is Eve, who is from England but, along with her husband, now living in Australia. Eve recently traveled to Singapore and Vietnam and I was thrilled with her letters describing the country, people, and the food they tasted.

If I could travel anywhere in the world, Australia would surely be my first choice. After all, we have friends there!