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December 21, 2009

After 60 years of writing, pen pals finally meet

By JESSE DAVIS

For two pen pals, the world just got a little smaller.

While a young child attending Yellow Creek Mennonite Church, Goshen resident Lucille Jackson, then 11 or 12 years old, picked a name out of the Words of Cheer Sunday school newsletter and began a relationship on paper with Canadian Verda Cook of Kitchener, Ontario. The pair wrote back and forth, talking about school, family and life in general. More than 60 years later, the two have finally met face to face.

“When our son and family moved to Chicago three years ago, I thought of contacting Lucille and asking if we could meet,” Cook said. “However, if we were not flying in to Chicago, our driving schedule did not allow for a side trip. After Lucille’s husband’s death and my husband having emergency triple-bypass surgery, I felt life was too short to say ‘next time we go to Chicago I’ll call Lucille.’”

Jackson’s interest was also piqued by the idea.

“I thought it was great,” Jackson said. “You always wonder what they look like, you know, and sound like. I thought it was a lovely idea.”

Over the following days, the two corresponded about meeting, deciding the best spot would be Das Dutchman Essenhaus. Cook sent Jackson an e-mail with a picture of her and her husband and a note on what they would be wearing so she could recognize them.

“They came through the door and they were just kind of standing there and I said ‘well hello there,’ and she turned around and I told her who I was and we gave each other a big hug,” Jackson said.

“I felt very welcome by the way Lucille greeted me,” Cook said. “This was not as though we had been out of touch for many years and then rediscovered each other. It was like meeting the next-door neighbor for coffee, except that I had never seen this next-door neighbor.”

She was exuberant about the hour the two spent together at the restaurant, chatting while enjoying coffee and dessert.

“It was a wonderful experience,” Cook said. “Now I can put a face to a name. The correspondence will be much more meaningful and feel much more personal from now on.”

After saying their goodbyes, the Cooks parted ways with Jackson and her friend and fellow Goshen resident Betty Leinbach — who had gone along with Jackson — and headed home.

For Jackson, the years-long relationship, even though they only just met, has meant much to her.

“It’s fantastic,” Jackson said. “I just never dreamt it would go on so long. It’s almost like having another sister. If I’d have known it would last so long I would have saved the letters and pictures and everything, but I’m not a pack rat.”

Neither Jackson nor Cook were the other’s only pen pal. In fact, Jackson said that of Cook’s pen pals, she was the last one Cook hadn’t met in person. Jackson’s other pen pals have included a nurse who works at Riley Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis who she met while her son was being treated for bone cancer in the late 1970s.

“I also wrote to one in France, but that fizzled out after about a year and a half or so, which is what most of them do eventually, but for some reason this one (with Cook) kept on going,” Jackson said.

Nowadays Jackson isn’t so busy writing letters.

“I send a lot of cards,” Jackson said. “I don’t write a lot anymore. I go to write a letter and I sit there for two hours trying to figure out what to say on the page. That’s why it’s nice with the computer now, you can write just a little bit.”



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