New chapter
Lifelong pen pals meet 47 years after exchanging first letters
Almost half a century after becoming pen pals with an American farm girl, a Cape Breton woman has finally met her lifelong friend.
Linda (Swann) Pattengale, who grew up in Bras d’Or and now resides in Point Aconi, welcomed Patti Thompson, formerly of Wisconsin but now living in Tennessee, to her home on Wednesday afternoon in an encounter that both women described as “overwhelming”.
“I’m still numb,” said Linda, an hour or so after meeting for the first time in person.
“I never thought for a million years that this would actually happen — this is so awesome.”
Their relationship began 47 years ago, when then 11-yearold Linda responded to an ad for pen pals in the back of a craft magazine and ended up corresponding with the ginger-haired Patti, who was two years her junior.
“This was the early 1970s so there weren’t any cellphones or Facebook or online messaging, so we did it the old-fashioned way — we wrote letters,” she said, adding that it usually took one week for a letter to travel between Cape Breton and Wisconsin.
“I remember how exciting it was to receive a letter, especially one from far away and then I’d head to my bedroom to write back and get it sent the next day — this went on for a long time and we’d talk about our likes and dislikes, our routines, our families and about things we’d like to do when we got older.”
And, as they grew older, the letter writing would, from time to time, taper off as life threw new challenges in both their directions.
“There was a time when I was moving around quite a bit and the pen pal thing lapsed, but we always found each other again,” said Patti, who got married, had children and now lives in Knoxville, Tenn.
Although both women said they always wanted to meet in person, the seeds for a face-toface encounter were not sown until Patti began a new career as a flight attendant about seven years ago.
“After I started working for the airline I began to travel with my mother and my sisters — each year we go somewhere different and then it transpired that we could make a trip to this part of Canada, tour around a bit and meet Linda,” she said.
So, with plans finally made and the date fast approaching, both Linda and Patti looked forward to the big day.
For Linda, preparations included stocking the kitchen with plenty of fresh lobster and a cooler full of adult beverages. But she had plenty of help as sisters Delores and Rita popped by to help out. Even husband Floyd and daughter Ashley managed to make it home after a long day of lobster fishing prior to the arrival of their special guest.
And, while Linda nervously awaited her arrival, that special guest was making her way from Baddeck where she had spent the night with her mother Nancy and sisters Joan and Sandy.
“This is wonderful — it’s so great to see her so happy and glowing, she was really excited and got even more excited the closer we got,” said Sandy, 16 years junior to her sister and now living in San Francisco.
Patti’s mother was also beaming as the special occasion played out at the Pattengale home on Point Aconi Road, where the pen pals exchanged gifts and caught up on the latest news in their lives.
“I encouraged her to have pen pals when she was a little girl and I remember how excited she was to have a friend all the way up here in Canada,” said the proud mom, who claimed to have done her share of the driving from Wisconsin to Nova Scotia.
“Of course, back in those days people wrote letters, so it was the only real way to communicate.”
Later, as some rare sunshine hit the back deck, the two families continued to mingle, swapping stories and laughing together as if they had known each other for years — which in some ways they did, at least when it came to the relationship between the lifelong pen pals.
Later still, Linda’s son Jason stopped by to meet the visitors before taking them for a drive to the local fishing wharf and to the nearby Point Aconi power plant. And then it was back to the house for more food, drink and merriment.
For the record, pen pal activities still exist, although the advent of social media and instant messaging has rendered the written letter somewhat obsolete.
But wait! Both Linda and Patti said they still use the now old-fashioned “snail mail.”
“There’s just something special about getting something personal in the mail,” said Linda, with a smile and a glint in her eye.