VETERAN REUNITES WITH WAR PEN PALS
Ron Cavello worked in Lansdale post office for 36 years; student who wrote letters now works at Hilltown post office
PLYMOUTH » In an era of emailing and texting, the art of letter writing can seem quaintly archaic.
But a Vietnam veteran and some Catholic school students once united by dispatches through the U.S. Postal Service have learned that their exchanges of heartfelt feelings so long ago have brought them together in a way that modern technology could probably not duplicate, even if it had been available in 1969.
Patricia Gallagher — known as Miss Mohan to her students back then — was a teacher at St. Paul’s Catholic School in East Norriton when she assigned her second, third and fourth grade classes to write letters to Ron Cavello and other soldiers while they were stationed in Vietnam.
“In The Times Herald back then they printed the names and addresses of servicemen and if you wanted to write to them you could. Patricia Gallagher got the names from the paper for the kids to write to. I answered them and I saved the letters they sent me,” said Cavello, a Norristown native and U.S. Army veteran now living in Plymouth Meeting. “The kids would tell me, ‘I have a sister, I have a dog.’ And when I’d write back I’d say in my letter, ‘Thank you for
writing. How is your family, how’s the dog?’ I even got letters from the parents of the little kids who’d say my son or daughter waited by the mailbox for your letter. And now, after 50-plus years Patricia is finding some of those kids again.
Cavello, a retired Post Office employee who worked at the Lansdale branch for 36 years, got to reunite with Gallagher and the student who started the process, Mary Ann (Stemporosky) Campo, at his home for Veterans Day this year.
You could call it a strange stretch of fate, but Campo, who happens to work for the Hilltown branch of the Post Office, noticed Cavello’s name in the employee directory a few years ago.
“She thought that I might be the same Ron Cavello that she corresponded with, five decades ago. She wrote a letter and gave it to my supervisor who gave it to me,” Cavello said. “Then I went to the post office where she worked, and met Mary Ann in person, about three years ago. And that is how I found Patricia Gallagher. Mary Ann sent me her number with a greeting card for Veterans Day.”
Cavello still regrets that he didn’t attend the class Halloween party that Gallagher hosted at her parents’ home in King of Prussia after he came home from Vietnam in 1970.
“I feel so bad (that) I never showed up. My mother was so mad at me: ‘Ronnie, you are letting those little kids down. They are counting on you.’ I knew that was true, but I was scared. I didn’t know how I would act, or what I would say to them. I got drafted; I didn’t volunteer but my country called me,” Cavello said. “Right before my graduation from Bishop Kenrick in June of 1967, I got a notice to report to 401 North Broad. They gave me my draft card. There wasn’t a lottery yet. You just got drafted. It was a turbulent time in the 60’s. I went to Fort Bragg for boot camp, then on to Travis Air Force Base. I left for Vietnam on Memorial Day, 1969 and shipped overseas. I thought, ‘Geez, what is going on here?’ On my 21st birthday, I was laying on a rice paddy.”
Cavello said he always sympathized with the soldiers who never received any mail in Vietnam.
“So many guys did not get any mail. I told them that they could write to my kids from Saint Paul’s School. I assured them that the little kids would write back,” he said. “Especially this guy from Utah. He never got mail. I said to my Platoon Sergeant that when I finish reading the letters, that I was I going to pass them along to the other fellows. What those kids did for me back in 1969, that little gesture, I never forgot them. I still have their letters in my attic. When I came home, my parents had yellow ribbons on the trees outside of my house on Sterigere Street. My dad had flags made that said, ‘ Welcome Home, Ronnie.’ Nixon was sending people home but I missed that because I was five days short of my time in the service. Instead of coming back home, I had to stay in the service for five more months.”
Campo noted that the timing for the reunion with Cavello and Gallagher around Veterans Day couldn’t have been more perfect.
“That was a nice reunion,” she said. “I found Ron out of the blue, about four years ago and then he came to see me at the post office once, which was very nice. I found Patricia this year on Facebook and she said ‘yes, she had started that (letter writing) program when she was a young teacher.’ She taught fourth grade at that time, and I was in second grade, but we all knew each other and our class was writing letters too. She said she had never met any of these soldiers that we all wrote to.”
Campo doesn’t remember how many letters she wrote to Cavello.
“I do remember him writing back, telling me to stay in school and writing details about what life was like over there. Being in second grade I didn’t really understand it. My uncle Ron was also over in Vietnam, so it was easy to remember his name,” Campo said. “And I wondered over the years how he was doing. I saved the letters but my parents’ home got flooded so I don’t think I have them anymore, but I remember his handwriting, and I remember that they could send their mail for free, where we had to put stamps on ours.”
After that initial meeting, Campo had stayed in touch with Cavello.
“I sent him a card or letter at least once a year, on Memorial Day or Veterans Day, and this year I sent him Patricia’s phone number and told him she’d love to hear from you. She’s never heard from any of the soldiers we wrote to. He must have called her the same day,” she said. “When we met up at his house he did say that Vietnam wasn’t a very popular war, so my feeling is that when they came back they weren’t making a big deal about it, saying they were heroes. Maybe it was the opposite, I don’t know.”
His experience receiving letters from those young strangers resonated with Cavello in many ways years later, he noted.
“I met my wife in 1973, and we got married in 1978. We have two great kids, and a grandchild. I told my kids during the first Desert Storm War that they should take the time to write to soldiers. They were in high school then and I knew what their letters would do for a soldier’s state of being,” he said.
Going through the letters with Cavello, Campo said she was impressed by the handwriting styles evolving through the grade levels.
“In second grade we were just starting to write, and the letters were printed. But with the third graders you could see they were starting to write cursive, and with the fourth graders the cursive was much improved. My dad also worked for the Post Office, so letter writing was a big thing for us.”
Campo said that communicating with service members through the Post Office is not as obsolete as many might think.
“Since I work for the Post Office, there are a lot of people and organizations who still send CARE packages to service members,” she said. “And they include notes of encouragement. They have special cards out now for service members that come out around Memorial Day and Veterans Day. They’ll say things like, ‘We’ll never want for heroes because of people like you,’ with patriotic pictures and things like that.”
For Gallagher, meeting Cavello after 50-plus years was the kind of experience any teacher would relish.
“It was such an exhilarating experience to meet Ronnie and Mary Ann, standing on Ron’s porch in the pouring rain on Veterans Day,” Gallagher said by phone. “I had never met this man or anything. All I knew was that as a 19-year-old teacher at St. Paul’s The Times Herald would list all these soldiers that you could correspond with.”
She shared the contents of a few letters, starting with Cavello’s response to her after receiving the students’ letters.
“‘May 30, 1970. I got your letters today and the kids made me feel like a million bucks. I wish I could get your class something to show my appreciation.’ He said he ripped the company patches off of his shirt. ‘I am enclosing one for the third grade and one for the fourth. Could you pin them up on the bulletin board? It’s the best I can do. For all of us here in the ‘Nam, thank you for thinking of us.’ “
A soldier from King of Prussia, wrote ‘I’m not the soldier the kids have in mind, but I do pull guard duty all night. It gets depressing.’”
Another wrote, ‘Each of us as Americans have jobs to do, no matter how old you are or where you are. Those letters from the kids showed me that we really do have little Americans back home that care. I have a 3-month-old daughter back home that I’ve only seen in pictures.”
Gallagher recalled that the St. Paul students collected nonperishable food for the soldiers. She contacted the local military office about the drive and was surprised to hear back from them.
“I think morale was low and somehow my letter got to the defense center in Philadelphia and I got a reply that said a Brigadier General would be coming to our school to pick up the cans,” she recalled. “I remember the sisters had them clear the auditorium, and got a sheet cake, set up the auditorium for the fourth, fifth and sixth grades, and in comes what they called an entourage, two black limos, soldiers wearing white gloves and carrying flags in formation and they were having this ceremony with this Brigadier General walking into our school. They gave us this certificate, and all the cans and cookie tins were taken away. I don’t know if they actually sent them to Vietnam. I know the things we sent to individual soldiers were sent.”
Since meeting Campo and Cavello, Gallagher has reached out to some of the other St. Paul students on Facebook
“I only taught at St. Paul for two years, then went to Villanova to teach and never gave any of this another thought ‘til I heard from Mary Ann and Ron this year,” she said, adding that a full St. Paul reunion may be in the works at some point.
“When the pandemic is all over, there will be something. We don’t know what it will be, but there will be something,” she said.