Eutawville, S.C.
When I was a kid in India, without tv for entertainment, no telephones and only half an hour of English music on the radio on Sunday night, my friends and I competed in soliciting pen pals from far and wide. I have no recollection of what prompted this, but I sent an ad to the Winnipeg Free Press promising to correspond with anyone who would write me by Airmail.
The postman's arrival was a big deal and everyone gathered round when I got an envelope from Canada. The only person responding to my ad was a ninety year old gentleman by the name of Alfred Stone who wrote from the Wentworth Lodge Retirement Home in Dundas, Ontario.
He rambled on for pages in blue ink handwritten letters on thin paper sent by Airmail as requested. He thought I had nerve insisting on the extra postage but surface mail took 4 - 6 months to arrive. If I was to have a senior citizen as a pen pal, Mr. Stone was the right one. He had just started violin lessons and was rehearsing for a performance. He had recently taken up woodworking and was making an bowl made of intricate inlaid pieces.
Mr. Stone knew exactly the right trick to keep me writing back. In each envelope he sent, he included a crisp two dollar Canadian bill. Gasp! Real pretty foreign money! He signed the letter, which I have to this day, "You can I am sure, use this."
You betcha! I kept my fortune in a worn envelope with tiny ticked pencil marks for each addition, translating it into Rupees and recalculating it endlessly according to the current exchange rate. I was the sister with MONEY.
We went to see Mr. Stone. When my family returned to Canada for a visit we drove to meet him. We walked down to the community room where he played us a tune on the piano and showed me the ribbon he won at the fair for his hand carved wooden bowl. He was a good catch.
9 comments:
What an amazing man Mr. Stone was! Imagine starting violin lessons and learning woodworking at age 90, and do it well enough to perform in a concert and win a fair ribbon. I just hope to be able to sit upright and maybe blink at that age. I'm sure your correspondence meant as much to him as it did to you. Great story. :)
S
That's a sweet story.
I tried to penpal with a cousin of mine years ago. We did that for a long time. She in Fiji, me in America. It was fun, but then in high school, somehow we lost touch.
Then email and facebook came on the scene but we still never really connected as we did as kids. Oh well. The busyness of life, I guess.
This post amde me smile. In far away Australia I ended up with an american girl called Lori from somewhere in California as my penpal and for the life of me I cannot tell you how that started. But your mature penpal sounds more intriguing. AND he included money!!
Only Joan Perry would think to do something like that. Always the fund raiser...even so young. This memory made my day. Pam D.
Wow, Joan... what a cool story! My earliest pen pal was a boy from Scotland. Which, I am sure, fueled my romantic fantasies about Scotland. Which only got stronger when I actually WENT to Scotland, eons later. Penpals rule. Scotland rules. And you rule. Long live Queen Joan!
He was a good one! I do enjoy real characters - they are ageless.
That you had a disciplined upbringing is evident by your words that radio was accessible only on sundays for a limited time.Somehow my mother who was a disciplinarian couldn't manage to keep the radio/transistor away from my elder sis who was constantly listening to songs both Hindi & English.When the music sessions of the local & the national station were over, she would with amazing patience, tune very slowly all over, till she could could catch the overseas stations.It's because of her that I can still recall the echoes of the sound of bells & the kookaburra which were or perhaps still are respectively, the signature tune of a BBC Radio & some station in Australia.This post also made me remember that households in a small town of Shillong did not have TV till the early 1980's and while landline telephones were there since the 1950's,most households did not consider it to be a necesssity for decades, because those days people visited each other and that too, without appointments and kept in touch with outstation kin & friends through letters.How habits have changed in a matter of decades.Telephonic touch has replaced visits and e-mails have replaced letters!
Namrata - We had telephones installed the year before I left so it must have been about 1972 but of course our friends didn't have them so there was no one to call except businesses. I never saw a tv at that time but I am sure everyone has one now. It was a different time!
I read this a couple weeks ago while I was stuck in traffic in Vancouver (Canada) and it really lifted my spirits! Thank you for sharing your stories!
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