Remember
Pen Pals? As kids many of us, through school or off the
back of a comic book, signed up to be pen pals. We’d get
the address of a foreign student around our age with which we
shared a few letters, mainly focusing on the routines our daily
lives and hints about the cultural area in which we lived.
These pen pals generally drifted apart after a while with letters
finally stopping being replaced by a vague but fond memory. Sometimes,
though, our curiosity rekindles and we search out again our
old far away friend. Such is the case of Janice (Clay) Gomez
’73.
Janice
is a sixth grade teacher at Oasis Elementary School in Twentynine
Palms, California and for the past 23 years she has encouraged
each of her classes to broaden their dreams and horizons by
developing pen pal friends. Recently Janice looked up
her childhood pen pal from Scotland, Kathleen Knox, and the
two were reunited after 31 years. They had both kind of
lost touch as the letters became fewer and farther between following
graduation from high school. Moves and marriages further
separated the old friends until Janice, at the encouragement
of her elementary school class, looked up Kathleen through a
contact with her brother. Traveling to Scotland, Janice
and Kathleen easily picked up where they left off way back when.
