Featured Iron Butterfly: Betsy

They met through an ad and had a long-distance relationship for over 60 years before finally meeting.

No, it is not a romance story. It is a friendship story and involves my mother and me.

In 1934, my mother, Lona, then 12-years-old, noticed an ad for pen pals in one of my grandfather’s railroad magazines.  She requested a person and was matched with 13-year-old girl named Betty, who lived in Australia. They immediately started writing each other and continued to do so.  Letters, when they first wrote, usually traveled by ship and would take a month to travel from Virginia where my mother lived to South Australia where Betty lived. Then another month would pass as the return letter traveled back from Australia to the United States….