Ariz. woman, Australian pen pal meet after 55 years

Srianthi Perera | The Arizona Republic

PHOENIX -- Linda Martin of Gilbert was at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport's arrivals lounge on Monday, holding aloft an Australian flag and awaiting someone who was both a friend and a stranger.

Martin, in her mid-60s, had never met or spoken to Wendy Norrie, who is from New South Wales, Australia. But the two have corresponded as pen pals for decades, since they were grade-schoolers a world apart.

For 55 years, as their friendship matured, the correspondence remained mostly the same — routine updates about their lives on either side of the equator, always sent via snail mail.

But then recently, Norrie mailed off a letter with surprising news: She planned to visit the United States for the first time, and she wanted to meet up.

Norrie expected to get an invitation for a weekend at the most. "But the response I got just blew me away," she said. "I was completely flabbergasted."

Email addresses were exchanged to speed up communication. Plans for an elaborate tour of Arizona and Las Vegas were set.

Monday at Sky Harbor, the years of anticipation were palpable.

"Never having met before, I guess there's always that element of apprehension, but it was like coming to meet a longtime friend that you haven't seen for a long time," Norrie said after being greeted by her pen pal. "I didn't feel as if I was coming to meet a stranger."

Martin said she felt the same way.

"It was very exciting. I was a little apprehensive, too, because never having met her, you just never know," she said. "But it was very emotional to us. I cried, and she cried."

It all began in 1958, when Norrie's fourth-grade teacher, whose last name was Wilcox, looked up all the cities in the United States for those bearing his name and settled on Wilcox, Neb., as a place for students to mine for pen pals.

On Oct. 3, 1958, 9-year-old Wendy Norrie of Eugowra, New South Wales, wrote a letter to 11-year-old Linda Martin, then a resident of Wilcox, Neb.

"Dear Linda," it said, "Our teacher Mr. Wilcox received the letter your class sent to us. … He asked us did we want a penfriend from your class so I picked you."

In her first letter, Norrie went on to describe her brick farmhouse, with its two verandas and her mixed farm of 900 acres devoted to crops, sheep and cattle.

"Dad has a welder, and likes making gates, lorry crates to hold sheep, and ever so many useful farm necessities," she wrote.

Martin didn't understand "veranda" and "lorry," and it took some research to learn that it meant "patio" and "truck."

While Norrie found the exercise educational, she wasn't turned off by American colloquialisms because Australian television had been broadcasting American programs.

Although they have had things in common, both women find it hard to pinpoint what really sustained their friendship over the years.

"I wasn't in it to make great history. It was just to create friendship with somebody on the other side of the world and compare lifestyles and that sort of thing," Norrie said.

As girls, the two wrote to each other every couple of months, but after they reached adulthood, they limited themselves to writing annual letters at Christmas.

Martin attended college and worked as a teacher until she and her husband, Joe, had children. Norrie became a secretary in a busy office.

They wrote to each other about their families, health issues, jobs, travel, hobbies and celebrations. Because their birthdays were within two weeks of Christmas, they also developed a tradition of sending each other calendars representing their country as gifts.

For Norrie's visit, Martin has drawn up an itinerary that includes the Grand Canyon, Jerome, Sedona, Montezuma Castle National Monument, Lake Havasu City to see the London Bridge, and Las Vegas. Closer to home, they will visit the Heard Museum and Saguaro Lake.

"I haven't got through the list yet; I'm just going to sit in the backseat," Norrie joked.

Since this is her first visit to the United States, she also did a 10-day bus tour of Washington, D.C., Niagara Falls and New York City before coming to Gilbert for a two-week stay.

As for gifts, the Australian has brought Vegemite (an Australian food paste made from leftover brewer's yeast extract) and Tim Tam chocolate biscuits, to name two of the goodies that Martin has not heard of, let alone tasted. She also has a Splayd, a half-folk, half-spoon eating utensil found Down Under.

Martin, who intends to visit Australia in 2015, has her own plans for gift-giving:

"My plan is to, as we go different places, pick up things that I think she would like to take back to Australia," she said.

In Gilbert, they will make time to pore over some of those letters. Both have saved most of them, though Norrie left hers back home.

"I think we are a generation that cherishes things like this. And so we kept them," Martin said. "I can't explain why. I thought they were really important."