Published: August 18, 2007 12:29 am         

Women celebrate 60 years as pen pals

Correspondence kick-started by giraffe pin in 1947

MANKATO — The summer she turned 17, Gloria Kain had to stay at her family’s farm in Minnesota Lake while her mom and dad went to visit relatives in Sauk Centre. To thank her, they brought back a present from the Ben Franklin there.

“It was an orange giraffe pin,” Kain said. “Just a piece of costume jewelry.”

But shortly before her parents had bought that pin, a 9-year-old girl had used its cardboard backing to test out the pen she was buying. She printed her name, Carol Penrose, and her address — then handed it back to the clerk behind the counter. When Kain saw those carefully penned words, she immediately found a pen of her own and composed a letter. Not even a week later, Kain got a letter back from Penrose.

That was in July 1947.

This summer, the two women — now Gloria Klinder and Carol Exum — celebrated the 60th anniversary of their almost lifelong correspondence with a meeting in Mankato. They went out to lunch, visited museums and ate pie at The Dam Store.

Kinder and Exum, who now lives in Fayetteville, Ga., have written each other hundreds of letters in six decades. Their correspondence slowed after college and marriage, but they picked up the thread in 1972 and have kept it going strong since.

“That was 35 years ago,” Exum said. “It hasn’t slacked off at all since. In fact, it’s even more now.”

The two women had sent each other pictures often during the course of their correspondence, but it wasn’t until 1985, when Exum returned to Minnesota for a class reunion, that the pair actually met.

“Carol and her husband got to our house three hours early,” Klinder remembered with a laugh as the two sat reminiscing last week. “I was totally embarrassed — I was on the front steps scrubbing in my shorts, barefoot, with my knees dirty.”

Despite those dirty knees, Klinder and Exum immediately felt at ease with each other. “It was like an old shoe,” Klinder said. “Comfortable.”

“Like we’d known each other forever,” Exum said.

Since then, the two have had a handful of meetings, including in the spring of 1993, when Klinder and her husband, Ralph, flew to Georgia after Exum’s breast cancer surgery. “I wanted to go,” she said. “I was so upset at the thought of losing her.”

Now the women are closer than ever. Although they still send each other the occasional greeting cards, most of their communication these days is of a far more immediate sort.

“We haven’t written letters like we used to for a long time,” Exum said. “Now, I’d rather pick up the phone and talk, or send a quick e-mail.”

The best thing, of course, is to sit side by side in the pavilion at Sibley Park, catching up with each other in person. Their recent three-day reunion was the longest they’d ever been together in the course of their relationship and allowed them time to talk about all of their favorite things, including gardening, birds and needlework. Klinder even taught Exum how to tat.

“We have so much in common,” Exum says. “I love her to death. She’s the sister I never had.”

And while Klinder still has some of the letters she received from her “pen-pal sister” over the years, she no longer has the giraffe pin that started it all.

“I wish I had kept that pin,” she said.