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60-year friendship found between the lines Shortly after they met, Helen Grove, left, and Laura Shaw stopped jumping around "like 2-year-olds" long enough for a snapshot. Phoenix woman meets Irish pen pal By Dani Dodge of the Mail Tribune PHOENIX -- In 1939, a Pennsylvania farm girl wrote her first letter. It traveled across the Atlantic to an Irish lass who wanted a pen pal. "My name is Helen. I'm 9 years old. I live in the country with a cat named Cream Puff," Helen Grove wrote. Delighted, Laura Shaw of Dublin responded with a letter about her dog. Over the years, the correspondence continued with tales of first boyfriends, pictures of weddings and snapshots of grandchildren. Through the mail, the two women shared their milestones, cultures and heartaches. Last month, Grove, who lives in the Holiday R.V. Park in Phoenix, took a tour of Ireland. After 60 years, she and Shaw finally shared hugs. "I can't even describe what it was like," Grove said, her hands flying to her face and squishing her cheeks in excitement. `There's no words to describe 60 years of writing and then this. "But I knew her immediately, I waved, tossed my camera to a friend, and we hugged and we jumped around like 2-year-olds." Even some of the 36 people with Grove's tour group cried, said one of the tour members, Tammie Mathis of Casper, Wyoming. "You could see from the sparkle in both of their eyes that it had been worth waiting 60 years to meet one another," Mathis said. "It sort of took the breath away." Sixty years ago, when Shaw first sought out a pen pal, she never imagined she would actually meet a girl from America. "America was very, very far away back then," Shaw said from her home in Dunmore East, near Waterford. At the time, Shaw was a Girl Guide -- the organization the Girl Scouts were modeled after in the United States. "I wanted to get another badge," Shaw remembered. "And to do that I needed a pen pal." Shaw's mother contacted an English family friend -- Lilly Hanman -- who had emigrated to Langhorne, Pa. It just so happened that "Mrs. Hanman," as Grove called her, had been having little 9-year-old Grove and her mother over for tea each afternoon, teaching the girl the formal manners and etiquette of the English. Grove wrote first. "I am an only child. I have tea with Mrs. Hanman every afternoon. We have a cow named Daisy." Shaw was elated when the letter arrived. "I was very excited about it all," Shaw said. "I was getting a letter from someone in America. I still have some of those early letters." Grove, too, was enchanted by the correspondence. The Irish stamp alone was enough to give a country girl a thrill, she said. "I wrote about things like picking flowers and wading in creeks, which was big stuff for a kid," she said. The letters mostly detailed the day-to-day happenings and events in their lives. "We grew up through the mail," Grove said. After high school, Grove went to nursing school. Both women got married about the same time. Each had three children. Grove's husband later died. Sometimes during those busy years of raising young families and strained finances, the two let their correspondence lapse for six months at a time. But they always caught back up. Once their children had grown, they began writing more regularly again -- every few months or so. Grove has taken to the snowbird lifestyle, driving alone in a primly decorated Dolphin recreational vehicle with her cats Peaches and Blackberry. Shaw is settled with her husband and four Boston terriers in a home that overlooks both the Atlantic Ocean and the Irish Sea, on the southeast coast of Ireland. Grove writes prolifically to her many friends -- still corresponding with everyone from her 1951 graduating class at Abington Memorial Hospital School of Nursing. Shaw, though, never had another pen pal. Last year, three of Grove's friends from nursing school died. "I started to realize that the time was running out. I wouldn't meet Laura if I didn't do it soon," Grove said. "She's as healthy as a horse and so am I, but that doesn't mean you can't drop dead tomorrow. "So I went to Ireland even though I really didn't have the money." They met as Grove emerged from the tour of the Waterford crystal factory. Grove was so excited about the visit, the tour was just "a big blur of diamond-like crystal. "I didn't care about it," Grove said. "I just wanted to see Laura." Shaw and her husband whisked Grove away from the tour to visit their home. "We talked nonstop for two hours. We talked on top of each other and laughed and laughed," Grove said. "It was the nonstop craziest two hours I've ever had in my life." Then, the three went out for a formal dinner before rejoining the tour group at an Irish pub. Grove said Shaw's husband was "every bit as nutty as we were." "I've never met three people so well matched in their ability to be happy and get excited," Grove said. And the women discovered similarities they hadn't ever realized in all those letters. Grove could name the flowers in Shaw's yard because both share a love of gardening and the Irish and Oregon climates are similar. Both women walk five miles a day. Both have outlandish senses of humor and bubbly personalities. "The interesting thing about the visit is we didn't have much to say: We'd said it over 60 years of letters," Grove said. "But we had the time to feel each other's sense of humor -- you don't get that on paper." They got to listen to each other's voices, something they had never heard until last month. Grove's green eyes glisten as she shares the tale of her childhood friendship finally realized. "We'll write until we die or are so sick we can't write," she said. "Because this has been some kind of miracle for me." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA