Pen pals finally meet — after 55 years

Arizona woman Linda Martin has been writing to her Australian pen pal, Wendy Norrie, for 55 years.

"We’ve grown and matured and raised families. It's somebody on the other side of the world sharing your experiences, it's been wonderful," Norrie told ABC 15.

The friends finally met for the first time at a Phoenix airport this week.

In 1958, Norrie, then 9, started writing to 11-year-old Martin as a pen-pal exercise in her grade 4 class.

"I had to figure out a frock is a dress. She talked about a veranda and I wasn't familiar with that growing up in Nebraska," Martin said of deciphering each other's slang terms.

"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 told the Arizona Republic.

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The long-distance friends wrote to each other every few months. When they reached adulthood, they slowed down their correspondence to just once a year, writing letters at Christmas.

Both women have kept all the letters they've exchanged over the years.

"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."

Not long ago, Norrie sent Martin a letter with unexpected news: she was planning a trip to the United States, and wanted to finally meet her pen pal.

Martin jumped at the chance to meet her friend. The women traded their usual snail mail for email to finalize plans that would include a three-week tour of Arizona and Las Vegas together.

The friends met on Monday.

"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."

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

Martin plans to visit Australia in 2015.

Earlier this summer, pen pals Audry Sims and Norma "Kitty" Frati met for the first time after exchanging 3,000 letters over 74 years.

Message-in-a-bottle pen pals Emmanuelle Demeautis and Adrian Lomas also met up for the first time this summer — after exchanging letters for 34 years.