When Mike Rafferty was 14 years old, a teacher at St. Gabriel School in South Philadelphia introduced a pen pal program and asked his class a question: What kind of pen pal would you like?<\/p>\n
One of Rafferty’s friends had an answer.<\/p>\n
“He said, ‘I want a 14-year-old girl from California,'” Rafferty said. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, me too.'”<\/p>\n
He got his wish.<\/p>\n
What Rafferty could not have known was that the classroom assignment would begin a friendship spanning 42 years \u2014 or that the girl who became his longtime pen pal wasn’t actually the girl he was originally assigned.<\/p>\n
This week, Rafferty and Christie Leonard finally met face-to-face for the first time. Their story began just down the block from where Rafferty lives today.<\/p>\n
He grew up one street from his current South Philadelphia home, both near St. Gabriel, where the pen pal program began in 1984.<\/p>\n
Rafferty still has a letter dated June 1 of that year from his original pen pal, a 14-year-old California girl named Regena Jauregui.<\/p>\n
“I like to play tennis and go swimming,” Rafferty read aloud from the letter. “This is very short because I do not know anything about you, except that your name is Mike Rafferty.”<\/p>\n
But Regena had a cousin named Christie Leonard.<\/p>\n
After hearing about the program, Leonard wanted to write to Rafferty, too.<\/p>\n
Rafferty remembers the letter arriving with Leonard’s picture and her name written in bubble letters.<\/p>\n
“She kind of stole me away from Regena,” he said.<\/p>\n
Soon, Rafferty and Leonard were exchanging letters and photos between South Philadelphia and Orangevale, California, writing about school, their lives and even their favorite football teams.<\/p>\n
As the years passed, their lives moved in different directions.<\/p>\n
Rafferty became a professional boxer, then a Philadelphia police officer. He married his wife, Razel, and started a family with four children. He and Leonard stayed in touch over the years, sometimes losing contact before reconnecting again.<\/p>\n
But they had never met.<\/p>\n
That changed Monday, when \u2014 after Leonard told Rafferty she’d be visiting Philadelphia with her fianc\u00e9 \u2014 they arranged to meet at Dean’s Bar, a corner pub at 29th and Tasker streets in South Philadelphia.<\/p>\n
“Forty-two years ago we started writing each other,” Rafferty said as the two embraced.<\/p>\n
“Can you believe that?” Leonard said.<\/p>\n
Inside, Leonard got a full South Philadelphia welcome as Rafferty introduced her to family and friends \u2014 including his mother, who still remembers St. Gabriel’s pen pal program that started it all.<\/p>\n
Over beers, the two reminisced about the letters they exchanged as teenagers.<\/p>\n
“I remember you had very nice penmanship,” Leonard told him.<\/p>\n
They even remembered the one phone call they shared as teenagers, an event Rafferty said attracted plenty of attention from his family.<\/p>\n
“My whole family is hanging over me like you’re from planet Mars,” Rafferty said. “‘Michael’s talking to somebody from California.'”<\/p>\n
Leonard remembered taking the call from her bedroom on her “Princess phone.”<\/p>\n
They remembered discussing the different football teams they each favored.<\/p>\n
“He was an Eagles fan, of course, and I was a Denver Broncos fan, even though I never lived in Denver,” Leonard said.<\/p>\n
But there is one thing the former pen pals certainly agree on, in the world of social media and text messages:<\/p>\n
“There’s nothing like getting a letter in the mail,” Rafferty said. “Everybody knows that.”<\/p>\n
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