Good friends of 60 years just now meet

Two women bridge an ocean after a lifetime of letters.

By WAVENEY ANN MOORE

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 30, 2000

ST. PETERSBURG -- After six decades, the cards and letters stopped.

On her farm near Belfast in Northern Ireland, Madge McCullough worried. Had something happened to Jean Shelton, the American friend she had never met?

Her letters had never stopped before. They had come by boat through World War II. They had brought news of Jean's marriage and the birth of her only child. Sometimes the mail even brought presents. And always there were cards at Christmas.

But December 1998 brought none.

[Times photo: Dirk Shadd] Madge McCullough, 77, left, of Belfast and Jean Shelton, 80, of St. Petersburg meet for the second time Wednesday at Good Samaritan Nursing Home.

It was a circumstance that would lead to the eventual meeting of the two longtime pen pals.

Last week, arms around each other, they posed for pictures in a St. Petersburg nursing home.

"It's pretty magnificent," Mrs. McCullough said of the meeting.

Mrs. Shelton, who rarely stopped smiling, concurred.

"I'm excited," she said.

But the meeting did not come easily.

When Mrs. McCullough called her friend in December 1998, she learned that Mrs. Shelton had been injured in a fall and for the time being could not keep up the correspondence they had carried on since the early 1930s.

Mrs. McCullough, 77, who suffers from sciatica, understood. But when mail failed to arrive again the following year, she became concerned. This time her telephone call to Mrs. Shelton's home brought only anxiety. Her friend's husband was too ill to provide any information about his wife.

"My husband doesn't remember things very well," Mrs. Shelton, 80, explained last week.

It was at that point that one of Mrs. McCullough's two daughters, Norma Nash, stepped in.

"I tried a couple of times during Christmastime (1999) to call her. I spoke with her husband, but he wasn't able to tell me whether she was alive or dead," Mrs. Nash said. "I phoned again in February."

When she was unable to reach Mrs. Shelton, she called international directory assistance and got the numbers for about 12 Sheltons who live in St. Petersburg.

"Maybe on my second or third call I got her daughter-in-law," Mrs. Nash said. "She was able to tell me that she was alive and well. My mother was relieved."

Soon after, Mrs. Nash began making arrangements for her mother and several family members to travel to the United States.

"For most Irish people of my mother's age, it is a big thing to travel so far," Mrs. Nash said.

But Mrs. McCullough was eager to meet her pen pal.

"She had no inhibitions about coming to visit Jean. My worry was that something would happen to one of them before the meeting ... after all the planning," Mrs. Nash said.

"It's something I've wanted to do for a long time. I would have been very disappointed if anything had happened to them before I got them together. It's like a dream come true."

At their second meeting Wednesday, as the pen pals sat on the patio at Good Samaritan Nursing Home, at 3127 57th Ave. N, Mrs. Shelton expressed gratitude that her friend had not forgotten her.

"I'm very pleased," she said. "I'm so thankful."

The two began their correspondence through a program called the International Friendship League, said Mrs. Shelton, who was 17 at the time and attending Beaver (Pa.) High School. She still can remember their first letters.

"I used to play the accordion and I told her about that and that I liked music and I had a dog and a cat. I told her about them. I told her a little bit about the town I lived in."

In turn, Mrs. Shelton said, "She wrote about the club she belonged to. She would go there for the dancing, to do the Irish jig."

They did not write many letters each year, Mrs. Shelton said, "but we'd always write at Christmastime."

Mrs. Nash, who lives in Kircubbin, in County Down, and teaches fourth grade, has fond memories of the long-distance friendship between her mother and Mrs. Shelton.

"When I was very young, I remember the excitement of the letters coming, of mommy showing us the photographs she received. She sent us toys and sweets from America."

"I can remember," added Kathleen Bell, Mrs. McCullough's second daughter, "when we'd go on holiday that Mommy was always thinking about her. "Jean would like that,' she would say. She was like a sister."

Mrs. McCullough's husband, Jimmy, knew of Mrs. Shelton before they married.

"At times she would tell me she got a letter from Jean," he recalled.

"We wished we could get to see her. We enjoyed the letters that she sent and we enjoyed the presents that she sent."

One was a "wee" rubber frog for daughter Norma that stuck out its tongue when squeezed, McCullough said.

Mrs. Shelton, who has one son, Jimmy Lee, a granddaughter and step-granddaughter, can remember only one present she sent to her friend.

"I remember I sent her a pair of silk stockings during the war. Oh, she was pleased," Mrs. Shelton said.

"We have sent each other lots of postcards, pictures and also gifts. She sent me a very pretty cover, like a dresser cover, with a shamrock on it and she brought me some things ... a vase and a lap tray and it had pictures of Ireland on it."

Last week's visit came about eight years after a meeting between Mrs. Shelton and Mrs. McCullough's son, James. An aviator, he had traveled to Lakeland for an air show.

Mrs. Shelton, a retired schoolteacher, was "tremendously excited" when she learned that she also would get to meet her pen pal.

The two still cannot believe they were given such an opportunity, Mrs. McCullough's daughters said.

"Mommy knew that Jean was a very nice person by reading the letters," Mrs. Bell said, "but meeting her, she knows that she's really a lady."

Mrs. Shelton is similarly complimentary.

"It was quite a thrill meeting her ... She is very nice," she said. "They were so charming. All four of them. It's been so exciting, so very exciting."

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