It all started 20 years ago when Jeff Smookler of Brooklyn, N.Y. was looking through a magazine. There was an address exchange in the back, and Smookler, then 9 years old, thought it might be cool to have a pen
It all started 20 years ago when Jeff Smookler of Brooklyn, N.Y. was looking
through a magazine.
There was an address exchange in the back, and
Smookler, then 9 years old, thought it might be cool to have a pen pal from far
away.
He wrote a letter to a young girl in Honolulu, Hawai’i. And Christy
Okimoto wrote him back.
What followed was a 20-year correspondence.
“At
first, we wrote superficial letters back and forth. But eventually we even
exchanged presents and talked about our personal lives,” Smookler said.
The succession of letters came to a head when the pen pals spoke for the
first time Sept. 19 by phone, when Smookler arrived on Kaua`i. Then Okimoto
came over from Oahu four days later to meet her mail friend face to face for
the first time.
In this boy-meets-girl story, there’s a twist. Smookler
didn’t come to Kaua`i alone. The 29-year-old New Yorker brought his new bride,
Dawn, 26, for their honeymoon.
Smookler said Dawn had no problem with him
interrupting the honeymoon to meet his long-distance friend.
“Dawn was with
me. She was with us the entire time,” he said.
She and Okimoto couldn’t be
reached for their spins on the pen palling.
Staff writer Dennis Wilken
can be reached at 245-3681 (ext. 252) and [
HREF=”mailto:dwilken@pulitzer.net”>dwilken@pulitzer.net]
