By Eva Andersen, Jim McHugh
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PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania (KYW) — 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?
One of Rafferty’s friends had an answer.
“He said, ‘I want a 14-year-old girl from California,'” Rafferty said. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, me too.'”
He got his wish.
What Rafferty could not have known was that the classroom assignment would begin a friendship spanning 42 years — or that the girl who became his longtime pen pal wasn’t actually the girl he was originally assigned.
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.
He grew up one street from his current South Philadelphia home, both near St. Gabriel, where the pen pal program began in 1984.
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.
“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.”
But Regena had a cousin named Christie Leonard.
After hearing about the program, Leonard wanted to write to Rafferty, too.
Rafferty remembers the letter arriving with Leonard’s picture and her name written in bubble letters.
“She kind of stole me away from Regena,” he said.
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.
As the years passed, their lives moved in different directions.
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.
But they had never met.
That changed Monday, when — after Leonard told Rafferty she’d be visiting Philadelphia with her fiancé — they arranged to meet at Dean’s Bar, a corner pub at 29th and Tasker streets in South Philadelphia.
“Forty-two years ago we started writing each other,” Rafferty said as the two embraced.
“Can you believe that?” Leonard said.
Inside, Leonard got a full South Philadelphia welcome as Rafferty introduced her to family and friends — including his mother, who still remembers St. Gabriel’s pen pal program that started it all.
Over beers, the two reminisced about the letters they exchanged as teenagers.
“I remember you had very nice penmanship,” Leonard told him.
They even remembered the one phone call they shared as teenagers, an event Rafferty said attracted plenty of attention from his family.
“My whole family is hanging over me like you’re from planet Mars,” Rafferty said. “‘Michael’s talking to somebody from California.'”
Leonard remembered taking the call from her bedroom on her “Princess phone.”
They remembered discussing the different football teams they each favored.
“He was an Eagles fan, of course, and I was a Denver Broncos fan, even though I never lived in Denver,” Leonard said.
But there is one thing the former pen pals certainly agree on, in the world of social media and text messages:
“There’s nothing like getting a letter in the mail,” Rafferty said. “Everybody knows that.”
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