Pen-pal friendship thrives for 52 years

One from the Midwest and one from Finland, they met on paper in 1957.

Lois in Wisconsin picked Anja in Finland from the list of students who wanted pen pals in The Weekly Reader, a newspaper circulated among elementary schools.

It was a difficult correspondence at first because Lois could not write Finnish and Anja could not write English.

They managed with a series of translators to share decades of girlish facts about schools, young women's news of marriages, mothers' announcements on new babies and adult gloom of illness and death.

As young girls of 11 and 12, they always ended their letters, "Write soon." Even Anja, who could neither write nor speak English, always wrote those words in English.

Lois wrote the first letter on a typewriter from her home in Theresa, Wis. She has a copy of her second letter, also typewritten, and dated Aug. 12, 1957:

"I am twelve years old. My birthday was July 9. When is your birthday?

"I have two sisters. One is older than me and the other is younger. I also have one brother who is 7-years-old.

"I live in a small village of 460 people and live above a furniture store where my father works."

At first, Anja had someone translate her Finnish words mailed to America, but she started writing solely in Finnish in the 1970s and 1980s. She had married Esko Hietula.

It was not until Lois moved to Appleton, Wis., that she was able to find a Finnish family who could regularly translate Anja's letters for her.

It got more difficult for the American writer staying in touch and finding translators after Lois married Ed Rath and moved to five different states.

"I have all of Anja's letters, up in the attic, and some of them still are not translated," said Lois Rath, who now lives in Champaign.

"It took both of us to keep it going," Rath said. "We tried to remember birthdays, Christmas and now and then a couple of letters in between.

"There were some years when one of us would barely get off a Christmas card. ... We were busy with school, raising kids and our families."

The Raths had a son and a daughter.

Anja Hietula once wrote, "I haven't been very active with rider because I can't the language."

She also wrote from Finland that one of her daughters was away at school in a town considered "the home of Santa Claus where there is 'real' winter with almost 500 meters of snow and -15 degrees Celsius."

As Hietula's youngest of three daughters, Leena, became more proficient in her English studies, she wrote the letters to Rath, in her mother's words.

The saddest was one from Anja Hietula in Finland and dated October 2003:

"The last three years have been so hard for my family.

"My mother had a stroke in the summer of 2000.

"In 2001, we were arranging for Leena's wedding, but that wasn't all what has happened.

"On the 15th of September, just after those terrible losts in the USA (9/11), my husband Esko had an accident. He slipped and fell on stairs to his neck badly. The sixth and seventh vertebrae on his backbone were broken. The first three months he was in the hospital and then four months in rehabilitation.

"I worked and visited two hospitals every day.

"On Feb. 2, my mother died.

"Then we had to move from our third floor home."

Since his accident, Esko Hietula is a paraplegic who uses a wheelchair, but he can drive a special car and a boat that the family owns.

The Rath-Hietula correspondence also included gifts.

Rath still has all-brown, wooden Santa Claus figures wearing fur coats that were made in Finland and wooden spoons with Rath family names burned into the handles.

Rath remembers sending huckaback work, hand-embroidered tea towels she had made.

On New Year's Eve 1994, Hietula surprised Rath with a telephone call their first verbal communication.

"It was a three-way conversation with her daughter translating," Rath said.

After the call, Hietula's 16-year-old daughter Leena wrote: "Is there any chance that you could arrange me a pen friend from USA? It would be nice if she/he likes sports."

Rath asked a neighbor's daughter, one of her piano students, if she was interested and a second generation of American-Finnish pen pals started between Leena Hietula and Yvonne Halenor.

As the years went on, the older women's letters contained more and more invitations to visit each other's countries.

Now in their mid-60s, they finally met in Helsinki last summer when the Raths traveled to Finland.

"We decided, with retirement, that that was what we wanted to do," Rath said.

Lois Rath was retired from teaching music at Carrie Busey Elementary School (but still teaches part time in St. Joseph). Ed Rath is associate director of the University of Illinois School of Music.

One surprise at the face-to-face meeting was that Anja was about a foot shorter than Rath and had gray-white hair.

"You always think someone is just your size," Rath laughed. And, when she saw Anja Hietula's hair, she realized "We hadn't sent pictures for a while."

"We were sitting around the kitchen table, dictionaries in hand," Rath recalled, when she gave Hietula a picture frame with copies of the first school-girl pictures they had exchanged and space for a picture of their 2009 meeting.

"When we were younger, I sent her a leather coin purse that I had made in 4-H," Rath said. "She still had it. The zipper was broken and the leather looked 100 years old, but it was nice to see that it was really used."

The Raths also took a side trip with the Hietulas, traveling east to the Finns' summer cottage on the Russian border.

"Our husbands really hit it off with their mutual love and talk of music," Rath said. "The last night we were together he (Esko) sang Elvis' 'Are you Lonesome Tonight?' to us."

"There was champagne when we met and tears when we exchanged gifts and left," Rath said.

By the time of the Hietula and Rath visit, Leena Hietula and Yvonne now Yvonne Shaw of Bondville had been corresponding for 14 years.

They use more modern methods of connecting through e-mail and Facebook at least once a month.

During the senior pen pals' trip, which Leena was translating, Yvonne got regular updates on the visit and would send e-mails like "Say 'Hi' to the Raths."

The second generation exchange sometimes includes regular mail.

"When they're on holiday, we'll get a postcard and then we'll do the same," Shaw said.

Leena married a man named Aki, but kept her maiden name.

Leena Hietula and Shaw exchanged gifts such as books and pillow cases before they had children.

"Now we exchange more for the kids," Shaw said. "I send toys for her daughter and son bath boys, crayons and color books, sidewalk chalk ... and clothes. She sends Christmas presents for my daughter."

The younger Finns have a 1-year-old and 5-year-old. Shaws' daughter is 3.

"When I got married, in 2003, we invited them; and they almost came," Shaw said. "We don't want to wait 25 years before we meet or 50 years like Anja and Lois. But travel challenges us with young families."