Fremont, Australian pen pals of 73 years meet again
FREMONT - For 73 years, Juanita Billow has walked out to her mailbox every month or two and received a treasured aerogramme from one of her closest friends.
Those air letters, and correspondence she wrote back, contained life snapshots of how children were doing, new grandchildren welcomed to the family and gardening updates from halfway around the world.
Her longtime pen pal lives more than 9,000 miles away, where daytime highs peak above 80 degrees in December, January and February, in a city of more than 2 million people.
Through a simple routine spawned in high school, post-World War II, of sitting down and writing letters to each other, Billow, 89, and Betty Hood, 88, of Brisbane, Australia sparked a lifetime friendship.
Hood made the long trek to Fremont, her second trip to Ohio, this week to see Billow.
"I know more about Rutherford B. Hayes than anybody in Australia," Hood joked, as she and Billow sat together and reminisced about their seven decades of letter writing and the high volume of President Hayes-themed gifts sent to her Australian home over the years.
She paused to show off a brooch pin emblazoned with First Lady Lucy Hayes' likeness, one of many presents sent by Billow to her Australian pen pal.
Both women were in high school when they started looking for pen pals.
Billow's 10th grade English class assignment at Fremont Ross High School required her to find a pen pal.
"It was common in those days," Billow said. "You'd see it in the papers, somebody would want somebody to write to."
Hood's grandmother and mother came from Kent, England. Billow's mother also hailed from the same English town.
Like Billow, Hood wanted a pen pal and submitted an ad to her local newspaper.
Billow's mother got a copy of that newspaper and the Fremont resident saw Hood's pen pal ad.
"I got 16 people, but none of them kept up," Hood said.
Except for Billow, who answered Hood's ad and steadily maintained her correspondence over decades as both women married, had children and raised families.
Her classmates all wanted to write to pen pals that lived stateside, Billow recalled, but she wanted to share and get letters from someone, like Hood, who lived outside of the United States.
They hit it off, and the letters kept flowing across two continents for decades.
Hood might give an update on her small garden, her carambola tree or dragonfruit she'd grown.
Billow would respond with family tidbits or her own gardening news from Fremont on an aerogramme, an air letter that folds on three pieces.
Hood loosened a rubber band that held together several letters she'd sent and Billow had saved since they began their pen pal relationship.
In one letter, Hood told Billow she'd put the first of her seeds in the ground for her garden.
"We plant now (April), as our best growing time is our winter. I've put in French beans, carrots and radishes," Hood wrote.
Eventually, each woman visited the other overseas.
On her first trip to the United States in 1974, Hood flew from Australia to Los Angeles International Airport.
She and her husband didn't have a lot of money, but they were able to use his International Police Association discount to get a good look at America the long way.
From there, she and her husband bought discounted, 90-day Greyhound bus passes for $99 and headed east across Phoenix, El Paso and New Orleans and then north through Alabama on their way to Fremont.
They ate at Greyhound Restaurants, marveled at how green places like Alabama were compared to their own "sun burnt" country, and got to meet Americans for the first time on their long cross-country trek
When she made it to Ohio, Hood toured the Hayes House from attic to basement.
She found a popular Australian novel of Hayes' time in the attic, Hood recalled.
Billow and her husband, Ralph, made their own visits to Australia in 1983 and 1996.
On one trip, they traveled by camper up and down Australia's east coast to the base of the Cape York peninsula in remote northern Queensland and watched the stars, free from city light pollution.
As they've gotten older, travel has become more difficult.
"I never thought I'd see her again," Billow said.
Ron Billow, Juanita's son, said he's more of a "new generation" person, but used to write letters like his mother all the way through college.
He's thought about the weeks it might take for a letter sent through international air transit to travel from Fremont to Brisbane, and how it differs from the instant gratification people get today from social media and messages sent through new technology.
Billow said his mother and Hood's friendship through letters opened the doors for him and his son to travel to Australia.
He took his oldest son, Matthew, to Australia during his senior year at Lakota High School on a 35-day adventure.
There, Ron and Matthew spent several days with the Hoods and also met with an Australian sprint car racing team.
"I think it's pretty amazing because the generation nowadays wouldn't understand the relationship they've developed over all these years," he said.
As she sat with Billow, Hood acknowledged there are still things she marvels at when she visits the United States.
She bought bread at the supermarket this week and couldn't believe how sweet it tasted, not to mention the wide variety of fruits and vegetables available to shoppers and the dramatically lower price Americans pay for fuel compared to Australians.
Soon, Hood will return to Australia and see how her orchids are doing and whether her efforts to attract bees to her garden were successful.
And she and Billow will continue their letter writing.
dacarson@gannett.com
419-334-1046
Twitter: @DanielCarson7