It's the kind of friendship you don't see every day. That's because it started on paper.
Janye Evaristo was a Navy kid living in the Philippines when her sixth-grade teacher asked if she and her friend Treeny wanted to be pen pals with a female student in Connecticut.
"And neither Treeny nor I knew what a penal was," said Evaristo now an office manager at a Kearny Mesa accounting firm.
Janye and Treeny began writing Lori twice a month during their school years and never stopped for 40 years.
There was something strange about this friendship however - the fact Janye and Treeny had never actually met Lori in person.
That all ended in April when the three women met up in a hotel lobby in Los Angeles. They screamed when Treeny and Janye walked through the doors and immediately hugged.
"We did sit and talk and that was the amazing thing, we had a lot to talk about, like we'd been old friends and we were old friends. You just don't think about it that way," said Janye.
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Today the three women continue to correspond through e-mail and text messaging from time to time, but they will not abandon the old-fashioned handwritten letters that started it all.
Janye says you can learn a lot more about people through letters because it is more personal. "Cause you're moving, and you're creating, and hand writing is an art. It's a lost art, but it's an art."
