Pen pals’ bond still strong after 75 years

On a bright, cool morning in Manoa Valley recently, 89-year-old Mildred Sakumoto sat at her kitchen table and listened with equal measures of amusement and amazement as her best and oldest friend recounted one of their first exchanges.

“You were telling me how you were sitting in class — or maybe it was study hall — and that later you were going to watch a softball game,” recalled Darlyne Kellicutt, 88.

Sakumoto nodded vigorously, her eyes beaming behind wire-frame glasses.

“You have a good memory,” she said, chuckling. “Me, not so good.”

In truth, the remembrance of any particular conversation is a remarkable thing in a friendship that has spanned nearly 75 years. Sakumoto and Kellicutt became acquainted as young teenagers and have remained stalwart friends through first jobs and first loves, marriage, parenthood and grandparenthood, retirement and widowhood.

They are as close as friends can be, and they have met in person just three times.

“We were pen pals,” Sakumoto explained, nodding toward a smartphone at the center of the table and the Bluetooth speaker through which Kellicutt’s voice carried from more than 4,000 miles away. “And then years later we started using the phone.”

By time and circumstance, the two were unlikely friends — a nisei girl from the small plantation town of Olaa on the Big Island and a Midwestern girl from La Crosse, Wis., connecting over great literal and figurative distance during the height of the war in the Pacific.

Sakumoto’s older brother Calvin, a member of the 100th Battalion, had been stationed in Wisconsin. One day, while bowling, he broke his leg and was taken to a local hospital. Kellicutt’s father happened to be at the hospital, as well, visiting a friend. The two struck up a conversation, and Kellicutt’s father invited Calvin to visit him at home when he was released.

During the subsequent visit, 14-year-old Darlyne Kellicutt asked Calvin whether he had any sisters. Calvin answered that he did and suggested that she write to his 15-year-old sister, Mildred.

The two girls exchanged handwritten letters regularly throughout their teenage and young-adult years, finding similarity in their tastes, values and small-town sense of propriety while at the same time exposing each other to worlds beyond their city limits.

For Sakumoto, Kellicutt’s letters were a touchstone of friendship and constancy as she completed high school, embarked on what would become a 40-year career with Dole, and started a family with her husband, Earl.

In 1982, after Kellicutt’s son landed a job at the local phone company (enabling Kellicutt to make low-cost long-distance calls), the two friends traded in longhand letters for hourlong phone calls.

“The first time I called, we were so excited we both talked at the same time,” Kellicutt said. “Afterward I called everybody I knew and said, ‘Guess who I talked to?’”

Kellicutt and her husband, Jim, visited Hawaii for the first time later that year, a trip that Kellicutt still vividly recalls — from the “big, bright” lei that Sakumoto greeted them with to the visit to the Pali Lookout, where Kellicutt worried earnestly that her old friend might be blown away, to the overwhelming warmth that she and Jim felt in meeting Sakumoto’s family.

The couple returned for another visit in 2004, two years after Earl’s death. Jim Kellicutt would himself die two years later.

Darlyne Kellicutt last visited Hawaii with her daughter-in-law. Sakumoto, cold-averse, has not visited Wisconsin.

The two old friends still call each other at least once a month.

“If I had a dollar for every time we’ve talked on the phone, we’d be rich,” Kellicutt said. “It’s been such a wonderful experience knowing (Mildred). I’d like to live it all over again.”

The feeling, as always, is mutual.

“She’s the best person I ever met,” Sakumoto said. “We’re like family. She’s the sweetest, nicest, friendliest, most thoughtful person. She’s the best.”

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@staradvertiser.com.