Pen-pals since a 1984 school assignment, Mike Rafferty, a South Philadelphia boxer-turned-cop, and Christie Leonard of Orangevale, California, finally met face-to-face Monday at Dean's Bar.
Practice puzzle. It does not touch your streak or today's stats.
Kept 'Monday' or 'Dean's Bar'? Both are true, and both are where and when, and the five only has room for how long. Kept 'since'? It is the little word that hangs 1984 on the pen-pals, and the five does that job by putting them side by side. Kept 'boxer-turned-cop'? It is the best word here that is not in the answer, and it is his life story, not the meeting. This one really happened. In 1984 a teacher at St Gabriel School in South Philadelphia started a pen pal programme, and Mike Rafferty, then 14, asked for a 14-year-old girl from California. He got Regena Jauregui, whose letter of 1 June 1984 he still has. Regena had a cousin, Christie Leonard, who wanted to write to him too, and she did, with a photograph and her name in bubble letters. The two of them wrote for 42 years, from South Philadelphia to Orangevale, California, through his years as a boxer and then a police officer, losing touch and finding each other again, and they had never once met. On Monday, with Leonard visiting Philadelphia with her fiancé, they arranged to meet at Dean's Bar at 29th and Tasker, and Rafferty introduced her to his family, including his mother, who still remembers the programme.