Two pen pals paired by a South Philadelphia school in 1984 met for the first time on Monday

Mike Rafferty was 14 when a teacher at St Gabriel School handed him a pen pal in California. Her cousin Christie Leonard wrote too, and kept writing for 42 years. On Monday they met at Dean's Bar, a block from where the letters were first opened.

25 September 2026

Two old photographs laid over a handwritten letter: a teenage boy in a green and gold football jersey, and a teenage girl with long brown hair in a red top — Mike Rafferty in his football kit and Christie Leonard as teenagers, over the 1984 letter from his first pen pal, which he still has.
Photo: CBS Philadelphia

Two people who have written to each other since a classroom pen pal assignment in 1984 met for the first time on Monday at a corner bar in South Philadelphia, CBS Philadelphia reported on Tuesday, 42 years after the first letter and one street from where it was delivered.

Mike Rafferty, a former professional boxer who went on to become a Philadelphia police officer, and Christie Leonard, of Orangevale, California, embraced outside Dean's Bar at 29th and Tasker streets, according to the station, which filmed the meeting. "Forty-two years ago we started writing each other," Rafferty said as they hugged. "Can you believe that?" Leonard said.

The assignment

Rafferty was 14 when a teacher at St Gabriel School in South Philadelphia introduced a pen pal programme and asked the class what kind of pen pal each of them would like, CBS Philadelphia reported. One of his friends had an answer ready. "He said, 'I want a 14-year-old girl from California,'" Rafferty told the station. "And I was like, 'Yeah, me too.'"

He got his wish. His first letter came from a 14-year-old Californian named Regena Jauregui, dated 1 June 1984, and he still has it. He read it aloud on camera. "I like to play tennis and go swimming," it says. "This is very short because I do not know anything about you, except that your name is Mike Rafferty."

A two-storey grey stone school building on a street corner under overhead wires, with a maroon sign reading Saint Gabriel School on its end wall and a silver car parked outside — St Gabriel School in Grays Ferry, South Philadelphia, where the pen pal programme began in 1984. Rafferty grew up one street from his current home, both near the school.
Photo: WhisperToMe, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

The cousin

The girl who became his pen pal for the next four decades was not the girl he had been assigned. Regena had a cousin, Christie Leonard, and after hearing about the programme Leonard wanted to write to him too, according to the report. Rafferty remembers her letter arriving with her photograph and her name written in bubble letters. "She kind of stole me away from Regena," he said.

The two exchanged letters and photographs between South Philadelphia and Orangevale, a suburb of Sacramento, writing about school, their lives and their football teams. He was an Eagles fan. She supported the Denver Broncos, she told the station, "even though I never lived in Denver."

Their lives went in different directions. Rafferty boxed professionally, then joined the Philadelphia police. He married his wife, Razel, and they had four children. He and Leonard stayed in touch through the years, sometimes losing contact and then finding each other again, CBS Philadelphia reported. In all that time they had never met.

The phone call

They had spoken once, as teenagers. Rafferty said the call drew his whole family. "My whole family is hanging over me like you're from planet Mars," he said. "'Michael's talking to somebody from California.'" Leonard remembered taking the call in her bedroom, on her Princess phone.

Two Princess telephones on a wooden table, a dark green rotary one with its handset off the hook and a pale yellow push-button one — Princess phones, the small bedroom telephones Western Electric sold from 1959. Leonard took the one call the pen pals made as teenagers on hers.
Photo: Mcheath, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Monday

The meeting came about after Leonard told Rafferty she would be visiting Philadelphia with her fiancé, and the two arranged to meet at Dean's Bar, the station reported. Inside, Rafferty introduced her to family and friends, including his mother, who still remembers the St Gabriel programme that started it.

Over beers they went back through the letters they had written as teenagers. "I remember you had very nice penmanship," Leonard told him.

A large grey stone church with green copper trim and a curved apse, seen over an iron fence with a nativity scene and a stone cross in the garden — St Gabriel's church at 29th and Dickinson, the parish the school belongs to. Dean's Bar, where the two met, is a few blocks south at 29th and Tasker.
Photo: Jerrye and Roy Klotz, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Rafferty said the one thing the two of them agree on, in a time of social media and text messages, is the mail. "There's nothing like getting a letter in the mail," he said. "Everybody knows that."

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Written from the CBS Philadelphia report of 23 September 2026, which filmed the meeting at Dean's Bar; the quotes are from that report. The photograph of the two as teenagers and the 1984 letter is CBS Philadelphia's. The school, the church and the telephones are Creative Commons pictures from Wikimedia Commons, credited under each one.