Deanna Bakke has been corresponding with Jean Gray for 60 years.

Bakke lives in Austin. Gray lives in Australia.

The pen pals got together for the first time last week, when Gray and her brother, Geoffrey Stuemer, visited Austin.

Gray, a widow, is from Boonah in southeast Queensland, Australia.

Her brother, Geoffrey, a grazer/rancher and commercial photographer, is from Australia’s Gold Coast region.

The pair were making their first trip to the United States.

Deanna and Glenn Bakke, a retired Austin firefighter, have never been to Australia.

Through a six-decade exchange of hand-written letters, Deanna and Jean have come to know each other and countries that were only mysteries to them.

“I found her name in a Sunday school paper at Trinity Lutheran Church in Hayfield when I was 10 years old,” said Deanna (Hanson). “I found this name in the Sunday school paper, and I thought it would be really neat to have a pen pal from Australia.”

The year was 1948, and Deanna had no other pen pals.

“I had requested pen friends in my own Sunday school paper,” Jean said. “The editor used to send our names to an American Sunday school paper.”

Having an Australian pen pal was obviously a popular goal of American youths.

“In answer to my letter in the American Sunday school paper, I received 129 answers,” Gray said. “You can just imagine how surprised I was.”

To be certain, two of the 129 responses came from Canada.

“The letters I got were just so different,” said Gray, but there was an early link to the girls becoming life-long pen pals.

“Same age as me, same eye color, same hair color. I thought ‘Oh, we might look the same’,” Gray recalled.

The Australian was clearly the “serious” pen pal. She answered all of the 129 letters she received after the Sunday school paper introduction and thanked them for writing.

“I couldn’t write to them all so I told them ‘Thank you very much, but I will pass your letter on to someone else.’ which I did,” Gray said.

So began the exchange of letters that lasted — so far — 60 years.

The girls, then teens, then adults and now seniors exchanged four or five letters a year.

Trading family news and other.

School work, Sunday school, boyfriends, holidays and milestones: Weddings, birth of children, birth of grandchildren.

All the minutiae that makes up life.

“Snail mail” is becoming less used in the age of Internet e-mail, but the pair continued to hand write their letters.

“I like to write,” Gray said without adding an explanation.

The pen pals traded letters: Deanna would write Jean, Jean would answer and Deanna would write another letter and so on through the years.

“When the children came along, it might have gotten a bit slower, but we kept writing each other,” Gray said.

“For many years, we exchanged birthday and Christmas gifts, too,” Bakke said. “When it started costing more to mail the gifts than what we spent on the gifts, we stopped that.”

“We decided instead of gifts we would exchange photographs,” Gray said. “I would sooner get a picture from her than anything else.”

Bakke has collected pictures from Gray in her family photo albums: 24 in all.

Both women married. Gray married a grazer/rancher like her brother. “I’ve been on a farm all my life,” she said.

Married life and the birth of children expanded the topics of letter conversation.

Bakke became private secretary for a Hormel Foods Corporation executive.

The letters kept coming: Gray’s hand-written and Bakke’s typed when she retired from Hormel Foods.

Gray’s letters filled 2 or 3 pages, Bakke’s one single-spaced typed page.

Life on the Australian farm and life in Spamtown USA prompted more paragraphs of information.

“We shared everything,” Bakke said.

Everything, including recipes. “I still like your pumpkin bread,” said Gray.

For awhile, the pair exchanged tape recordings of family news.

Bakke had no other pen pal, but Gray did. She exchanged letters with a woman in Scotland for 45 years before the exchanged ended.

The American pen friendship was never severed.

“I never felt to any of my other pen friends in my life than I have to Deanna,” Gray said. “Deanna and I seem to have a lot more in common.”

So close did the pair become, through their letters, Gray, the only daughter in a family of four sons, calls Bakke, “the sister I never had.”

Their visit to the Bakkes last week included visits to local attractions: The Austin Fire Station, Spam Museum and the Mississippi River, to name a few.

Gray’s brother is himself a pen pal to correspondents in Minneapolis (55 years long) and Los Angeles (50 years long), where the pair went for a visit after leaving Austin.

Arlene Bjornson, a sister of Deanna’s, visited in Austin. She has been exchanging letters with a pan pal in Australia for 45 years.

Bakke said the link to how the long-distance friendship flourished may have been their Sunday school upbringing as children. “Both of us have been very active in church work all our lives,” Bakke said.

Gray said the key to the unique friendship is how much they are alike.

Bakke’s talent at writing her pen friend may have spilled over into Christmas cards: She mails 125 each December and “I write something in every one of them.”

The significance of 60 years of pen pal letters can’t be understated. At least not by this pair.

“We’ll write to each other until we die,” Bakke said.

“And, maybe, while we’re in heaven, too,” Gray said.