Pen pals finally meet – after more than 60 years: “It’s great”

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CHATHAM — Carol Robert’s sister’s marriage in 1956 sparked a pen-pal friendship that spanned more than 60 years and finally reached a milestone in person Sunday.

Robert’s new brother-in-law, Jim Toler of West Virginia, told him that his brother had a daughter named Chyrl who would like to be his pen pal.

Some 68 years after that pen-pal friendship began in 1956, Robert finally met Chyrl Butler in person for the first time on Sunday in Chatham-Kent, where Robert lives.

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“It’s a great feeling,” Butler, who lives in Maine, said of meeting Robert and his daughter, Chyrl Roelans.

When asked if they felt like they already knew each other, Robert replied: “That’s true. I feel like I’ve known her forever.”

Robert was 11 and Butler was 9 when they began corresponding. Over the years, they shared life experiences, including those about children and family.

When asked why she named her daughter Chyrl with the same rare spelling as her pen pal, Robert said: “At the time, we wrote to each other a lot. I liked the name and I said, ‘Chyrl, that’s different,’ and that’s what happened.”

Life seemed to take over the times Robert and Butler had planned to meet over the years. Additionally, as life became busy, correspondence between the two came and went.

But Roelans saw Butler on Facebook and asked her mother if she was named after him. So Roelans reached out to Butler a few years ago through social media and a new connection was made.

A friendship formed between Roelans and Butler as they shared the problems they had with Chyrl’s spelling.

“It’s a nightmare with our name, it really is,” Butler said with a laugh.

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She listed the many names she had been given, as well as the mispronunciations of her name. She said people often insisted on switching the “r” and “y” in the spelling of her name.

“People would say to me, ‘You don’t have a vowel in your name,’” Butler said. “And I’d say, ‘Yes, AEIOU and sometimes Y. I’m sometimes Y.’”

Roelans says she tells people who question the spelling of her name, “The ‘y’ is in the middle…and they still don’t get it.”

She often has difficulty with spelling in government offices and has even been told her name is misspelled.

Butler admitted that her mother got the name Chyrl from a story in the old True Story magazine.

Now that they were together for the first time, they had plans to see each other, have dinner together, and catch up. But they didn’t divulge any details.

“We won’t tell you all the personal stuff,” Robert said with a laugh.

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