Neither time nor distance can keep friends apart

Decades ago as a youngster at Killbuck Elementary, Scott Mellor started a long-distance relationship with a pen pal who lived an ocean away in England.

Remarkably, that relationship has somehow stood the test of time, and after returning recently from a 20-day trek to the hillsides and small towns of England called Rotherham South Yorkshire, where he visited his pen pal Tony Tunstill, Mellor is thrilled he took the time to pick up a pen and make a friend many years ago.

A fourth-grader at Killbuck Elementary in the 1975-76 school year, Mellor and his classmates were invited by substitute teacher Carol Remington, who had just returned from Austria with her husband, to sign up on a pen pal site that Mellor thought was Big Blue World, and he said Tunstill remembers that being the pen pal program he signed up for.

Amazingly, the two had much in common. They were within a couple of weeks of age, they were both passionate about sports, they each collected stamps and it seemed like a perfect fit.

“We had a lot of common interests,” Mellor said. “He was a single child, and his dad was a machinist engineer in a steel mill in Sheffield, England.”

The two began writing back and forth to one another and did so diligently. They wrote and would send cards and photos. However, like many 10-year-old boys, other activities began to encompass life, and the two began writing less and less until it stopped altogether.

“I was going into ninth grade, and like it often tends to happen to young people in life, you begin to have different interests,” Mellor said.

Mellor kept all of his friend’s letters, but the contact ceased, and Mellor and Tunstill moved on to their own lives without one another.

Fast-forward to summer 1998 when Mellor, who was then livening in Indiana, went with his parents to Germany to visit his cousin Marty Nyhart, a career military sergeant in the U.S. Army.

One thing they didn’t realize was that when families come to visit family members in Europe, they have the availability of traveling and staying on weekend bus trips around Europe at little expense.

“We would get overnight accommodations, bus transportation for like $90,” Mellor said. “It just so happened that Marty and my family wanted to take a trip to London on a four-day, three-night trip.”

The trip went from Germany to France and then to Heathrow Airport to England.

Mellor had never been to England, had never seen Tunstill in person and had never actually talked to him, doing all of their correspondence via letters.

Even though they hadn’t connected for many years, Mellor decided to go to the concierge at their hotel and ask him about his letters from his pen pal. He told him the story of how they used to write all the time but grew apart and hadn’t written for 18 years.

“I asked the guy if there was any chance that he still lived there, and he said unlike Americans, British families tend to stay put once they find a home,” Mellor said.

They did an address inquiry and found out Tunstill’s parents still lived at that address.

Mellor said he started to develop a feeling of excitement.

He called the Tunstill home, and his friend’s mother answered the phone, but Mellor said she was somewhat flabbergasted that after 18 years someone would try to contact her son.

She handed the phone to her husband, who immediately knew who Mellor was.

He told Mellor their son lived only 1 mile away and would be thrilled to finally meet his pen pal.

Because of time restraints on the trip, the two never did connect, but the relationship was rekindled to the point that the two now-grown men began striking up their pen pal relationship.

In 1999 Mellor did make a point of visiting England for a couple of days with the sole purpose of finally meeting his friend.

Mellor said it was an incredible moment when they finally met, and they caught each other up on their lives in person.

“Once we reconnected, we realized we still had a whole lot in common,” Mellor said. “It was fantastic to reconnect. I know Tony was a really good soccer player, and if people didn’t know us, they probably would swear we were brothers because of our stature and mannerisms.”

Getting paired with someone who was so similar as a youngster was a stroke of luck, but Mellor said finally being able to reconnect was an even bigger stroke of luck.

The two men rekindled their passion for writing, and after 1999 they continued to write to one another.

On his recent three-week trek, he stayed with the Tunstills, and they dove deeper into each other’s lives. Mellor said he has English roots, and after a short time, he felt right at home trekking around the English world.

The Tunstills live in South Yorkshire, near Sheffield, and they took Mellor all around the countryside where Mellor’s family lived in Belper in Darbyshire, England.

“I felt like a regular English bloke for three weeks,” Mellor said. “We watched some futball (soccer). I looked up and visited some of my family heritage there.”

Mellor said he has met Tunstill’s family and considers them family. His hope is Tunstill’s family is able to come to Amish Country sometime soon so they can experience the beauty of where he lives.

“Their land in England is beautiful, and I was honored to be able to experience their culture for three weeks, and I hope that they can come here to visit my family and come to appreciate how beautiful it is around here,” Mellor said.

Sometimes not even time and distance can damper the spirit of friendship and the bond that was built an ocean away by two young boys who found it’s never too late to rekindle a meaningful friendship.