Pat DeReamer turned 95 this year. The card waiting in her mailbox was already older than most people's grandchildren.
It arrived in 1944, when Pat was 14 and new to Indianapolis. Her family had just moved during World War II, and she didn't know many people. Mary Wheaton did something simple: she was kind to her. They became friends.
For Pat's birthday that April, Mary gave her a card with a cartoon dog on the front and a dinosaur skeleton inside. The message was playful and slightly absurd—a joke about how long it would take Pat to become "an old fossil." Pat loved it enough to keep it. A month later, for Mary's May birthday, Pat signed the card, dated it, and sent it back.
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Start Your News Detox"We never said, 'We're going to do this'," Pat told WLKY News. "It just happened. Every year it would give us some reason to call each other and talk."
That's how traditions begin sometimes—not with a plan, but with a small gesture that feels good enough to repeat. And repeat they did. For 81 years.
A Card That Outlasted Everything Else
The decades stacked up. Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. The internet was invented. Email killed the greeting card industry for most people. But the card kept traveling back and forth between Pat and Mary, crossing state lines as their lives took them in different directions. After 60 years of exchanging it, they earned a Guinness World Record for the longest greeting card exchange.
What's striking isn't the record itself—it's what the card represents. It's a physical object that survived wartime relocation, adult life, separation, and the entire digital revolution. It's proof that some friendships don't need reinvention. They just need someone willing to sign and send.
Pat will sign the card again this year. She'll date it. She'll put it in the mail to Mary in May, just as she has for over eight decades. The dog will still be there on the front. The dinosaur will still be waiting inside. And two women who met when the world was at war will have another reason to call each other and talk.
Some things don't need to change to matter.
