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May 23, 2009

STEPHANIE SALTER: Long before there was ‘BFF,’ they were best friends forever

By Stephanie Salter

TERRE HAUTE — Call it luck, fate, coincidence, divine providence or all four. Some things are just meant to be.

By all logic, a fairly brief connection made at Cruft Elementary School in the post-war 1940s between two little girls named Delight Mace and Julie Snyder should have sputtered and died out at many junctures.

It could have ended in 1950 when Julie’s father, who worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad, put 75 miles between the best pals by moving his family from Terre Haute to Indianapolis. It might have dissolved a few years later when the girls graduated from their respective high schools and Delight stayed in Indiana for DePauw while Julie went off to Ithaca, N.Y., for Cornell.

Reason would dictate that the friendship surely should have atrophied when Julie (now on her third college) moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to finish her bachelor’s degree at the University of California-Berkeley while Delight and her new husband moved to Boulder, Colo.

And why in the world the connection wasn’t severed in early adulthood, when Delight, back in Terre Haute, began to have babies and Julie was single and teaching high school English and history on the West Coast — well, it just doesn’t make sense.

But, as the old saying goes, “The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.”

It is now 64 years since the schoolgirl souls of Delight and Julie jumped out at one another and clasped hands. Born less than a month apart, the two women are 72. They have lived very different lives thousands of miles apart but, get them in a room together, and they still finish one another’s sentences.

“We always pick up pretty fast,” said Julie, of hundreds of phone calls and dozens of face-to-face visits.

“I can’t remember a time when we weren’t in communication,” Delight said. “It helps that our husbands get along so well.”

Both men, Delight’s Dick Dowell and Julie’s Dean Mayberry, were unceremoniously kicked out of the Dowells’ Collett Park living room late last week so their wives could talk about being friends for nearly seven decades.

Earlier this spring, the California-based Mayberrys decided to add a Terre Haute trip to their busy, early summer travel plans.

“I got an e-mail from Delight that said, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t send you a birthday card, but I’ve come down with cancer,’” Julie said. “I was just shocked.”

No more so than Delight was when she learned in March that the cause of her shortness of breath during tennis matches was stage-three lung cancer. In her whole life, she has never smoked.

“Stage three isn’t very good,” she said, “but I’m half-way through the chemo and the tumor has shrunk.”

Julie’s perpetually jiggling foot seemed to kick into a higher gear as her friend talked about her cancer. Then, almost jauntily, Julie said, “I haven’t been back here in five or six years anyhow and I thought, I need to get back and have a nice visit,” she said. Her voice grew softer and she threw a quick glance at Delight, adding, “We don’t know where it’s going.”

Delight is a foot jiggler, too, just a more subtle one. The shared characteristic — and variation — typifies so many aspects of the women’s lives.

They’ve much in common. In addition to their close birth dates (and Aries sign), both married English teachers. Dean taught high school in and around the Mayberrys’ Palo Alto home, and Dick taught college kids at Indiana State. Both Delight and Julie were English teachers, as well.

Social welfare is a theme in each of their lives, too.

Julie, who finished her teaching career as a public school librarian, has established and stocked a library in one of the poorest parts of Mississippi. After raising four children, Delight became involved in a local program that began eight years ago with the buying of backpacks and school clothes for two sisters, 8 and 10, and has grown into a surrogate grandmahood.

The sisters, now 16 and 18, think of Delight as part of their family; they call her their “angel.”

Yet despite all the common ground, Julie and Delight are no cookie-cutter pair. Asked whether, if they met today — say, side by side on an airplane — they likely would take to one another as they did at Cruft, the women paused. In unsentimental, matter-of-fact voices, they both replied, “No.”

“Delight’s a homebody,” Julie said. “I’m the traveler. And she’s always been very social. I was an isolano.”

Julie and Dean, who met one summer while working in a cocktail lounge at Harrah’s Tahoe resort, didn’t have children. Julie’s travel has never been of the ordinary variety, either.

“I like exotic places,” she said, “like Mongolia and Borneo. This fall, I’m going to Patagonia.”

Over the years, the Mayberrys and Dowells have taken trips together to national parks, around Indiana or up and down California’s coast. But mostly the women have fed their friendship through letters, hour-long phone calls and, now, e-mail.

Listening to them co-tell stories — like how Delight found out only hours before her water broke that she was having twins — you would assume the two had lived on the same block their entire lives. How could they possibly have known, at age 9 or 10, to pick such a perfect friend?

“How do you click in a friendship?” Julie asked. “I don’t know. I suppose part of it was, we’re both pretty outspoken.”

“Yes, we are,” Delight affirmed. “We went to Girl Scout camp together four straight years. We would have these spit-spats and refuse to speak to each other. Then, the next thing you know, we’d be walking through camp arm-in-arm.”

In the few short years their families lived in Farrington’s Grove, the girls rode their bikes everywhere, including back and forth to Cruft, where they were in different classrooms. They took dance lessons from Miss Ernestine — “I was a flop,” Julie remembers — and once marauded through the neighborhood pulling down Ralph Tucker’s political signs because they didn’t like or trust him.

When the Snyders moved to Indianapolis, Delight felt doomed. “I hated it,” she said. “My mother didn’t even drive.”

But Julie, still in junior high, wasn’t about to let physical distance cramp their style.

“I had free passes on the railroad because of my father. I just jumped on the train. I was over here all the time,” she said.

And so it’s been ever since, with jets taking the place of trains.

“I’m a tenacious person,” Julie said. “I still have a friend from when I was in kindergarten in New Jersey. When we moved to Indianapolis, I knew I wasn’t going to give up the friendship with Delight. I treasure this friendship, and kept it going because it means so much to me.”

Ditto Delight.

“I think it was good luck and coincidence,” she said, of meeting her friend at such a tender age. Asked if she can imagine her life without Julie in it, Delight didn’t hesitate. “No, I can’t,” she said.

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

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