Mary and Royce Thorpe pose at their wedding on December 18th, 1965.
This story is about love, and war. And a mysterious piece of paper.
Fifty-three years ago, Royce Thorpe was cleaning a US Navy barracks in California when he found a scrap of paper. He didn't look at it, but he stuck it in his wallet so he could throw it away later. That bit of paper would change his life. But at the time, Royce forgot all about it.
He was assigned to a ship that was headed for Vietnam, and during the trip he spent a night standing watch in Hong Kong. “Middle of the night, nothing's going on,” he remembers. “So I thought, okay, I'll clean out my wallet.”
When he finally looked at that paper, he saw the Oregon address of a woman named Mary. So he sat down and wrote her a letter. “I wasn't nervous about it,” Royce says. “I once wrote a letter to President Eisenhower. I'd never meet him before, either! It was just something different to do.”
Mary was still in high school. She remembers receiving the letter and calling her mother. “I had no idea how old he was, nor did I know what he looked like,” she says. Her mother said she might as well write back.
Mary told him about high school, and Royce wrote about life in the Navy. They traded photographs. “I always would spray the letters with perfume,” says Mary, laughing. Eventually, Royce got 3 weeks of leave, and he decided to visit her on the way to his hometown in Michigan.
The day they met, they shook hands and looked at each other. After all those letters, it felt completely natural to be together. The two of them started exploring the state together, going on walks and visiting Mary's favorite places.
Dallas, Oregon had a population of a few thousand people. Royce and Mary became the talk of the town. “I never did make it back to Michigan,” he says. He stayed in Oregon until he had to ship back out with the Navy.
They corresponded for three years. “I think in letters, your heart comes out about who you really are, about what you believe in and what your values are,” says Mary. “That's what I got from him.”
Finally, the pair met up again, when Royce had a few days of leave in California. That was in 1965. During a fancy lamb dinner, Royce got down on one knee.
On December 18, 2015, Mary and Royce celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary.
To this day, they're not sure how they managed to meet. Mary has a theory. While she was still a teenager, she worked with a young woman who was dating a Navy man. “She asked me if I wanted to have a penpal,” Mary recalls.
She politely refused. But maybe, just maybe, that was how her address ended up in a Navy barracks all those years ago. “That's the only clue,” she says.
“It's a mystery,” Royce says. “We'll never know for sure how it happened. But it did. And it's all good. Fifty years worth of good.”