Committed Correspondence Local Woman And Italian Man Maintained Pen Pal Relationship For More Than 20 Years

She was a young girl from Moses Lake, he was a young boy from Reggio Calabria, Italy, when they first began to write.

“I am your Italian correspondent,” Giulio Di Raco wrote Lavonne Sturm on Jan. 26, 1976.

So he remained for 20 years. Through high school and college, through the birth of her two sons, through medical school and heartbreak, through their teens and 20s into their 30s, the two pen pals wrote.

They exchanged up to a letter a month, tucking photographs, 45-rpm records and homemade cards inside. Charles Schulz made a fortune off them - Snoopy cards were their special joke - and so did the phone company.

They became each other’s oldest, best and closest friend. They loved each other.

And then they met.

Reality, reached when she traveled to Milan in 1994, was not what they envisioned.

“In the letters you see a different picture, you see someone, you read him, but you build him in a different way,” said Sturm, a 35-year-old mother of two.

“She had all these problems in her life,” said the 36-year-old Di Raco. “She was a person, not a room in my mind. It was the most difficult moment.”

She was less adventurous than he expected. He was less open. He was so Italian, and she, so American. Their lives were so complicated.

Disappointed, expectations erased, the two pen pals retreated into their respective lives.

And then, despite that, they again began to write.

Last week, Sturm and Di Raco walked at Riverfront Park and smiled over his first impressions of this country: how dirty New York was, how chaotic, the terrible man at the airport who thought Di Raco was a terrorist.

Di Raco, an ear, nose and throat physician, arrived in Spokane for a two-week visit Aug. 12.

Their visit seemed a cross between a family reunion and a first date.

“We’re starting over, but now with reality. Our feet are on the ground,” Sturm said.

A physician specializing in problems with singing voices, Di Raco also teaches music at a conservatory in Verona. Sturm is a health unit coordinator at Sacred Heart Medical Center and a single mother, raising Aaron, 14, and Andrew, 10.

“She is for me, like a part of my mind. When I have a thought I have to put it in her department,” Di Raco, said.

“When I’m with him, the emotions are going everywhere,” said Sturm. “I feel like the sun. I’m beaming.”

They were teenagers when Sturm obtained his name and address through the television program “The Big Blue Marble” and began the correspondence.

He wanted to practice his English, she wanted a friend. They wound up writing their deepest thoughts.

“You put into your letter all your deepest feelings that never come up with your family and friends. You don’t have the stops of seeing how someone reacts,” he said.

Neither married. When she became pregnant and moved to Spokane in 1982, she took a deep breath and wrote him everything.

“He wrote back, saying a child can add so much joy,” she remembered.

Sturm is glad she took the step in 1994 to meet the man who knew her better than just about anyone.

“I had to end that fantasy, that person on paper and see him as a person so I could go on with my life,” she said.

Tuesday he wore the silver bracelet she sent him at 15. At 15, he had thought he would marry her.

Now, the pen pals, older, wiser, are finessing a new relationship, an adult friendship, based on flesh and blood. Pen pals turned friends for life.

“It’s better, of course, but our ‘room’ remains,” he said.

“You can change your life. But ‘Your friend forever’ is something fixed.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo