Oldfangled Legwork in Newfangled Times

By John Kelly
Tuesday, March 14, 2006

A departure lounge of Los Angeles International Airport and the English town of Walsall don't sound as if they'd have much in common, but two stories I heard recently have linked them in my mind.

We'll start at LAX, where Germantown's David Whiteis was standing in line to catch a flight back to Washington in February. He spied on the floor a tiny memory chip, of the sort that goes into a hand-held electronic device. David picked it up and slipped it into his pocket.

When David got back home, he looked around for something the dime-size chip would fit in. It fit into a Treo cell phone, but the chip bore no information that would help David return it to its rightful owner. No name, no address, no phone number, no e-mail.

What it did have were 107 digital photographs, group shots mostly, from what appeared to be the wedding of a bearded man and an Asian woman. Written in frosting on a wedding cake was a pair of names: Yuki and Roger.

If the cake had said "George and Laura" (or "Debra and Roger") it's doubtful that what David tried next would have worked. But "yuki and roger" was just distinctive enough that when he typed it into Google, David got a handful of hits. One was for a Web site that included photos from the very wedding depicted on the chip, right down to that cake.

The Web site was Roger Tragin 's.

"As you can tell from my accent, I'm from Australia," Roger told me last week on the phone from Seattle, where he lives. "I have friends and family, and they like to keep in contact with us and see what we're doing. . . . It's just intended for people I know, but it's open to the public, too."

That public included David Whiteis, who after a little more Googling was able to get a message to the office where Roger works as a software engineer. Turns out, the chip isn't Roger's. It belongs to a friend of his, C. "Jay" Jayakumar , who snapped the photos last spring at Roger and Yuki's wedding in Boston.

"Roger called and said, 'Did you lose something?' " said Jay, who lives in Torrance, Calif. "I'm like, 'What do you mean?' "

The tiny chip is now winging its way back to Jay. He might want to keep an eye on it. David said he dropped it, and it sat on the floor of his cubicle for half a day.

"I joked with a coworker that that little chip has little legs on it," said David.

Paper Trail

Sure, the Web might make it easier for bad guys to steal your identity and drain your bank account, but it also can bring us together in ways unimaginable just a few years ago. Then again, the letter -- the piece of paper that you put in an envelope and leave for a mail carrier -- works pretty well, too, which brings me to the second story.

Just ask Carol Murdock Scinto . In 1939, when she was 13 and living in Astoria, Ore., Carol found a pen pal in England. Dorothy Johnson was 13, too, living outside Leeds.

The girls wrote to each other several times a year, through the ups and downs of World War II: the Battle of Dunkirk, the Blitz, Pearl Harbor, D-Day, V-E Day, V-J Day.

In 1952, they met in person when Carol lived in England as a youth club leader for a British YWCA. By then, Dorothy was Dorothy Llewellyn, married with a 6-month-old son.

"Unfortunately, we lost touch after that, probably because of the exigencies of daily living," said Carol, who lives in Rockville. The demands of career and family, along with various moves, meant the letters stopped crossing the Atlantic. "But I never forgot Dorothy."

Three years ago, Carol decided to try to find her old pen pal friend. She didn't turn to the Internet but to the Royal Mail.

"I wrote to the two addresses that I had," she said: the first address and the last known address. "I remembered them. I didn't have to look them up or anything. They were just imprinted on my mind."

Carol knew it was doubtful Dorothy would be at either address, so she outlined her quest to the current residents. Both wrote her back. One said she didn't know Dorothy's whereabouts, but she knew that Dorothy's husband had been in the town's fire brigade. Maybe its members would have some information.

The owner of the house Dorothy had grown up in wrote to say that when his home was on a garden tour a woman had asked to see inside, explaining that she had grown up there. His neighbors knew how to get in touch with her.

That woman turned out to be Dorothy's sister. Through her, the pen pals made contact again.

I asked Carol why she had been so adamant about finding Dorothy. She thought for a moment. "I don't like to let people go, I guess. . . . That's about as good an explanation as I can give you."

Last month, Carol stepped off the train in Walsall, a town in the Midlands outside Birmingham.

Dorothy walked up and asked, "Are you Carol?"

After 52 years, the two 80-year-old women had a lot of catching up to do.

Catch up with me atkellyj@washpost.com.