In 1951, Mary Starn and her colleagues were working at an Iowa factory, repetitively packing eggs into cartons, when they “hatched a goofy plan to liven up their workday”, reported The Washington Post.
In their own version of messages in a bottle, they wrote their names and addresses on eggs destined for the US east coast, in a bid to attract pen pals. “Whoever gets this egg, please write me,” Starn pencilled onto several eggs, along with her home city of Forest City and the date, 2 April.
After failing to get any responses, the group figured their special eggs had “long ago been cracked into omelettes” and gave up on ever hearing from anyone.
But, extraordinarily, 72 years later, one of the eggs turned up on a Facebook group called “Weird (and Wonderful) Secondhand Finds That Just Need To Be Shared”, in a post by a man from New York City.
John Amalfitano said he had been given the egg 20 years earlier by a neighbour on Staten Island, Miller Richardson, who’d kept it for years after finding it in his egg carton in 1951.
Thanks to the social media post, Amalfitano was able to contact Starn, now 92. “I’m happy to have a new friend,” she told the paper. “I finally have my pen pal.”