The year was 1967, Robbinroger Beever was 15 years old and walking home along a beach in Liberia, West Africa. It was high tide and the sea had washed up seaweed and planks of wood and strewn them across the beach. Amid the debris, Beever spotted something glistening in the late afternoon sun. Curious, he approached it and found a whiskey bottle. There is something coiled inside, so he tried to open the bottle to no avail. It's probably just some kind of label, Beever thought but decided to take it home anyway.

Back home, he showed the discovery to his mother. They put it on the dining room table and after a bit of effort, they managed to prise the cap open. It wasn't a label, but a letter -- a message in a bottle.

"I threw this bottle off a merchant marine ship passing over the Equator near central Africa. My name is Gösta Mårtensson, I am a Swedish merchant marine." The letter was dated from 1965. Mårtensson had included a return address for his home in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Beever enthusiastically wrote back, introducing himself: an American teenager, one of two sons of a British-American father and an Austro-Hungarian-Dalmation mother from Trieste, Italy. He told Mårtensson the story of how he'd stumbled across the bottle. (Continued in the next post)

Mårtensson was thrilled his letter had found its way to a recipient, but he was in his late 20s. "I'm not the ideal pen pal for a 15-year-old," he thought. But he had an idea: he'd introduce this young letter writer to his wife's sister, Saija Kuparinen.

Kuparinen, 14, lived in Finland. She'd had no idea her brother-in-law had thrown a bottle off a ship near the Equator, but upon hearing the story she was eager to write to the boy in Liberia.
Kuparinen wasn't confident writing in English, so she composed a message in German, writing about her school, friends, family and life in Finland.

She hoped she'd get a response, but her letter travelling across the world felt like a longshot. But it wasn't. Beever got her letter and was delighted. He loved the idea of communicating with a girl in Finland.

He scrawled a response, and a connection was formed. Five decades later, the pair are still in touch, not only pen pals but close friends who've watched each other grow up from afar. [Read more]