Back before our world was endlessly connected with digital devices, connecting with strangers in other parts of the world was a more novel experience. That’s what Miss Alford wanted to explore with her second-grade students in the 1961-62 school year at Lake Highlands Elementary. Students wrote notes that they attached to helium balloons and released from campus.
Students were surprised and delighted when, a few weeks later, they received a letter all the way from Marianna, Florida. The balloon floated a full 750 miles, where a second-grade girl found it walking home from school one day. She brought it to her own school, where the class decided to respond. The experience launched a brief pen-pal exchange between the young students across the country.
The Dallas Morning News picked up the story (see the clipping above, preserved in a LHE PTA scrapbook), and it went viral across the country, even receiving a mention in the Saturday Evening Post.
