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From the inside

Ninety letters, six years, one P.O. box

Lonnie Mayhew was released from Ross Correctional in 2015. He wrote this for our tenth anniversary, and lets us keep it here.

Lonnie's story

What the tomato letter did

On getting mail from a stranger, writing back out of boredom, and how a librarian from Bexley ended up at my parole hearing.

Lonnie Mayhew · Co-founder and reentry lead

May 20196 min read

Bible being passed between two pairs of hands

The first letter was about tomatoes. Six plants, one of which she was sure had a disease, and a question at the end about whether I had ever grown anything. I had not. I wrote back mostly because it was a Tuesday and there was nothing else to do.

I told her about my grandmother's garden on Sullivant Avenue, the collard greens and the bucket of rainwater. Four pages. I did not expect an answer. Three weeks later the officer called my name at mail call and I did not move, because nobody had called it in two years.

The middle letters

We wrote about nothing much for a long time. Her library, my GED classes, the Buckeyes. Somewhere around letter thirty she asked if she could pray for my mother, who was sick, and I said yes because I was tired of being the only one who was.

She never once asked what I did. When I finally told her, her next letter was about tomatoes again.
Lonnie Mayhew

By the time I was moved to a lower-security prison we were on letter sixty-something. She came to visit twice. She sat at my parole hearing in a green coat and read out a paragraph from one of my own letters, which I had forgotten writing.

Marjorie keeps every one of Lonnie's letters in two shoeboxes in the mail room. He keeps hers in a filing cabinet.
Marjorie keeps every one of Lonnie's letters in two shoeboxes in the mail room. He keeps hers in a filing cabinet.

Letter ninety

The last letter I wrote from inside said I would see her at the gate. I did. She brought a tomato. Within the year we had put a notice in nine church bulletins asking for writers, and forty-one people answered.

There are men on my old block who still have never had a letter. That is the whole reason we keep going.

Lonnie Mayhew

In his words

I tell new writers the same thing every time. You are not writing to a prisoner. You are writing to a man who has a mail slot, and nobody has put his name on an envelope in years.
Lonnie MayhewCo-founder, writing since 2009

Since 2009

From one pen pal to three hundred

We have never had an office. We have had a very good P.O. box.

  1. 2009

    A notice in the bulletin

    Marjorie answers a request from a prison chaplain and writes her first page to Lonnie.

  2. 2015

    Letter ninety, and a tomato

    Lonnie comes home. Forty-one people answer a call for writers in nine church bulletins.

    Letter ninety, and a tomato

  3. 2017

    The P.O. box

    After a writer's address is passed around a cell block, every letter starts going through one box. It has done ever since.

  4. 2020

    Lockdown letters

    Visits stop across Ohio. Our writers send 2,900 letters in nine months, and the stamp fund runs dry twice.

  5. 2023

    Writing nights at Oak Street

    The fellowship hall in Olde Towne East becomes home on the second and fourth Tuesday.

  6. 2026

    Fourteen prisons

    Three hundred and eleven people inside are writing back, including our first pen pals on death row.

Somebody on Lonnie's old block is waiting for a first letter.

We will match you with someone who has had no mail this year.

Write your first letter Read the rules first