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Her wrong number became a 20-year friendship

Gladys Hankerson only meant to call her sister in Maryland. She kept dialing 401 instead of 410, and a man named Mike kept picking up. more

Mike Moffitt was using a Nextel flip phone back then, and he had a rule that came from his father. "My dad said always answer your phone," he says. "You never know who it is." So he answered, and the voice on the line wasn't the sister Gladys was hoping for.

It happened a couple more times that day. Then again the next week, and maybe the next month. Gladys kept calling, and Mike kept answering.

At last he caught her before she could hang up. "Sweetheart, before you go, who are you? Where are you from?" he remembers asking. And they just started talking.

Gladys told him she was trying to reach her sister, and then that her son had passed away. She was divorced, and it was a hard time in her life. Mike said he was so sorry. "He was talking real nice to me," she says, "and I was talking nice to him."

After that she wrote his number down on paper and kept calling him. When she was downhearted, she says, he "lifted me up. He was real nice." The calls kept going for twenty years.

Then, over a Thanksgiving holiday, Mike and his family were in Florida. He surprised her at her home in Delray Beach. "Just walked in and I said, I'm Mike," he says. "She just threw her hands up and she said, I'm blessed."

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Gladys Hankerson only meant to call her sister in Maryland.

Gladys called it the best Thanksgiving ever. They're not strangers anymore. "Seem like a family member to me," she says. She wishes more people could be like that, because then, as she puts it, "the world would be better too."

It all started with two digits in the wrong order. The number she first dialed by mistake is the one she has been calling on purpose ever since.