NYC woman finds long-lost friend with help of old photo and lucky Facebook post: ‘I started crying’
NY Post
An old photo album, a social media plea and a key stroke of luck reconnected an Upper West Side woman with a long-lost friend she hadn’t seen or spoken to in three decades.
When Jennifer Calcano found a charming photo in a scrapbook a few years ago of her and an older girl she knew growing up in the 1990s, she wondered what happened to her childhood pal.
The older girl, Kimberly Mendez, played an integral part in Calcano’s childhood, walking her to now-shuttered St. Gregory’s Catholic School every day for two years when Calcano, now 36, was too young to go alone and her mother was too ill to take her there.
The girls both lived on West 90th Street a few buildings apart, but lost contact in 1995 after Mendez graduated from the school that only ran until 8th grade back then. Calcano was in 3rd grade at the time.
“She treated me like I was cool,” recalled Calcano. “We would just walk and talk and then she would drop me off at my class and she would go to hers.”
The photo discovery prompted a years-long search that seemed destined to fail.
