By ANEEKA SIMONIS
IT’S been 70-odd years since basketball mates Don Armour and Ken Pettitt had last seen each other – but it felt like no time at all according to the men who made a surprise reunion in a Berwick hospital last week.
Don, 93, and Ken, 90, both from Pakenham, began playing basketball together in the late 1940s after making a safe return from the war overseas.
The team-mates, too modest to say who was better on the courts, split ways after getting married in the ’50s and taking up different jobs.
Although they had each spared a thought about one another in the decades that passed, neither had seen nor heard from the other.
Or at least until last week when, by chance, the two men were placed in the same hospital room at the St John of God hospital, in Berwick.
It wasn’t an immediate reunion, said Ken, who admitted he did not recognise his long lost friend by appearance 70 years on, instead making the chance finding when a nurse called Don’s name.
“I thought … there couldn’t be two Donny Armours so I asked him and we got talking and that’s how it turned out,” he laughed.
The pair, who both moved to Pakenham roughly six years ago, had not crossed paths in that time.
Making up for lost time, Don and Ken have put their time in recovery to good use – sharing stories about their happy, half-century-long marriages and their many great-grandchildren.
“Our stories haven’t varied too much over the time,” Don said.
The hospital’s marketing co-ordinator Lisa Carman admitted the chance reunion was one of the more unique stories to have flourished within the hospital walls.
