20 Years After Wrong Number Call, RI Man, FL Woman Finally Meet On Thanksgiving Eve

DELRAY BEACH, FL — Misdialed phone calls 20 years ago blossomed into an unlikely friendship between a South Florida woman, now a great-grandmother, and a Rhode Island man who was then in his mid-20s and now has a family of his own.

They spoke regularly for two decades thanks to those wrong-number calls, but they never had the opportunity to meet in person — until last week, when Mike Moffitt, 46, surprised Gladys Hankerson, 80, at her Delray Beach home the day before Thanksgiving.

Their calls started in 2001, when one of Hankerson’s sons died from cancer. She was trying to reach her sister in Maryland to share the sad news when she accidentally called Moffitt, who lives in South Kingstown, about a half-hour south of Providence.

When she dialed her sister, she mixed up the area code. Instead of dialing the 410 area code for Maryland, she’d mistakenly dial 401 for Rhode Island, Moffitt told Patch.

And it didn’t happen just once; she kept calling back.

“She was using the wrong area code and kept getting me,” he said. “She’d quickly hang up but was real polite.”

Finally, after multiple misdials, he asked what her name was.

“We might as well get to know each other if we’re going to keep talking like this,” he told her.

From there, their phone calls to one another became intentional.

“We’d make small talk. Talk about the weather. And she started telling me about her family, her sons, daughters, sisters,” Moffitt said. “And she always asked about my kids.”

For the first few years, Hankerson was saved in his cell phone as “Florida Lady.” His kids would get a kick out of her name flashing across the screen when she called.

“And there’s my daughter yelling across the house, ‘Florida Lady is calling,’” he said.

Over time, their friendship grew into something more meaningful than small talk. A few years back, when there was a death in her family, her son even called Moffitt to let him know.

“He called me from her same number and said, ‘Mom wants you to know so-and-so died,’” Moffitt said. “I could tell at that point what our calls meant to her. I knew it meant something to her as opposed to just talking about the weather, small talk. You could tell it meant a lot more to her.”

He added, “And it goes both ways.”

He’s sent her flowers for her birthday and when her loved ones have died. They speak “every couple of months,” he said. “Sometimes there’s a bigger stretch and I start to get worried about her. That’s when I call her.”

Hankerson told Patch that she’s not surprised by their friendship, despite the age gap and geography between them. She described herself as someone who has always made friends easily.

“I’m always a very nice person to other people,” she said. “I talk to him nice, and he talks to me nice. We’re friends.”

Over the years, Moffitt has occasionally made trips to Florida with his family and had long wanted to make a stop in Delray Beach to visit Hankerson. Last Thanksgiving was the closest he got to seeing her, since they were flying out of Fort Lauderdale.

“But I just couldn’t make it happen with my family of five,” he said.

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This Thanksgiving, he and his family were visiting Florida colleges and universities with his daughter when they found themselves in West Palm Beach.

While stuck in traffic because of a drawbridge on State Road A1A, Moffitt pulled up his map to reroute directions and realized how close he was to Hankerson.

“Holy s---, we’re in Delray Beach," he told his family. "We’re going to see Gladys.”

They stopped at Trader Joe’s to get some flowers and showed up at her home to surprise her.

Hankerson didn’t recognize Moffitt when he pulled up.

“Then he said, ‘I’m Mike from Rhode Island,’ and I said, ‘Oh yeah, you’re my friend,’” she said.

Once she realized who he was, she threw up her arms and said, “I’m blessed,” Moffitt said.

She invited his family to join her on her back patio.

“It was very nice of him to visit, very nice of him,” she said.

His family felt right at home, he said. “There’s a very old Southern charm to her. We don’t get that up here (in Rhode Island). We walked right in and there were grandbabies in diapers, food on the stove for Thanksgiving. It was really, really neat.”

Family is the most important thing in Hankerson's life, she said.

Born in the Carolinas, she’s lived in Delray Beach since she was a child. For 51 years, she worked for golf pro Bob Murphy at Delray Dunes Golf and Country Club.

And she raised her family — five boys and five girls — there.

“I have four girls living now and three boys,” Hankerson said. “It’s a large family. A lot of grandkids and great-grandkids. I haven’t counted them all up.”

During her brief visit with Moffitt, they took a picture together. While he shared it on Facebook, the great-grandmother isn’t on social media. So, instead, she plans to hang it in her home alongside other photos of loved ones.

“I’m going to take it to have it enlarged and put it on the wall,” she said.

Now that they’ve met, Moffitt expects their calls to happen a little more frequently.