Friends for 80 years, these childhood besties still meet for lunch once a month

(Image credit: iStock)

published 27 March 2018

They met in grade school and just never grew apart, sticking together for all of life's major events: Graduations, weddings, births, and deaths.

The six women — Joyce Sindel, 85; Arlene Dunaetz, 85; Armony Share, 86; Charlotte Gussin-Root, 85; Jackie Waterman, 86; and Helen Bialeck, 85 — bonded while attending Sheridan Street Elementary in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights. Once a month, they gather for lunch to reminisce about the past and chat about what they're up to now, but that's not to say they don't sometimes disagree over things. "We fight all the time," Waterman told the Los Angeles Times. "But we fight like sisters, right?"

Over the years, they've traveled together, and during a trip to San Francisco in the 1970s, they managed to get separated — but ended up all walking into the same random restaurant. "Can you imagine?" Gussin-Root said. "That's still a mystery to me." One of their latest adventures was appearing in a Facebook commercial that aired during the Golden Globes — Sindel decided late in life to become an actress, and she had answered an ad for an older woman with a lot of friends. "We know each other," she told the Times. "We know our histories. With these girls, there's never any pretense."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Explore More

Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Subscribe to The Week

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox