Oh happy Day.
A West Virginia woman who lost her wallet more than 50 years ago has been reunited with the missing pouch, according to news reports Thursday.
Sharon Day seemingly misplaced the item during a high school dance in 1968 when she was 16 — and thought she’d never see it again. Confused contractors reported discovering the wallet in the ducts of the school building when it underwent renovations to become apartments.
“This is the ductwork that we were breaking loose when it fell out,” Bradley Scott, owner of New River Contracting in Fayetteville, told local outlet WDTV, as he gestured at the school ceiling. “You can actually still see there’s an old shoe in there. There’s some other things.”
Day, left, was thrilled to be reunited with her lost wallet, all thanks to a clever contractor. WDTV 5
The wallet was full of forgotten memories and even Day’s Social Security card. WDTV 5
The duct had been bolted shut for decades, Scott revealed, so the construction unearthed a time capsule of miscellaneous belongings, including tickets to a boxing match, shoes and Day’s wallet.
Scott said he was determined to find the owner of the wallet, taking to Facebook to hunt Day down. He claimed to have found her in less than a week.
“When we found that wallet, that was something there was just instantaneously very different about it, like, this is something that we can identify as the personal property of someone that might very well still live in this area and with all the wallet photos and names of the back of wallet photos, with a Social Security card in it, it was like, ‘Well, I think we can actually find this person,’” Scott explained.
Day hadn’t given the wallet a second thought since it went missing all those years ago.
“I didn’t ever think about having something like that 54 years from when I had it,” she recalled, adding that her sister informed her of Scott’s inquiry.
As Day sifted through the graveyard of memories, she said she was “excited” to re-discover her old belongings and photos that had been locked away in the ceiling of her alma mater. She admitted it felt like she was back at Fayetteville High School, which closed for good in 2019.
The closed school was undergoing renovations to be turned into apartments. WDTV 5
Day vows to make a scrapbook of her rediscovered memories that allowed her to relive high school all over again. WDTV 5Now she plans to craft a scrapbook of the rediscovered photographs and half-century-old memorabilia from her wallet.
“I was excited because I knew there was things that was mine that belonged to me, and I like my pictures of the people that I went to school with and friends,” she gushed. “It’s something that I never thought I would see or know what was going on about it.”
