Construction work often means things are destroyed to make room for new places. Workers usually don’t expect to find missing items, especially ones that have been missing for decades. But one West Virginia company got to be the heroes for a day after finding an unexpected item inside an air duct of a recent renovation job.
They were working at an old high school that was being turned into apartments, when contractors noticed an item falling out of the ceiling they in the process of tearing down. And just like that, they were time travelers.
Photo by WVVA
It was 1968 and Sharon Day was just 16 years old when she attended a dance at her high school. Like all young girls, she was excited to dance and happy to hang out with her friends. But when she left that evening, she couldn’t find her wallet. And after searching with no luck, she gave up on ever seeing it again.
I didn’t ever think about having something like that 54 years from when I had it,” she said.
Bradley Scott, owner of New River Contracting, showed the news station the ceiling where they located the missing wallet, as well as a host of other items they found. “This is the ductwork that we were breaking loose when it fell out,” he said.
“You can actually still see there’s an old shoe in there. There’s some other things,” he said. They also found an assortment of items, including tickets to a boxing match, shoes and Day’s wallet. “We broke the duct loose for the first time in about 100 years,” he said.
Photo by WVVA
“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 said.
Shockingly, it took Scott less than a week to locate Day’s sister, who called Sharon to tell her the news. “She said they found something for you,” Day said. “I didn’t think about having something back like that.”
“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 said. “It’s something that I never thought I would see or know what was going on about it.” Day said that she was going to take the items from her wallet and make a scrapbook so she’d always have access to the memories ‒ maybe for another 54 years.
