Woman Gets Wallet Back 75 Years After It Was Stolen
ByBill Galluccio
July 8, 2019
A decades-old mystery was finally solved during the demolition of Centralia High School in Illinois. The building was being torn down so a new church could be built. While knocking out the wall in the girl's bathroom on the second floor,a plumber discovered 15 wallets stashed behind it.
While the money was long gone, the wallets still contained school identification cards, and they all belonged to young women who attended the school in the 1940s. The wallets were also a time capsule of sorts, containing photos of soldiers who had been deployed during World War II.
Seth Baltzell, who is the pastor of City Hope Church, took a photo of the wallets and shared it on Facebook, hoping he could return them to their owners.
The relatives of 89-year-oldBetty June Sissomsaw the post and reached out to Baltzell. They told him that Sissom used to live in Centralia and moved about 85 miles away. Baltzell asked reporters from KSDK to personally deliver the wallet to Sissom.
"This is exciting. I can't believe after all of these years. It looks like it's old," Sissom told the news station.
Sissom could not believe somebody finally found her wallet, and still remembered what it looked like. It included photographs of her friends, which brought back memories of her time in high school.
"I remember it was red and I remember I lost my wallet... I can't believe this from all these years ago. That's me with a little boy by the name of Jimmy Kane, and I had a crush on him... Oh my goodness, look at the boy's pictures I have... They took all the money, huh?" Sissom told KSDK.