A Canadian high school recently made an unexpected discovery during renovations when workers found a wallet belonging to a 17-year-old student who had lost it 51 years ago behind a restroom wall. The school has since located the owner of the wallet and reunited him with it.
Located in Stoney Creek, Ontario, the high school’s administrator, Lorna MacQueen, stated that on August 26, construction workers uncovered the wallet behind a wall while demolishing one of the school’s restrooms.
The wallet belonged to Tom Schopf, a 17-year-old student at the school in 1974. Inside the wallet were personal items such as a student ID, driver’s license, social insurance card, photos of family and friends, European railway tickets, a price list from a Canadian brewery, and a hockey game ticket.
MacQueen expressed to local media the excitement of finding and seeing these items that existed before they were even born. “We thought, ‘We have to find this person and give it back to him. After 50 years, he must want it.'”
With the help of Facebook, MacQueen and her team successfully located Schopf, now 67 years old. Schopf initially thought it was a prank since they mentioned the wallet contained his social insurance card and birth certificate, items he already had. However, upon realizing he had updated them, he decided to visit the school.
On August 29, Schopf visited the school and confirmed that the wallet was indeed the one he had lost years ago. He discovered a childhood photo of his family home built in 1960, where his mother still resides.
As for how Schopf’s wallet ended up hidden behind a restroom wall for half a century, both he and MacQueen speculate that he may have lost it in the restroom, someone found it, took the cash inside, discarded it on the ceiling tiles, and it eventually ended up behind the wall.
Interestingly, a similar event occurred in Ontario in 2020, where a wallet lost for 54 years was returned to its owner. Christopher Camacho, a resident of Port Dover, found a wallet in an old bench containing a check dated June 1966, Ontario Ministry of Transportation documents, a social security card, a dog permit, and a driver’s license.
Camacho identified the wallet’s owner as 86-year-old Darcy Major through the contents and returned the wallet to him after locating Major’s children via Facebook.
Major expressed to local media, “Despite everything being expired, it’s still exciting. Honest people returned it. They could have just thrown it in the trash. It’s great to have people like that.”
These heartwarming incidents of lost wallets being reunited with their owners showcase the power of honesty and the unexpected connections that can be made even decades later.