Posted on 07/28/2004 9:27:34 AM PDT by locochupacabra
A few days after the Fourth of July and a few months after her father died, Omahan Jody Gardner relaxed outside her father's house near Lake Okoboji in Iowa.
Exhausted from a long day of settling her father's business, Gardner wearily watched a young man she didn't recognize walk toward her. He asked if she was Jody Gardner, and said he had found her billfold.
"I don't think I've lost it," she told him, but immediately felt a pang of panic as she followed him back toward the house.
Her billfold that day contained nearly $20,000. Gardner and her two sisters had closed out their father's accounts in town and thousands in cash and checks were in the wallet, in addition to all of Gardner's credit cards and ID.
Back at his pickup truck out front, the young man and his father - 48-year-old Tim Titterington and his son Dylan, 16 - presented Gardner her billfold.
It was tattered, ripped and empty.
"My heart just sank," Gardner said. "My father's whole estate was in that billfold, not to mention my whole life."
Someone must have found the wallet first, Gardner told them.
"No, I think we found all your stuff," Tim Titterington said. With that he pulled an old paper cup from the truck, stuffed full of hundred dollar bills, credit cards, checks and coins.
It was all there, every cent.
"I didn't know what to say," Gardner said. She offered the men a $100 reward, but they turned it down.
"All I could do was cry, hug them and say this was a miracle."
The miracle started earlier that afternoon when Gardner stopped at a grocery store in Milford, Iowa. Gardner had a lot on her mind, she said, dealing with her father's death. A few days earlier, they had spread his ashes above the lake behind his house while shooting off Fourth of July fireworks.
Lost in thought while loading the groceries into the car, Gardner left her billfold - stuffed with the unusual sum of money - on top of her car as she drove back to her father's house on the lake.
A short while later, the Titteringtons were surprised to see confetti flying around Iowa Highway 86 outside Milford, near their farm.
As they neared the churning mass of flying paper, kicked into the air by semitrailer trucks and cars running through it, they realized the debris was, in fact, cash.
"It was quite a sight, really," Tim Titterington said. "Twenties and hundreds are flying in the air, and it looked like confetti. Then you look down the highway and there's credit cards, receipts, coins . . . you name it."
They pulled to the side of the road and started collecting as many bills as they could find. They spent a full hour scouring a ditch and running into the highway, filling a paper cup with money, checks, credit cards and identification.
Then they went a step farther. They found an emergency contact number for Gardner, called that Omaha number and found out where her father's lake house was located. They then drove a couple of miles to the house to return the $20,000 to its owner.
"It could have been so easy to take all that money," Gardner said. "I had my driver's license in there, so all those checks could have been cashed, and there was so much cash."
But the Titteringtons never considered it.
"My father likes to be honest. He never does anything like that," Dylan Titterington said. "We're just farmers out here, and we've got most everything we need."
"You want to treat people the way you would like to be treated," Tim Titterington said. "So if you lose something, you hope somebody would be good enough to return it. For a 16-year-old, that's a valuable lesson. The good that you do, hopefully he'll learn from it."
Gardner said there's another lesson to be learned.
"We hear so much out there about the bad news that everyone gets kind of paranoid of each other," Gardner said. "Hopefully we can realize that there are a lot of good people out there, too."
God Bless them!!!
Luckily, everything turned out for the best.
Well God bless 'em!
Thanks very much for this story. :)
Made me smile.
Mid Western Values are still alive
Very kind act, but what a stupid lady.
Great story.
The Titteringtons are to be applauded. If her father owned a lake property at Lake Okoboji, his whole estate was not in that wallet. That is very expensive real estate.
Wow, this is amazing and wonderful. I mean it's one thing to find a full wallet and call its owner. It's another thing to spend all this effort to collect all the cash flying around, making extra sure to get it all, and...
Sometimes I am proud to be from Iowa
Michael Moore need not apply.............
Grief can do alot to someone in the midst of it..especially causing absentmindedness...grief can overwhelm the system...to call this lady dumb or stupid is unfair..Glad that she got her stuff back and God bless the farmer and his son for doing the right thing.
Wow. That story seems unreal. It's hard to fathom that there are still folks around like that,those who care more about others than their own personal gains.
They can't be liberals!
"but what a stupid lady."
I disagree!
She was very despondent from losing her father.
Thinking straight is not foremost on peoples mind, and usually very difficult, under those circumstances.
"You want to treat people the way you would like to be treated," Tim Titterington said. "So if you lose something, you hope somebody would be good enough to return it. For a 16-year-old, that's a valuable lesson. The good that you do, hopefully he'll learn from it."
What a great story, and what a great father! Dylan's lucky to be this man's son, and he seems to following in the old man's footsteps.
It occurs to me that the lesson that Titterington gave to his son that day was worth more than anything that wallet might hold.
Thank you for posting this heartwarming story. That father and son risked their lives going out on that busy highway to retrieve what she had lost and then went out of their way to locate and return it to her. May they be blessed for what they have done!
Hopefully, you can say that again in November. :(
Iowa has an annual bike ride across the state, I have rode in 4 of them. One year I lost a credit card and I had no idea I had lost the card. Upon returning to my home in Va. I recieved a phone call asking if I had lost my credit card. To make a long story short my credit card was int he mail to me the next day.
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