California theater renovations uncover wallet lost 46 years ago

AP ^ | 6./4/21 | AP

[MAGA2017]

VENTURA, Calif. — A woman from Ventura was reunited with a wallet she lost 46 years ago after an employee working on remodeling Southern California's historic Majestic Ventura Theater discovered it inside a crawl space.

“I would have never imagined,” said Tom Stevens after locating the wallet among old candy bar wrappers, ticket stubs and soda cans.

Stevens told the Ventura County Star he then went on social media to try to locate the owner based on clues in the wallet, including old photos, a 1973 Grateful Dead concert ticket and a California driver’s license for Colleen Distin that expired in 1976. There was no money in the wallet.

“Does anyone know Colleen Distin?” he asked on the theater’s Facebook page. “While doing some maintenance we have found her wallet. There are a bunch of pictures of people, and they are super cool from that era also. Someone may want them. So if you are, or if you know Colleen, drop us a line and we will have it here for you!”

Stevens’ boss, Loanne Wullaert, suggested posting the information on social media.

“We’re at almost 1,000 shares, a ridiculous amount of comments and then it went to all these other sites,” Wullaert said Monday. “I think it’s cool that people care and are interested.”

[Flick Lives]

Accidental time capsule

[gundog]

Packed off by rats?

[marktwain]

Probably stolen, money taken, wallet tossed.

My best guess.

[Vermont Lt]

The story indicated there was no cash in the wallet when it was lost. It likely fell out of her pocketbook and into the space.

[Bogey78O]

I came across a wallet in a near exact same scenario. It was tossed by a crook as he moved through a field. I came across it two years later. Used the white pages to find a relative of the victim and returned his pics and such to him.

[skimbell]

No it wasn’t.
The woman said in the article that she put her purse on the floor and the wallet fell through a tear in the purse.

[Robert DeLong]

But it did contain: a $200 check.

[OttawaFreeper]

In somewhat related story, back in about 1993, I worked a summer job with a building contractor who did a fair bit of work at the local schools maintaining and fixing the gym equipment.

In any event, he had in his office an old six pack case of Canada Dry ginger ale bottles that had that distinctive look of what the case and the pop bottles looked like no later than 1970 or thereabouts. He told me that one day about one or a couple of years prior, he had been working at a school when he had to go into an old storage room and off in a corner was this pack of empty pop bottles.

He figured that all of those years ago, someone probably put the bottles there with the idea of going to the grocery store to return them for the deposit money but then forgot about them and they stayed there until they were discovered by he himself.

[butlerweave]

Is that $200 worth $939 today ,LOL

[HalfIrish]

I would have completely lost interest in reuniting the wallet with its owner as sound as I found the Grateful Dead ticket stub. Deadheads are not my cup of tea.

[fidelis]

By the look of that Cambridge shirt and hairstyle, it looks like the old gal is still a hippie.

[fidelis]

Cambridge = cambric.

Stupid spell check.

[Vermont Lt]

I think you and I are the only ones who read the article.

[Responsibility2nd]

A Deadhead in California. What are the odds? What are the odds?

[webheart]

The photo and concert ticket weren’t clues. They just looked at the driver’s license. Writers of news always want to show off. “Let’s see. Who was in this photo. Maybe we can figure out where it was taken. Or we can get a list of all the people who went to a Grateful Dead concert. Then we call everyone on the list but only the females. That will take half as long. This expired driver’s license doesn’t look too promising because it’s expired.”

[Robert DeLong]

Well that’s normal. 8>)

[Mr. K]

So you would be a douche bag about it?

[rlmorel]

I love stories like these. I also have an interesting story about the USS Rooks (DD-804) that my dad was on in Korea.

He reported to her as a LTJG in June 1951 at San Diego, CA, they went via the Panama Canal to Newport, RI, where they operated up and down the East coast until April 1952, when they went BACK down to the Panama Canal and on to Korea where he spent four or five months operating in and around Korea. They went into the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, and back to Newport, RI in April 1953.

During that deployment, he had proposed to my mom in a letter, and the wedding date was set for May 9th, 1953. When my dad's ship came in just a couple of weeks before the wedding, and he was able to finally get off and head up to Massachusetts for the wedding that was to take place in the next few days, he realized he had forgotten his dress shoes and the marriage license in his rack after he arrived home.

He drove all the way back to the ship in Newport got his shoes and license, but when he got back up the Massachusetts, he couldn't find the wedding license. He went back down again and went aboard the ship where he scoured the compartment and his rack, to no avail. Crestfallen, he had to go back without the license, but the office was closed for the weekend and he was unable to get another one. Someone he knew pulled a few strings, got the guy to come back in and he got a license, so the wedding went ahead as planned.

In the early Eighties, my mother got a call from South Korea (that was her account, no idea how the vessel ended up there) and the guy said they were breaking up an old WWII navy ship for scrap, and they had found a wedding license with her and my dad's name on it. They were breaking up the USS Rooks, and when they were tearing the compartment apart, they found it in a bulkhead.

Apparently what had happened, was my dad had got the certificate, put it on his rack, raised the mattress up to get the shoes underneath, and when he did, the license must have slid down a minuscule gap into the bottom of a dark bulkhead where it lay for 30 years until they tore it down.

They offered to send it to her, but I think my parents had been going through some tough times at that point, and the last thing on her mind was a piece of paper from her past about their wedding, so I think she told them somewhat curtly to throw it away...I wish she hadn't!

[libertylover]

Probably stolen, money taken, wallet tossed. ... My best guess.

Mine too.

I found a wallet once while I was walking which had been stolen during a home invasion only a few hours earlier. I had to go through it pretty carefully in order to find a snow bird's local address and I called him when I found it. It had no money in the usual place but, tucked deep inside, was a $20 Silver Certificate bill that the thief had missed. When I told him I had found the $20 bill, he started to cry and explained that his late wife had given him that $20 bill decades earlier.