Oak Hill woman sees lost wallet returned after nearly 60 years

FAYETTE COUNTY, W.Va. (WVVA) - Sharon Day was 16 years old when she lost her wallet. The year was 1968.

Day was a student at what was then Fayetteville High School. Looking back, she thinks she lost her wallet at a school dance and had made peace that she would never see it again. But little did she know that after the school closed in 2019, a local contracting company would begin renovating it, turning the space into living apartments.

“This is the ductwork that we were breaking loose when it fell out,” said Bradley Scott, owner of New River Contracting in Fayetteville as he pointed to a bent piece of old metal in the ceiling of the Historical Fayetteville Grade School, “and you can actually still see there’s an old shoe in there. There’s some other things.”

Scott explained that this duct, which the entrance to had been bolted shut by the school years and years before, would have never been exposed had it not been for their renovation.

“There was some old admission tickets to a boxing match and some other things that all fell out of there when we broke that loose and opened it up for the first time in 100 years.”

And there lying in the menagerie of lost items was Sharon Day’s wallet.

“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.’”

So, Scott went on Facebook in the hopes of tracking down the wallet’s owner. He found Day in less than a week.

“My sister told me that I was on there, and I said, ‘Why?’” Day recalled. “She said they found something for you, so it was really...I didn’t ever think about having something like that 54 years from when I had it.”

As Day combed through her wallet, she said she began to remember things about her life that she had forgotten.

“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. It’s something that I never thought I would see or know what was going on about it.”

When asked if the wallet made her feel as if she were right back in Fayetteville High School, Day gave an easy answer.

“Yeah.”

Day says she plans to put together a scrapbook of all the photos and notes in the wallet so that it can, hopefully, survive another 54 years.

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