When Gean Brown checked his answering machine a couple of weeks ago, he was surprised to hear from a man who said he’d found his wallet. Brown lost his wallet 35 years ago.
Shawn Wyckoff of Spring Hill was adjusting his TV antenna in his attic when he saw something black sticking up from the insulation. He always takes everything out of his pockets before he goes into the attic, so he was shocked to find a wallet. Upon opening it, he found a tattered selective service card and yellowed Vietnam War-era photos.
“I was going to do whatever I could do to get this wallet back to him,” Wyckoff said.
He started by calling the numbers on the contact list he found in the wallet, which was written in neat cursive on a torn-out piece of spiral notebook paper. All but one of the phone numbers had been disconnected, and he hit a dead end.
He looked at the photos in the wallet, wondering if any of the people pictured were still alive, or if the owner was still alive. The tattered wallet had been well-used before it was lost.
Wyckoff took to the Internet to continue his search, and soon a Gean R. Brown in Paola popped up on his computer screen.
Thirty-five years ago, Brown was living and working in Spring Hill. His building crew was in a home installing a flue pipe through the ceiling for a freestanding wood stove. Later, when he couldn’t find his wallet, he thought he must have kicked it down into a wall.
“You can’t go in there and knock someone’s wall down just for a darn wallet,” Brown said.
Although he went back to the house at least 10 times to look for it, he never found it and resigned himself to the fact that he had lost irreplaceable photos from his service days, of his children and a photo of his wife when she graduated from beauty school.
Brown said he volunteered to go to Vietnam, but a serious car accident during training left him honorably discharged. In a time when others burned their draft cards in protest, he kept his original discharge papers in his wallet.
“I wanted to prove to them I wasn’t running to Canada,” Brown said.
When Brown drove to meet Wyckoff and get his wallet back, he was happy that Wyckoff understood the value of those pictures and papers within his wallet. Brown’s story also helped Wyckoff and his wife figure out what the patch in the ceiling was from — the flue pipe that has since been removed. Although there was no money in the wallet, it still contained Brown’s driver’s license, Olathe Public Library card, Sears and Roebuck credit card, original Social Security card, and many memories Brown thought he’d lost forever behind some drywall.
“It’s a time capsule,” Wyckoff said. “It was like stepping back through and seeing someone’s life.”
