For many, a truly lost wallet is gone forever. Finding it is a lost cause.
Sharon Day was 16 years old when she lost her wallet in 1968.
She was a student at Fayetteville High School and believes she lost her wallet at a school dance.
Long ago, Day resigned herself to the fact she would never see it again.
Events leading to her reunion with her wallet started when the old high school closed in 2019.
A local contracting company started work to transform it into new apartments.
That work uncovered Day's billfold.
Bradley Scott owns the company doing the renovation work.
"This is the ductwork that we were breaking loose when it fell out and you can actually still see there's an old shoe in there. There's some other things," said Scott.
And that's not all.
"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 a hundred years," said Scott.
And Day's wallet was there, laying in the menagerie of long-forgotten items stuck in the duct like a time capsule.
"When we found that wallet that was something that 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 on the back of wallet photos, with a social security card in it- it was like well I think we can actually find this person," said Scott.
So Scott went on Facebook to try to track down the wallet's owner.
"My sister told me that I was on there and I said why? 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," said Day.
As Day combed through her wallet, she says she started remembering things about her life she'd forgotten.
"I was excited, you know, 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," said Day.
"Does it make you feel like you are in high school again?" asked reporter Gailyn Markham.
"Yeah," replied Day.
Day also reconnected with memories of youth, giving them new life -- all thanks to a long-lost wallet.
