Wallet on ice for five decades comes home
Paul Grisham’s wallet was missing for so long at the bottom of the world that he forgot all about it. Fifty-three years later, the 91-year-old San Diego man has the billfold back, along with mementos of his 13-month assignment as a United States Navy meteorologist in Antarctica in the 1960s.
‘‘I was just blown away,’’ Grisham told The San Diego Union-Tribune after the wallet was returned this week. ‘‘There was a long series of people involved who tracked me down.’’
The wallet contained, among other items, his navy identity card, a pocket reference card on what to do during atomic, biological or chemical attacks, and a beer ration card.
Grisham, who was raised in Arizona,
enlisted in the navy in 1948. He became a weather technician and then a weather forecaster.
He was assigned to Antarctica as part of Operation Deep Freeze, and shipped out to the frozen continent in October 1967. At the time, he was in his 30s and married with two toddlers. ‘‘I went down there kicking and screaming,’’ he recalled.
The wallet was found behind a locker in 2014 during demolition of a building at McMurdo Station. But finding its owner took emails, Facebook messages and letters exchanged among a group of amateur sleuths.
Stephen Decato and his daughter Sarah Lindbergh, of New Hampshire, and Bruce McKee of the Indiana Spirit of ’45 non-profit foundation had previously worked to return a navy service bracelet to its owner. Decato’s former boss sent him the wallet, and McKee contacted the Naval Weather Service Association, a group that includes Grisham.