Soldier’s wallet lost in the 1950s finally makes it to family’s home
CONCORD, N.H. — Sharon Moore had heard the stories about her father getting his duffel bag stolen on his way back from the Korean War. The New Hampshire woman never expected to see any of the contents.
In July, she got a Facebook friend request from a stranger in France. She deleted it.
But the person responded with a Facebook message asking for help in finding the owner of a lost wallet. Attached were several black-andwhite photos, including one of her mother as a young woman, and another of her aunt, as well as a tattered Social Security card and Massachusetts driver’s license.
“I immediately saw my dad’s driver’s license and my mother’s photo. I knew it was my dad’s wallet,” Moore said of her father, Robert McCusker, who died a day before her 20th birthday in 1983. “I couldn’t believe it. Really, my dad’s wallet after all these years? It was just weird.”
The brown leather wallet was found in the basement of a building in Chatellerault, France, a small city about 185 miles southwest of Paris. Workers had tossed it out, but the building’s owner, Patrick Caubet, noticed it on a pile of gravel and was drawn to the half-dozen photographs and what looked like official documents.
On closer inspection, he saw a field ration permit dated September 1950 belonging to Cpl. Robert S. McCusker, as well as McCusker’s Social Security card and other military documents. It was unclear how the wallet ended up in the building.
“The photographs made it very sentimental and personal, and really gave me the desire to find the family they belonged to,” said Caubet.
“My grandfather and father were also in the war,” he said, adding that his grandfather had been injured by a shell in World War II and his father suffered serious burns in the Algerian War. “I would have loved it if someone had found papers or other things belonging to them and sent them to me.”
Caubet found a friend who spoke English and they found an obituary for Moore’s mom, Jean McKenney McCusker, who died in 2014. They went in search of his relatives listed in the obituary, first posting the wallet’s contents on Caubet’s Facebook page. They tried contacting the Pentagon and the U.S. Embassy in Paris, but got nowhere. Then, Caubet sought the aid of a French military office in Paris, which tracked down the names of McCusker’s kids. He found Moore on Facebook last month; soon after the wallet was headed to Dover, N.H.
“She was so happy to know there was this trace of her father,” he said.
When the package arrived, Moore and her brother, Steven McCusker, filmed themselves opening the wallet and emailed the video to Caubet, so he could share in their joy.