OWNER GETS BACK WALLET LOST IN ANTARCTICA IN ’67

Paul Grisham has many memories from his time working as a meteorologist in Antarctica in the 1960s, but losing his wallet is not one of them. Yet here was a man on the phone last month telling Grisham that he had found it, 53 years later.

“It was like a bolt out of the blue,” Grisham, 91, said. “It was because of what’s in the wallet and what it looked like that I remembered a lot of things.”

Grisham said the wallet, which he got back Jan. 30, contained a beer ration punch card; his military identification card; receipts from money orders he had sent to his wife back home in California; a recipe for Kahlúa; and an atomic, biological and chemical warfare pocket reference, which he was required to carry at all times.

The items have brought back memories of his 13-month stint starting in 1967 as a meteorologist for the U.S. Navy in Antarctica. He went as part of Operation Deep Freeze, which supports civilian scientists doing research there.

The ID shows Grisham “when I had brown hair,” he said. The money orders had been bought with his poker winnings. The beer ration card? Grisham said he was “getting kind of a kick out of it, because there’s only four holes punched in it,” out of 23.

The amateur sleuths who reunited Grisham with his wallet — Stephen Decato and his daughter, Sarah Lindbergh, and Bruce McKee — already had experience returning lost items to their owners. In 2018, Decato and Lindbergh found someone’s Navy identification bracelet for sale at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. They bought it and, after an online search for help in locating its owner, found McKee through Indiana Spirit of ’45, a nonprofit he started to honor service members. McKee, who served in the Air Force, said it was important for him to reunite people with their lost items because each was “a memory of an individual’s service, a loved one, a friend, a time or a place.”

Grisham said the wallet brought back fond memories of the 180 men who were stationed with him.

“I liked everybody down there, every person from the skipper down to the lowest-ranked man that we had,” he said.