Conventional wisdom states that the best way to find something you’ve lost is to go back to the place where you last remembered having it. This is probably pretty difficult advice to follow if you, like former meteorologist Paul Grisham, forgot your wallet somewhere in a research base in Antarctica back in 1967 or ‘68.
And yet, incredibly, the wallet Grisham lost on a different continent, decades in the past, has just been returned to him. In an article at the New York Times, Grisham describes receiving a phone call that his wallet had been found by a trio of “amateur sleuths” who tracked him down after receiving it following “a 2014 demolition of McMurdo Station, where Mr. Grisham was based in 1967.”
The wallet is a time capsule of the 13 months he spent working as a meteorologist for the US Navy. It contains stuff like a military ID card, a beer ration punch card (not well used because Grisham had “a preference for martinis” at the time), a Kahlúa recipe, money order receipts, and “an atomic, biological, and chemical warfare pocket reference.”
As happy as we are to know Grisham and his wallet have been reunited after so long apart, the last item listed there does make us question the wisdom of sending it away from its frozen home in Antarctica. God only knows what kind of strange organisms, dormant for decades, could have sneaked their way between Grisham’s beer ration card and old receipts. If he has a dog, in other words, we hope it stays well away from his old wallet.
Read the entire article for more.
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