Man gets back missing wallet after 50 years

Usually, anything that gets lost can be found in the last place that you look. That wasn’t the case for 22-year-old James Westlake when he dropped his wallet in Ypsilanti in 1959.

“I was on leave after serving in the Philippines as a communications technician,” said Westlake, now 79. “I was being transferred to Japan for special duty and was given time to visit my wife and son, who I hadn’t met before.”

After a month long voyage back to California across the Pacific Ocean, Westlake made his way to meet his wife with their son in Michigan. One way or another, he managed to lose his wallet at a drive-in restaurant.

That’s where Scott Dodge, 13 at the time, found it the next morning before he started his paper route for the Detroit Free Press.

“My route started at 5:30, and I usually liked to get a doughnut before I started each morning,” he said. “I was cutting through the parking lot when I found Jim’s wallet.”

Dodge scooped up the wallet and took it to his parents after he had finished his route. His father went through it and found Westlake’s military identification cards, but no indication where Westlake lived before his time in the service. They tried to reach out through the U.S. Navy to get the wallet back to its rightful owner.

A wedding photo and a card for the Ancient Order of the Deep, a navy tradition honoring those who cross the equator, in the wallet of Jim Westlake.

The wallet also had Westlake’s member card for the Ancient Order of the Deep, a military tradition signifying when someone crosses over the equator for the first time. When Dodge saw that, he really felt like he needed to return the wallet.

“His name was always in the back of my mind. That card is what drove me to return the wallet to Jim,” he said. “It seemed like it would be very important to him. I know I would have been peeved if I had lost something like that.”

For the years that followed, Dodge would check on anyone named James Westlake listed in phone books in any new city he visited while on vacation or whenever his family moved.

Surprisingly, for how much Dodge worried about returning the wallet, Westlake hadn’t given it a second thought.

“I hadn’t even noticed I had lost my wallet. It didn’t affect me getting back to California to finish my final tour, and I just forgot about it,” Westlake said.

After his tour ended, Westlake worked at Borden for a while before testing into employment at the Newark Air Force Base as a mechanic, working on guidance systems for 33 years.

In the mean time, Dodge was still looking for the wallet’s rightful owner.

“After the internet became a thing, I started to search for James B. Westlakes in Ohio. I came across around 50 or 60 of them, so I wrote each one a letter, asking for an answer,” he said. “I didn’t get any responses from that attempt.”

Jim Westlake looks at his driver’s license from the 1950s along with other items found in his recently returned wallet. Scott Dodge found the wallet in 1959 in Ypsilanti, Michigan and returned it after nearly 55 years.

Dodge narrowed his search, using information found in the wallet, and finally reached Westlake in 2005. After confirming it was the right Westlake, Dodge sent the wallet and all of its contents to its rightful owner; even going so far as to replace $40 his father had borrowed from the wallet.

The two men continued to share Christmas cards and phone calls to check in on each other. This year, Dodge was planning a trip to visit family in Michigan and decided it was time to meet Westlake in person.

“It’s only a three-hour drive, so it wasn’t any trouble. I had always wanted to visit him,” Dodge said. “It was great to finally meet him and his wife, just amazing. They were such nice people.”

And that’s just what James and Shirley Westlake had to say to Dodge.

“How many young boys would have done that, just picked up the wallet and look for someone they had never met?” Shirley said. “This just proves that there are wonderful people in the world still, and Scott is one of them.”

Detroit Free Press