We’ve all found some weird things in cars. Money is probably the best thing to find, but typically it’s just a bit of cash or loose change. Recently, auto mechanic Chad Volk found an entire wallet under the hood of a customer’s 2015 Ford Edge, KARE 11 reports. It did not belong to the customer, but to one of the people who worked on the car at Ford’s factory, 11 years ago.
Any car this old is going to need some routine maintenance, which is how the Edge ended up at LC Car Care, Volk’s shop. After replacing the cooling fans, Volk was reinstalling the air box he had removed for better access and found an old wallet sitting there. He went through it to identify the owner, and was even more surprised to find a Ford employee ID. This wallet had been sitting under the hood since this car left the factory. We’ve heard of sockets left under the hood before, but never a wallet.
Using the power of social media for good, Volk tracked down Richard Guilford, the owner of the ID and wallet, who has since retired from Ford. He messaged Guilford on Facebook and asked if this was his wallet, and Guilford immediately asked if Volk had found it in a car. It was his.
‘Schmitty, I lost my wallet’
Eleven years ago, Guilford spent a day at the factory repairing electrical problems in Ford Edges that had been shipped over from a plant in Chicago. He wore sweatpants that day, something he never did, and tucked his wallet into a shirt pocket instead of his pants as usual. At around 2:00 AM, Guilford realized his wallet was no longer there.
“I’m like, ‘Schmitty, I lost my wallet,'” Guilford told KARE 11. He and several coworkers started searching the cars they had worked on that shift for the wallet, but never found it. The Edge that the wallet fell into traveled first to Arizona, then to Minnesota, covering 150,000 miles over 11 years before ending up at LC Car Care.
Being the honest mechanic he is, Volk mailed the wallet back to Guilford with all of its contents. That includes $15 in cash and old lottery tickets that expired a long time ago. Most surprising, though, was $250 worth of Cabela’s gift cards, which he had bought 11 years ago as Christmas presents. Cabela’s confirmed to Guilford that the cards are still valid.
