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A Minnesota mechanic working on a 2015 Ford Edge discovered a wallet under the hood that a Michigan Ford assembly plant worker lost 11 years earlier.
Chad Volk, who runs LC Car Care in Lake Crystal, Minnesota, was under the hood replacing the vehicle’s cooling fans and had pulled out the airbox when he made the discovery, he told KARE 11.
When the airbox would not fit when he attempted to put it back into place, Volk had to investigate the problem.
“And that’s where the wallet was,” Volk told KARE 11.
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“I had to sit down and go through this wallet,” he added.
Volk then searched through the leather wallet and found the Ford Motor Company employee ID.
“I was surprised. You find stuff all the time, usually tools,” Volk told the Detroit Free Press. “I looked through it, and I see a Ford Motor Co. badge. I thought, ‘I’m going to try finding this guy to see if I can get it back to him.'”
He then used Facebook to find retired autoworker Richard Guilford, who recalled the moment he learned his wallet had been located.
“Is this your wallet?” Volk asked.
“The first thing I said was, ‘Did you find that in a car?'” Guilford told the outlet.
Guilford, who built Ford vehicles in Michigan, was fixing electrical issues in Ford Edges the day he lost his wallet around Christmas in 2014.
“I never wore sweatpants to work, but I did that day,” Guilford said. “And I had my wallet in my shirt pocket.”
As Guilford leaned over the car, the wallet must have slipped out of his pocket and into the vehicle.
At about 2 a.m., he turned to a co-worker and told him he had lost his wallet.
Several coworkers then helped Guilford search for his wallet.
“You know, there [were] 2,000 cars out there, and we couldn’t find it,” he said.
Although he knew specifically which cars he worked on during that shift, Guilford says it did not even occur to him to look under the airbox.
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The Ford vehicle then traveled to a dealership in Arizona before heading to Lake Crystal, where the wallet was found by Volk after more than 150,000 miles on the road.
After exchanging Facebook messages, Volk mailed the wallet to Guilford’s home in Petersburg, Michigan.
“And there’s nothing wrong with the money at all,” said Guilford, who found $15 cash in the wallet.
“It’s well-traveled currency,” he added.
In addition to the cash and long-expired lottery tickets, the wallet contained $250 in Cabela’s gift cards he had planned to use 11 years ago to buy Christmas gifts for his kids.
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Guilford said he checked with Cabela’s and was told the gift cards could still be used.
The two men spoke in a video chat just days after the wallet was found.
“I would have never, ever, figured in a million years that would still be there,” Guilford told Volk, according to KARE 11.
Chad replied that he was “going to have to start digging through cars more often, I guess, in the engine bays, and see if I can find something.”
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