Workers doing renovations at Orchard Park Secondary School in Stoney Creek, Ontario, found a wallet behind a bathroom wall and discovered it had been lost by a then-17-year-old student in 1974. File Photo by Bill Greenblatt/UPI | License Photo
Workers doing renovations at an Ontario high school made a surprising discovery behind a bathroom wall — a wallet lost by a then-17-year-old student 51 years earlier.
Lorna MacQueen, caretaker at Stoney Creek’s Orchard Park Secondary School, said construction workers were tearing down a bathroom at the facility Aug. 26 when they found a wallet concealed behind the wall.
The wallet contained items belonging to Tom Schopf, who was a 17-year-old student at the school in 1974. The contents included student IDs, a driver’s license, a social insurance card, photos of family and friends, a Eurail transit pass, price lists from a Canadian distillery and a 35-cent ticket to a hockey game.
“To find something like that and see things from before we were even born, it was pretty cool,” MacQueen told The Hamilton Spectator. “We thought, ‘We’ve got to find this guy and give it back to him. After 50 years, he’s going to want it.'”
MacQueen and her team were able to contact the now-67-year-old Schopf on Facebook.
“Initially, I thought it was a prank,” Schopf said, “because they’re saying there’s a social insurance card and a birth certificate in there — and I thought, ‘Well, I already have those things.’ But in reflection, I remembered I renewed them at some point and said I might as well go down to the school and check this out.”
Schopf visited the school Friday afternoon and discovered it was indeed the wallet that he had forgotten ever losing.
“Flipping through the things in there, it was trip down amnesia lane,” Schopf said.
He said the photos in the wallet included a shot of his childhood home.
“The house was built in 1960; my mom still lives there. I went over to show her and we had a good chuckle looking at everything,” he said.
Schopf and MacQueen agreed the most likely explanation for the wallet’s decades-long hiding spot is that he must have dropped it in the bathroom, where someone else found it, removed the cash, and threw it up into the ceiling tiles, where it ended up lodged behind the wall.
Schopf’s story echoes that of West Virginia woman Sharon Day, who lost her wallet at a Fayetteville High School dance in 1968. The school closed permanently in 2019, and workers renovating the building to turn it into apartments in 2022 discovered the long-lost wallet concealed in some duct work.
Day’s wallet was returned to her after a 54-year absence.
“It’s something that I never thought I would see,” Day said at the time.
