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Published December 26, 2023, 1:14 am ET
Contractors discovered a lost wallet belonging to a 65-year-old while renovating a wall in the bathroom of an Atlanta movie theater. Plaza Theater
A wallet lost in 1958 was found more than six decades later in an unlikely location – behind the bathroom wall of a historic Atlanta movie theater, in a former closet.
“It was a portal into the past,” Plaza Theater owner Chris Escobar told CNN.
Since the 84-year-old cinema is the oldest in the city, Escobar has come across many things from the past, such as old alcohol bottles and popcorn displays, but the wallet full of history is on a whole new level, he said.
Inside the dust-covered wallet were black-and-white family photos, a raffle ticket for a shiny new 1959 Chevrolet and insurance cards, CNN reported.
According to Atlanta News First (ANF), there were even credit cards for the defunct local department stores Davison's and Rich's – and receipts for 10 gallons of gas for just $3.26.
However, according to CNN, the biggest find in the wallet was the name Floy Culbreth on a license.
The wallet was found behind a bathroom wall at the Plaza Theater. Google Maps The theater's owner, Chris Escobar, said he was determined to return the wallet to the family's Plaza Theater
“If we realize that this is what is missing from this family of real people who has lived in this neighborhood for 65 years, imagine if we could find them,” Escobar told the network.
Escobar and his “internet detective” wife Nicole soon found the obituary of Culbreth's husband, Roy, and social media eventually led them to the couple's 71-year-old daughter, Thea Chamberlain, who lived less than 20 minutes from the Plaza Theater, said ANF.
“To be honest, it wouldn't have been a surprise that my mother would have lost things,” Culbreth's shocked daughter told the outlet of her mother, who died more than a decade ago.
Inside the wallet was a license for Floy Culbreth, a raffle ticket for a new 1959 Chevrolet, credit cards without magnetic stripes and black and white family photos. Plaza Theater
Chamberlain told CNN that Culbreth was a “sharp June Cleaver” and a Sunday school teacher who was deeply committed to helping people with cerebral palsy, a cause for which the family hosts a golf tournament every year.
The discovery of the long-lost artifact “was pretty touching,” she added. “A flood of memories came back and it kind of brought her back.”
Culbreth's children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren went to the theater to collect her wallet.
For Chamberlain, watching her own 5- and 7-year-old grandchildren look at the items found in their great-grandmother's wallet was “a special moment.”
“They knew it was something valuable.”
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