PETERSBURG, Mich. — A retired Michigan autoworker looked at a Facebook message after midnight from a stranger: Did you lose your wallet years ago?
“If so,” a Minnesota man wrote, “it was in the engine bay of a car.”
Richard Guilford couldn’t believe what he was reading on his phone — a decade-old mystery was remarkably solved.
Guilford’s tri-fold leather wallet — stuffed with $15, a driver’s license, work ID, gift cards worth $275 and lottery tickets — had turned up under the hood of a car in a repair shop in Lake Crystal, Minnesota.
A Christmas gift from Guilford’s sons was suddenly a family treasure again. “Big Red,” as he was affectionately known at Ford Motor, was in awe.
“It restores your faith in humanity that people will say, ‘Hey, you lost this, I found this, I’m going to get it back to you’,” Guilford said Thursday.
The wallet was discovered in June by mechanic Chad Volk, sandwiched between the transmission and the air filter box of a 2015 Ford Edge with 151,000 miles on it.
“Crazy,” Volk said.
The filter box wouldn’t snap in place after a repair, he said, “so I messed around a little bit and then pulled it back out and the wallet was sitting on a little ledge where it needed to snap down. I pulled the wallet out and that’s what it was.”
Turn back the calendar to 2014, around Christmas. Guilford was working on the same car at a Ford factory in Wayne, Michigan. It was in a long line of new vehicles assembled elsewhere that needed extra electrical work before being shipped to dealers.
Guilford realized later that his wallet had fallen out of his shirt pocket. He was certain he had lost it in a car, but figured it was on the floor of a Ford Flex, not an Edge, and certainly not in the engine.
Guilford said he searched 30 to 40 cars, and his co-workers looked at dozens more, “just opening the doors up, looking under the seats, looking behind it.”
“I can’t take too much time to look for this because I gotta work. I’m on the clock,” he recalled feeling. “No luck. Life went on.”
Guilford, now 56 and living in Petersburg, Michigan, retired from Ford in 2024 after nearly 35 years. He had put the wallet out of his mind long ago, until getting the message in Facebook, where his profile said he had worked at Ford.
Volk messaged a photo of the wallet and included the driver’s license. “Big Red” saw a younger version of himself with his red-tinged beard.
“The amazing part to me was it was so protected,” Guilford said of the wallet as he also traced the car’s history. “Think about this: 11 years, rain, snow. It was in Minnesota, for crying out loud. It was in Arizona when it was bought. Think about how hot a transmission gets in Arizona driving down the road. That’s incredible.”
Cabela’s, an outdoor retailer, said the $250 in gift cards remain valid, but it has offered to give him new cards anyway. Guilford doesn’t know the status of a $25 card from Outback Steakhouse. The numbers on the lottery tickets faded long ago.
“I’m going to put everything back in it and leave it just like it is, and it’s gonna sit at the house in the china cabinet and that’s for my kids,” said Guilford, a part-time auctioneer. “They can tell my great-grandkids about it. We’re big into stories. I like tellin’ stories. That’s just who I am.”
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Vancleave reported from Lake Crystal, Minnesota.