Stories of lost wallets being returned to their owners are generally heartwarming—this amazing tale spans two continents and three generations.
Roy Rotz had just finished a hitch in the Navy in 1941. He was 23 years old, living in Santa Monica California, working in the Douglas Aircraft factory making bombers, which were sent to England to be used against Nazi Germany as part of the Lend-Lease program. The United States wasn’t officially in the war yet.
Rotz was an electrical inspector. His job was to crawl through the bombers checking wiring and inspecting connections. Somewhere on one of those crawls he lost his wallet.
“I looked in every one of the airplanes I worked on and couldn’t find it. No luck,” Rotz told Fox News.
The airplanes, and Roy’s wallet were shipped overseas. Rotz certainly never thought he’d see that wallet again.
Finders, Keepers
Someone else found Rotz’s wallet. Royal Air Force airman Edgar Warren Birds was stationed in Derbyshire, England, during the war, and somehow came across the wallet in one of the bombers Rotz had inspected.
No one knows exactly how or where Birds found the wallet. What is known is what he did with it—he kept it.
Birds passed the wallet down through the generations in his family, which kept up the tradition after his death.
Finally Rotz’s wallet ended up in the hands of Birds’s granddaughter, Diane MacKinnon.
McKinnon, who lived in Scotland, didn’t know anything about her grandfather, nor about the wallet. The name “Roy Rotz” was stamped in gold on the wallet, and the driver’s license inside had the same name, but the only address listed was the World-War-II-era warship the USS Phoenix.
However, McKinnon had a tool, which previous generations had lacked—the Internet.
McKinnon researched Rotz, and to her vast surprise found that the man was still alive.
Rotz, now 100 years old, was living in Arbor Terrace, a senior living community in Peachtree City, in Fayette County, Georgia.
Disappointment and Joy
Diane McKinnon hoped that Rotz, whoever he was, had somehow known her grandfather. She was eager to learn about her lost relative who had died a few decades before.
She contacted Cindy Williams, Rotz’s daughter, on Facebook Messenger. The two ladies discussed Rotz and the wallet.
McKinnon was disappointed to learn that Birds was as much a mystery to Rotz as Rotz had been to Birds and his family.
“She didn’t know her grandfather because he passed away a few decades ago,” Cindy Williams told Fox News.
“So she was hoping that my ‘DD’ had somehow known her grandfather. But that wasn’t the story.”
McKinnon dropped the wallet in the mail, and soon, it was back with its original owner.
History Held in the Hand
Rotz wasn’t pleased to have to disappoint McKinnon, but he was thrilled to get his wallet back. It was filled with documents, each a memento of a time long past, and each could trigger memories of how life used to be.
“We are just really thankful to this family for getting the wallet and the documents to us,” Williams said.
“I wonder about that. Why would he keep a strange wallet?” Roy Rotz wanted to know.
“Keeping it and passing it on to his son and daughter. I can’t imagine someone doing that,” Rotz said.
Rotz said he had never lost a wallet since, and he didn’t intend to let this one slip through his fingers again.
As Birds did before him, Rotz decided to pass down the wallet—and its amazing story—to the generations in his family, a little bit of history, and reminder of shared humanity that future generations of the Rotz family could share.
