A nice story.....

montanamuzik

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I'm not certain this was a detecting find but I would venture to say yes. It is a wallet found inside a metal tackle box in a dry lake bed in Nevada. Maybe someone here knows the finder? Goes to show how a little gesture can mean so much.

Article was in my local paper here in western Montana. Here is a link there is a couple of pics as well....

http://missoulian.com/news/local/lo...cle_25a93f47-0b32-524b-92bb-82e571f691a7.html


Lost wallet found in Nevada warms hearts of Missoula mom, friends

It was time something good happened to Frieda Kallis.

The 93-year-old Missoula woman has outlived her 13 siblings, her husband, and all three of her children.

The last to go was son Ron, who took his own life last August at age 66.

He had lived for years with unbearable back pain and the effects of a staph infection that cost him a leg. Frieda was at Ron’s bedroom door when the gun went off. She torments herself for not moving faster.

“The pain was so excruciating he couldn’t tolerate it any more,” she said last week.

“Enough was enough. None of his friends or the family that’s remaining blame him,” agreed Jim Havranek, who was Ron’s best friend and is Frieda’s caretaker and confidante.

So the package that arrived at Frieda’s home a couple of weeks ago struck a deep chord.

It came from a stranger in Nevada. Inside was her late son’s deteriorated wallet that contained, among other things, his elk and deer tags from 1974 and 1975.

A nice note accompanied it, addressed to Rodney W. Kallis (Ron’s real name) and dated Jan. 19, 2015.

“The contents of this box contain a wallet that I found in a small metal tackle box on the lake bed of Lahanton Reservoir near Fallon, Nevada, a few weeks ago,” wrote Connie Travers of Fallon. “Due to the drought the reservoir has receded quite a bit. While I was out looking for lost treasures, I came upon yours.”

Frieda doesn’t remember her son losing his tackle box and wallet. But Ron’s adopted son recalls when it happened. Now living in Everett, Washington, Robert Kallis told Havranek last week he was about 8 years old when his stepdad took him on a fishing trip to Nevada.

Havranek, 55, calls his friend’s mom “Mom.”

“It makes me feel good,” said Frieda, with a nod to Havranek sitting at her kitchen table. “That’s my right arm there. Everything. Period. He is just as close to me as my son was.

“I don’t want to do anything without him because my brain don’t work just right any more.”

When the package arrived, she called Havranek and ordered him down to her house. She had something to show him, Frieda said.

“When she tells you to do something, you do it,” Havranek said. “So I shot down here and she put that in my lap. I opened it and said, are you kidding me?”

To someone who didn’t know Ron Kallis, the contents are nondescript. The wallet itself is in pieces, some of them probably missing.

There are paper bills of unknown number and denomination. They’ve turned black and crumbled. You have to look closely to identify them as currency.

“It’s your money,” Frieda offered with a chuckle. “You want it, you can have it.”

There’s a conservation license, and an obscured wallet photo with nearly decipherable writing on the back. It was ruined when it was exposed to air, Travers wrote.

Kallis was a construction worker and spent a lot of time on the road, his mother said. There’s what looks like a Nevada driver’s license with his name on it, and a conservation license.

Kallis had preserved a brief obituary from 1964 in Scotch tape. It was of his brother Harold’s wife Judy, who died at age 22 during what Frieda described as a medical procedure.

More easily recognized is his rusty but intact metal Social Security card. The four Montana resident deer and elk tags are remarkably well-preserved.

“Those are amazing,” Havranek said. “Forty years under the water and in the mud, and they’re like they were just issued.”

In total, the wallet’s contents don’t add up to much and have no monetary value. Travers sent them in individual baggies to keep the contents from being totally obliterated.

“She said the tackle box disintegrated when she picked it up,” said Havranek, who tracked down Travers’ phone number and called her a few days later. “It was like tin foil.”

He took the wallet to show his friends who knew Ron Kallis and all saw something special in the story.

***

Havranek himself met Kallis about 20 years ago.

“We played cards. We drank beer. We helped each other out. Worked on cars. I’d take him fishing. To his doctor’s appointments. Helped him out with his yard. We were just good buddies,” he said.

“Ron was rough and gruff and jagged on the edges, but he was the kindest man you ever met in your life.”

Havranek and Frieda both wish Kallis had been around to see the lost wallet found.

“For him to open up that box 40 years after the fact, he’d have the exact story. (He’d say,) ‘I remember that. I was reaching for my beer or whatever and I knocked off my tackle box.’ I can just hear him,” said Havranek.

In her letter, Travers offered little explanation as to why she took the time and effort to track down an address for Kallis and mail the wallet.

“I just wanted you to have it back, even if it is just for memory sake,” she wrote.

“I know I was shocked,” Frieda said. “It just goes to show you there’s still some decent people out there.”

Travers closed her letter by saying, “If you are not the owner and know Rodney please forward.”

Frieda won’t keep the wallet. She plans to forward it on to Robert in Washington.

“I don’t have many more days left,” she said. “My time is almost here, and I feel that his son would really appreciate it.”

“That’s what I think,” Havranek said. “I was his best buddy, but that should go to his boy.”

But the wallet Ron Kallis lost 40 years ago has found a warm place in both their hearts.

“A little piece of him came back,” said Havranek. “It meant a lot to her. It meant a lot to me.”
 
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