A retired Michigan autoworker was surprised when he received a late-night Facebook message from someone he didn’t know: “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, containing $15 in cash, a driver’s license, work ID, $275 worth of gift cards, and some lottery tickets, had resurfaced under the hood of a car at 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 to know there are people who, when they find something, will say, ‘This isn’t mine, I need to return it to its owner,’” Guilford said Thursday.
The wallet was discovered in June by a mechanic named Chad Volk. It was wedged between the transmission and the air filter box of a 2015 Ford Edge that had 151,000 miles on it.
“Crazy,” Volk said.
The filter box wasn’t fitting back after a repair, Volk said. “I fiddled around a bit, took it out again, and there was the wallet on a small ledge where it was supposed to click in. I removed the wallet, and that’s what it was.”
Go back to 2014, around Christmas time. Guilford had been working on the same vehicle at a Ford plant in Wayne, Michigan. It was among a stream of newly assembled cars that required additional electrical work before they could be sent to dealerships.
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 on 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.”
Ford spokesperson Said Deep called it a “repair that’s right on the money,” adding: “Can you imagine the odds?”
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 in the wallet 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.
