The Slice: Glimpses of a private world

The Slice asked readers what they found in the wallet or purse of someone who had passed away.

Coeur d’Alene’s Helen Rock shared this.

“My father died in 1990. My mother passed in 2001. Among her possessions was my father’s last wallet. In the wallet? A few photographs, and the receipt for their stay at the Davenport Hotel on their wedding night, September 5, 1948. Including room service, they spent $11.00 for the luxury of that night, if I recall correctly. He carried that receipt with him to his dying day.”

Jay Dudley’s father served on the USS Arizona for 12 years but got transferred off the ill-fated battleship in October 1941, a couple of months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Still, Dudley’s father always kept his liberty card from the Arizona in his wallet. And that’s where it was when he passed away. “He said he always wanted to have his fellow shipmates near him.”

John Kafentzis had this answer. “When my dad died in 2008 I found a wallet-sized, laminated copy of his honorable discharge from the Army dated 17 August 1946, and his Social Security Act card dated 2-27-39. I guess he never lost a wallet.”

Gail Cory-Betz sent The Slice an image of a photo-booth picture taken of her and her sister Vicki back in the mid-1950s. (Posted on The Slice blog Thursday.) They were little girls then. That picture was in their father’s wallet when he died in 1998.

“Now I carry it in my wallet.”

And Marianne Bornhoft, who is in the real estate business, shared this.

“When I used to do estate sales, I would find old faded photographs in wallets. We always handed the contents over to the family. Sometimes they would tell me they recognized the people in the pictures. But other times, they had no idea who the person was.

“I find it curious that a person would hold onto a memory contained in a photograph but never share with their loved ones who was in the photo. Most of the time, the pictures were of someone of the opposite sex of the person who had recently passed. Other times, however, they were of a child. The young always had smiles on their faces.”

Today’s Slice question: When you had a visitor from far away who had never before experienced snow, what did he or she think of it?

Write The Slice at P. O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; email pault@spokesman.com. Gene Moore feels it’s only fair to warn area trout that he has a new fishing rod and he’ll be coming for them this spring.