Man walked rainy highway for hours to help stranger find lost funeral notes

Arnie Dienoff was headed to a Sunday afternoon estate sale in St. Charles, Missouri, when he spotted a bright yellow notebook flapping in the wind in the middle of Missouri Highway K.

Dienoff wondered if someone might have lost something important, so he decided to pull over and jump out of his car.

“I ran out and picked up the notebook in the middle of the double yellow line, then I saw something paper-clipped inside,” he said. “It appeared to be an obituary.”

Once Dienoff looked inside the notebook, he was glad he had stopped. What he found was clearly someone’s plan for a funeral, including handwritten notes about scripture readings. Then he looked up and spotted a cellphone sitting on the highway several yards from him.

“I realized the phone must belong to the same person, so I went over and picked it up,” he said, explaining that traffic was light that day.

All of a sudden, the phone in his hand began to ring. He answered it.

The person calling was Meghan Wolf. She had called her mother’s phone.

Dienoff told her he had just found the phone in the middle of the road, and Meghan Wolf said she would have her mom, Jeannie Wolf, call him.

“She told me her mom had been going through a rough time because her 98-year-old mother was on hospice and was going to pass away soon,” he said.

In fact, Jeannie Wolf was with her mother at that moment.

“My heart just dropped when she told me that,” Dienoff said.

Meghan Wolf called her mother, who at first didn’t understand why she needed to dial her own phone number and talk to a guy named Arnie. But then she realized what had happened.

“We’re Catholic, and I’d been preparing in advance for my mother’s funeral Mass and celebration of life,” said Jeannie Wolf, 74, noting that her mother, Ruth Kurtz, has congestive heart failure.

“I’d just finished everything I thought would be appropriate to include at her mass, and I’d saved some recent obituaries that I liked,” she said.

Kurtz is in hospice care at her home in St. Charles, Jeannie Wolf said, and she and other family members are taking turns sitting with her at the end of her life.

“I was headed out to my car that Sunday to drive over and take my shift, and when I got outside, I saw one of my neighbors,” she said, explaining that she was distracted talking to her neighbor. “I set my notes and phone on the back of my car so I could go talk to her, then I drove off and forgot all about them.”

Incredibly, the items stayed on her car for almost two miles, until they fell off on the road where Dienoff found them.

“When I called him, he offered to immediately come over to my mom’s place and give everything to me,” Jeannie Wolf said.

She thought that was more than enough to expect from a stranger. Then Dienoff offered to do more.

“I went over to meet Jeannie and her mom, and Jeannie was really grateful to have her phone and notes back,” he said. “But she mentioned that she had lots of other papers tucked inside the notebook, and they were all missing.”

“I thought, ‘They’ve all been blown away, so I’ll just have to start over,’ ” Jeannie Wolf said. She said she offered to pay Dienoff for his trouble, but he wouldn’t accept it.

Instead, he told her that he was going to return to the highway to try to find the rest of her funeral notes, even though it was windy and rainy.

“I couldn’t believe it – why would he do that?” Wolf said. “It was like a miracle to me.”

Dienoff parked his car near the highway and slowly walked up and down the road for more than a mile, searching ditches and along fences for Wolf’s lost papers. He looked for several hours until it was after dark.

“I found some old programs from other people who had passed away, notes Jeannie had written and some favorite poems and readings she’d saved,” he said. “They were all wet from the rain, so I went home and dried them out.”

Wolf said she cried when Dienoff returned everything to her the next day. A relative contacted KSDK News in St. Louis, and they reported on Dienoff’s kind deed.

“I’d put so much thought and work into my mom’s funeral, and I thought it was all gone,” Jeannie Wolf said. “Then Arnie showed up.”

Jeannie’s daughter Natasha Wolf said her family has a new nickname for Dienoff: Arnie the Angel.

“My mom felt peace while preparing for my grandmother’s funeral, and he helped to keep that feeling going by dropping everything to help,” she said. “Arnie is proof that good people are still out there.”

Dienoff, a self-described public advocate who monitors Missouri government, said he was happy to put his doggedness to good use in a more personal way.

“It really meant something to Jeannie during a difficult time for her and her family during their loved one’s final days,” Dienoff said. “This experience brought two humans together who had never met each other. I feel now like we’re connected.”