Katherine Geissler holds a wallet she lost in 1968, recently found in Kent Andreas’s basement wall (background).

When Kent Andreas was remodeling his basement recently, he found something unusual inside a wall. And while finding a 40-year-old wallet is strange in and of itself, in this case it’s especially odd given the fact that his Eau Claire home has been there for less than a decade.

Eager to reunite the wallet with its owner and uncover the story of how it got there, Kent Google-searched the name on the 1966 driver’s license, and tracked down their workplace phone number.

“He said, ‘I found your wallet,’” said Katherine Geissler, still an Eau Claire resident. “And I said, ‘What do you mean? I have my wallet right here.’ Then I thought it was some kind of come-on, a new scam,” she laughs. It was the mention of a paystub dated March 10, 1968 from Uniroyal Tire Factory that convinced Geissler the wallet really belonged to her.

Some further research on Kent’s part, which brought him to the Chippewa Valley Museum, Eau Claire County Court House, City Hall, and the home’s previous owners, helped piece together the story of how a 40-year-old wallet was in his 10-year-old house.

Apparently the home was built in 1943, at 1719 Necessity St. in the Town of Union. The wallet survived a basement flood in the 60s and two fires in the 80s, until the city purchased the property after a severe basement flood in the early 2000s. The city then replaced the home with a drainage basin, and moved the house across Vine Street to Orchard Place. That explains where the wallet came from, but how did it get there?

One of Kent’s theories was that a construction worker accidentally sealed it inside the wall. But Katherine busted that hypothesis when she revealed that she did do construction work, but not in the 60s. One clue led Kent and Katherine to believe that the wallet’s location was more foul play than accident.

    Though it contained a social security card, driver’s license, coupons, photographs, receipts, a grocery list, and the address of Katherine’s brother in the service, the wallet had no money in it whatsoever. To Katherine, that was particularly unusual.

“Back in those days you wouldn’t go anywhere without a dollar!” she recalls, adding that she would have had the majority of her $50 weekly pay in her billfold at the time.

The lack of cash jogged Katherine’s memory to an event around 1968 that likely led to the wallet’s location. She was out for the night at Pretzel’s Bar in downtown Chippewa Falls, a favorite local haunt where she also did some bartending in her mid-20s. Katherine remembers the night because she had just gotten a new purse. “Somebody talked me into this little clutch … I can still see the thing,” she recollects.

She got up to go to the bathroom and left the clutch on the table, and it was only later, when she went up for another beer, that she noticed the billfold was gone. Since that day she has always kept her billfold in her pocket rather than in a purse.

What happened to the wallet between the time it disappeared in 1968 and the time it appeared in Kent’s wall in 2009 remains shrouded in mystery. The man who owned the home in 1968 admits he never knew a wallet was stashed there.

Katherine, though baffled about the wallet’s disappearance, is very glad to have it back. “There were a lot of stories in there,” she says of the billfold. “It brought back my past.”

The items in the wallet document both a point in Geissler’s life and a very different Chippewa Valley. Ten-cent beer coupons (“Can you imagine getting a beer for 10 cents these days!?”), receipts from department stores which have long been closed, and an old black and white photograph of a friend of Geissler’s drinking Schlitz beer are all relics of a bygone era, perfectly preserved for 40 years in the basement of a west side home.