Two Grade School Kids Hit the Mother Lode in an East Side Snowbank

As the massive snow mountains are all but melted away in St. Paul, I couldn't help but remember one long-ago snowy winter when my younger brother Tommy and I encountered a pile that contained much more than dirty snow and ice.

I think it was the winter of 1964-1965, sometime after Thanksgiving. We had recently moved from Earl and Orange over to Lane Place near Jessamine. Tommy and I both went to Farnsworth, and we walked to and from school together. (This was long before school buses. You'd never let a 9- and 10-year-old walk that far now; it was almost a mile one way.)

The school crossing guards only got us a few blocks from school; we were on our own the rest of the way home. But the only dangerous intersection was Earl and Maryland, and there were stop lights there, so it was fairly safe.

On this particular afternoon as we were coming home, we stood on the corner waiting for the light to turn green so we could cross Maryland. There had been quite a lot of snow and the plows had created large mounds. So of course two young kids just had to climb those snow piles and jump around, right?

Tommy's boot sunk way in on one of his more energetic leaps, and we both had to work to dig his leg out. In the process, we unearthed (or would it be un-snowed?) a hard lump of navy fabric. It turned out to be what my grandma referred to as a pocketbook - a coin purse. We pried it open and it was stuffed with bills. Nothing else - no name, no identifying items, just money. And a lot of it.

I think we ran all the way home. We showed it to my mom and couldn't wait until Dad came home so we could tell him about it. All the way home we talked about what we were going to do with the money, it not occurring to us that we might not be able to keep this buried treasure. We felt like a couple of millionaires. This was long before the lotteries, so we had nothing we could relate to in terms of suddenly striking it rich, other than pirate treasure.

My dad of course was a practical, honest man. He wasn't about to let us keep it. He told us it didn't belong to us and we needed to find out who it should be returned to. But how? We found it on a busy intersection that happened to be a stop for the 14 bus. He had an idea, and he took the two of us down to the police station. There weren't neighborhood patrol offices at this point, so that meant going downtown to the BIG police station. Fairly intimidating for two grade schoolers.

The man at the desk was very much official business, and he filled out the report as we told him where we found it. Then he told us that if no one claimed it within a week we could have it. I think my dad would have loved it if there were seat belts in cars back in those days, because I am pretty sure Tommy and I were bouncing all over that old Chevy on the way home.

We put up a calendar on the wall and marked the days off. And sure enough, a week later, we got a call from the police informing us that no one had claimed the coin purse and it was ours. The purse AND the $80 it contained.

It probably doesn't seem like a lot of money now, but here's a comparison. My parents had just bought our 3-bedroom house that summer for $12,000, and if I recall, my dad's Chevy cost $900. (One inflation calculator I looked at said that $80 would be about $750 now.) Tommy and I were rich! Not Richy Rich-rich, but for kids that got no allowance and might look forward to a dollar in our birthday cards from Grandma, that was a LOT of money.

My dad's father was a vice president at the First National Bank in those days, and so his fiduciary instincts kicked in and he helped us plan what we were going to do with the money. I don't recall everything in detail, but we each got some money to put into the offering at church on Sunday, and a good chunk of it went into our own savings accounts we had set up. (Remember bank day at school? You brought your dimes and nickles and the teacher collected them.)

I do remember where quite a bit of the money went: Christmas presents. I don't think my brother and I spent a dime on ourselves. It wouldn't have occurred to us. That's not how my family lived. We economized wherever possible, and we tried to help others. So Tommy and I had great fun buying Christmas gifts for our parents and our siblings. I can't tell you what any of those gifts were, because I don't think the items mattered. What I do remember was how wonderful it felt to go shopping for those we loved.

We were allowed to take what remained of our new-found wealth and go down to the Phalen Shopping Center to go shopping. By ourselves. I know - I shudder just to think about sending two little kids out with a pocket full of money by themselves, even just down to the corner. But you need to remember this was the 1960s, and things were different then. It wasn't more than a few blocks away, and except for crossing Johnson Parkway in front of the shopping center, most of it was just walking through the park and the Arlington Hills Methodist Church lot, then through the tunnel under the railroad tracks overhead. My mom sent us to Phalen Center often to pick up some groceries at Red Owl, so this was familiar territory. Plus we got to spy on the puppies and the fish at at the pet store in the process.

Christmas was always a big deal in my family, but it was never extravagant. My dad was working to feed a family of 7 on three jobs, so there wasn't always a lot left over for gifts. But there were always special things for us. That year it was gratifying for us to be able to do something for our parents and our siblings. I think that shopping trip was our Christmas gift to ourselves.

Funny, I still kick at piles of snow on street corners. You just never know what they might hide. That particular one ended up containing one of my favorite childhood memories.