BRUNSWICK

Thirty years after he lost it, Thomas Tinkham got his wallet back — or one of them, at least.

On Oct. 17, workers at the former Brunswick Naval Air Station, now called Brunswick Landing, found a wallet in a crawl space underneath Building 200, otherwise known as the old terminal.

Looking at the space where a new elevator will be installed during the building’s renovation, Eric Hodgkins, a project manager for Blane Casey Building Contractors in Augusta, was wedged into the cavity with two other workers.

Demolition consultant Ron Duarte, of Newman Demolition in Richmond, found the wallet and gave it to Hodgkins when they extricated themselves.

“This is a very odd place to find anything,” Hodgkins said. “There are only two entrances into the space, they’re roughly 16 inches tall with a 2-foot-wide louver panel in the wall. So we surmised that somebody probably stole the wallet and was looking for a place to ditch it.”

The billfold had Tinkham’s driver’s license, as well as “some of his certifications, a couple of fleet gas cards, a calendar from 1983 — which is how we knew when it was from — and some other little odds and ends that every wallet has,” Hodgkins said.

He used his BlackBerry to track down Tinkham’s number in West Baldwin, in the hill country west of Sebago Lake.

“I said, ‘I have your wallet,’ and he said, ‘No, you don’t, I have it right here with me,’” Hodgkins said. “And I said, ‘No, I mean, I have the one you lost in 1983.’”

Having lost the wallet was not a surprise, Tinkham said, because he “had a habit of not being very careful with them in those days.”

But he was pleasantly shocked at this one’s discovery and subsequent return.

“There was nothing amazing in the wallet because I lost so many, I just kept the basic things I needed,” Tinkham said. “But, yeah, it was strange to get it back all this time later.”

One of those basics was the registration of his company truck, because the Navy’s military police required him to present it every time he drove onto the base for work.

“That it was still in there tells me it happened near the main gate,” Tinkham said. “Security let me search the Dumpster near the main gate because I just figured if somebody scalped it, that was where it would’ve ended up after they took the cash.”

How it got into a closed space underneath Building 200 is a mystery, though.

“I only remember being in that building one time,” Tinkham said. “We were working late and got locked onto the tarmac, so we walked through the front door once and I don’t think I was ever back to it after that.”

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