Former Navy meteorologist Paul Grisham didn’t even remember losing his wallet during a 13-month stint serving in Antarctica. But 53 years after the brown leather billfold he carried on “The Ice” went missing, it was back in his hands.
There was no money in it, because cash wasn’t necessary in a place with nothing to buy. It contained Grisham’s Navy ID, his driver’s license, a pocket reference card with instructions for what to do in the event of an atomic, biological or chemical weapons attack, a tax withholding statement, a recipe for homemade Kahlua, a beer ration punch card, and receipts for money orders sent to his wife from his poker winnings at the station.
“I was just blown away,” Grisham, who lives in San Carlos, California, with his wife of 18 years, Carole Salazar, told the San Diego Union Tribune. “There was a long series of people involved who tracked me down.”
Grisham, now 91, was raised in Douglas, Ariz., and enlisted in the Navy in 1948. He started out as a weather technician, then moved up to weather forecaster and was promoted to the rank of lieutenant in Antarctica. His job took him to duty stations in Guam, Hawaii and Japan, and he served twice aboard aircraft carriers in the Pacific during the Vietnam War.
He told the paper it’s hard to grasp how vast and remote Antarctica is. He remembers mostly how cold it got during the winter, when the team stationed there shrank from over 1,000 people to just 180 and the temperature dropped as low as -65 degrees. All the food was canned and the small team spent their days playing cards, chess and bowling in a two-lane alley.
He was able to speak with his first wife, Wilma, who was home raising two toddlers, just once a week via shortwave radio.
The year’s highlight was a visit from Sir Edmund Hillary, the mountaineer who reached the top of Mt. Everest in 1953. He was in Antarctica for a climbing expedition.
Grisham’s wallet was found in 2014 behind a locker during the demolition of a building at the McMurdo Station. It was sent to Stephen Decato, who retired from an agency that does snow cap research in Antarctica, by his former boss after Decato got attention for buying some Navy memorabilia online and hunting down its original owner.
Decato and his daughter Sarah Lindbergh, both of New Hampshire, worked with Bruce McKee of the Indiana Spirit of ’45 nonprofit foundation to track down Grisham through the Naval Weather Service Association. It was the third lost Navy item the trio have recently returned to families.