Associated Press
YAKIMA – For nearly 42 years, Marina Rempel believed her purse had been pinched at Pikes Peak in Colorado.
But it turns out she left it in the ladies’ room. That’s where Eva Walters, then 10 years old, and her mother, Bea, found it.
The Walterses intended to send the purse back to its owner after they returned home to Albuquerque, N.M. But time passed, and they never quite got around to it, said the Rev. Charles Bonner, Eva’s husband and pastor at Bible Baptist Church of Selah, a bedroom community north of Yakima.
The purse was stored away, and then Eva Bonner’s father threw it away sometime later when the family was moving to Reserve, N.M. But Bea Walters retrieved it and put it in a trunk.
In summer 2000, Eva Bonner found the purse again while visiting her mother in Reserve.
“I said to my wife, ‘If you get it, I’ll see if I can find the owner.’ Then we had the purse for more than a year,” Charles Bonner said.
Rempel was a 25-year-old bride from Rosenort, a small town south of Winnipeg, Manitoba, when she left her purse at the tourist spot near the summit of 14,110-foot Pikes Peak. Rempel said she always thought someone must have taken it out of the car while she was in the washroom.
Inside the brown vinyl clutch was $13 Canadian, some spearmint gum, trading stamps and her driver’s license, using her maiden name, Weibe.
So that’s where Charles Bonner started looking last week. First, he found hundreds of Weibes in the vicinity of Winnipeg. Luckily, Rempel’s nephew was living at the address on her old driver’s license.
“I explained what I was doing. He said, ‘Oh that’s my aunt,’ and he gave me her phone number. I called – she was just overjoyed,” Charles Bonner said.
He asked Rempel if she remembered losing something at the summit of Pikes Peak in 1960.
“It was an emotional moment,” said Rempel, now widowed, and it brought back a flood of memories of that trip to the United States with her husband, Walter, and two friends.
Charles Bonner read her some of the little sayings she had written in a notebook in her purse, and he mentioned the small Bible in there.
“I just cried when he called,” she said.
This week, Charles Bonner mailed the purse and its contents to Rempel, who still lives in Rosenort.
“It’s just so unbelievable,” she said. “I told him, ‘If I had your mother-in-law here, I would just give her a hug for saving it all these years.’ “
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