In mid-August, when 14-year-old Connor Halsa of Moorhead was fishing for walleyes, he caught a wallet instead of a walleye – a wallet containing $2,000 in wet, cold cash.
Meantime, in Iowa, a farmer and avid fisherman, kept trying to forget the devastating disappointment of losing a bundle of money the summer before while fishing on a Minnesota lake.
Emmy Award-winning reporter Kevin Wallevand shared that story on WDAY-TV, Fargo. Since then, it’s been retold far and wide. It’s a wonderful grinner of a story I want to share with readers.
Connor is a freshman at Moorhead High School and an avid hockey player. In August, he and his family were taking their annual vacation at Lake of the Woods in northern Minnesota.
On the way to an island where they would reside, Connor and family members began fishing from a boat.
“I thought I had a huge fish so I set the hook really hard,” he said, as quoted in Wallevand’s story.
Then he reeled in the fish as cousin Brandon reached over to net it. They were stunned that the big walleye had somehow morphed into a fat leather wallet.
Brandon opened the wallet.
“He said some words you probably shouldn’t say,” Connor recalled, “and he showed everyone, and we took the money out and let it dry out.”
Most of the bills were 100s, with some 50s, 20s, 10s and a smattering of ones.
Halsa and his father agreed the cash and wallet should be returned to the owner, if they could find out who it was. Inside the wallet, Connor’s family luckily found a business card with a name and phone number. That is how they tracked down the owner, Iowa farmer Jim Denney. When Denney heard the news that a wallet he’d given up as forever gone was suddenly found a year later, he just about keeled over from disbelief.
He and his wife drove to Moorhead to meet Connor. At the Halsa home, after a profusion of thank-yous, Denney insisted Connor accept a hefty reward. He refused. So Denney took the family out to dinner and bought Connor a beautiful, personalized fish cooler.
Denney told the Halsas what had happened. In the summer of 2022, he and some buddies took a fishing trip to Lake of the Woods. On the lake, it was wavy, causing the boat to rock back and forth and causing a wallet in a back pocket of Denney’s farmer bib overalls to work itself loose and fall into the lake. At the time, Denney was utterly unaware of the loss.
Back on shore, Denney reached into his back pocket to pay his share of the boat-rental bill. No wallet. No money.
“I didn’t have a penny on me,” he recalled.
He went back to the boat. No wallet.
The Halsas, Denney and his wife are still happily stunned by the near impossibility of “catching” a lost wallet in a huge 70-mile-wide lake, especially a wallet containing a small fortune.
“I would take Connor as a grandson any day, and I would fight for him any day,” said Denney in Wallevand’s story.
And Connor learned a life lesson from his extraordinary wallet catch.
“Be nice to everyone and give back,” he said. “We didn’t work hard for the money. He did. It was his money.”
Thank you for that story, Kevin Wallevand. It had me grinning ear to ear. And I relished its happy ending: honesty, kindness, gratitude, good wishes. Ah yes, life can work so well sometimes – and in the most mysterious ways!
