Middle-aged adult female wearing pearl necklace, glasses with thick frames, light-colored garment; purple handbag with geometric pattern in foreground indoors. 1:47
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A teen's lost purse turns up 65 years later

The crew tearing down an old high school in Indiana found a purse in the rubble. Its owner had lost it 65 years earlier, as a junior. more

The school was coming down to make way for a new building, and the purse turned up in what was left of the old science building. Her ID was still inside. She had been a student there back when Rosemary Clooney was number one on the charts.

The school posted a lost and found alert online for "Martha Ina Ingham's handbag," adding, "We would love to return it to her or her family." It worked. A relative saw the post and sent it to her youngest son, and Martha, who goes by Marty, turned up a thousand miles away in Florida, at 82. "It brings back a lot of memories," she says, along with a lot of people she hasn't heard from in a long time.

Middle-aged adult female wearing pearl necklace, glasses with thick frames, light-colored garment; purple handbag with geometric pattern in foreground indoors. The headline runs in white letters across the lower third.Save
The crew tearing down an old high school in Indiana found a purse in the rubble.

What she kept in that purse is a small picture of high school life. There was a basketball schedule trimmed in red and gold glitter, with the slogan "Best on the Floor in Fifty-Four." There was a compact, a well-used gold tube of red lipstick that still has its color, and even the tissue she pressed her lips on. "It's just a tissue that I blotted my lipstick on," she says.

A hand holds a small gold container with red inside, partly filled. A headline runs in white letters across the lower third.Save
Her well-used gold tube of red lipstick was still in the purse after 65 years.

Then there was a piece of Juicy Fruit gum, 65 years old and still in the purse. And there were a few love letters.

One of them came from a boy who wanted to take her to the junior prom. "Dear Marty," it begins. "I've heard that Paul has asked you to go to the prom with him." Then he made his case plainly: "I would like very much to take you."

Marty turned him down. She went to the prom with a student named Carter instead. The prom photos were still tucked in the purse, too.

Two people stand near a mirror. One holds a glass, and the other wears glasses and a dress. A headline runs in white letters across the lower third.Save
Prom photos were still tucked inside the purse, along with the letters.

The purse is a time capsule, and Marty finds it "really interesting." It holds things about her life she had forgotten, right down to a tissue with her lipstick on it.

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