NEW YORK - I never dreamed I would start my day last Thursday sitting with my wife in the 19th Precinct station of the New York Police Department asking for help.
No, we weren't under arrest. What we needed was NYPD's help to give my wife some ID so she could get on our Northwest Airlines flight back to Jackson, due to leave in less than three hours.
Unbeknownst to her, my wife had lost her wallet with her driver's license and credit cards the night before when we arrived by a hotel courtesy car at a restaurant on 7th Avenue and 57th Street. We were having dinner with some old Mississippi friends.
Rather than regarding us as a couple of elderly bumpkins from the sticks, the officer at the 19th NYPD Precinct couldn't have been nicer or more helpful. He made a call to Northwest headquarters in Tampa, Fla., and talked to someone who OK'd my wife getting through the airline gate at LaGuardia Airport. I had my own ID as well as the plane tickets for both of us.
Mind you, this was New York City, the Big Apple, and not Pelahatchie or McComb where we were being treated with the same courtesy and consideration we Southerners covet.
But the 19th Precinct visit wasn't the end of the story. What unfolded later was a story that could be titled a minor (pun intended) "Miracle on 42nd Street."
First I must relate why I happened to be in New York city in the first place.
As the initial recipient of the John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism administered by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, I had been asked to attend the award ceremony and dinner two nights earlier at the Pierre Hotel.
Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times was this year's recipient of the award, which carries with it a handsome $25,000 honorarium.
The award had been established in 1997 by philanthropist Ira Lipman to honor the late legendary broadcaster John Chancellor, whom Lipman befriended years ago.
The entire affair, including the honorarium as well as an elaborate black tie dinner, is endowed by Lipman, who maintains corporate offices in both Memphis and New York.
Without Ira Lipman's generosity, my wife and I wouldn't have been in the Big City. Only a few days earlier when Ira learned I was not able to come up for the award dinner, he put his top aides into action. A call came to me to get my bags packed because they were sending airplane tickets and had a top-notch hotel room reserved and paid for.
For this old journalist from the Deep South to be in the company of some of the nation's top journalists is a remarkable opportunity.
Not the least of those present would be two old friends from Mississippi, John Herbers and Jack Nelson.
Herbers had gone on from being UPI bureau chief in Jackson to become a noted national correspondent for the New York Times. Nelson, whom I had known as a cub reporter for the Biloxi-Gulfport Sun Herald, had risen to become Washington bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times.
Three years ago, Herbers received the Chancellor Award and Nelson is on the award jury. Both are now retired.
But back to the Minor version of "Miracle on 42nd Street." When we arrived back home in Jackson last Thursday night, I found a call on my answering machine from some hard-to-understand foreign-accented fellow in New York, obviously calling with street noise in the background.
However, it was clear that he had found my wife's wallet, either on 42nd or 47th street (how it got there is impossible to fathom). The $40 was not in it, but my wife's driver's license, Social Security card, credit card and calling cards were.
Further, this kind soul said he was going to drop off the wallet at a police precinct station near Times Square, as best we could tell, at 42nd and 5th Avenue.
I immediately began calling every precinct station telephone number I could get anywhere in the whole midtown New York area to see if a wallet had been turned in to them. It was just guesswork because there were at least four possibilities, but none of them had seen it.
Then, lo and behold, an hour or two later comes a phone call from a NYPD officer at the precinct station on West 35th Street and he says that my wife's wallet had been turned in to them by an unnamed person. It still had the same contents as the broken-English good Samaritan had described.
This NYPD officer said it would be sent over to a central lost property control station, and he gave us a voucher number to ask for. In a couple of days my wife's wallet with driver's license and credit card (but sans money) would be back in Mississippi.
It was all quite an experience, but I wouldn't put it on my next travel itinerary.
