Moultrian gets vacation memories back where they belong

Kevin Hall

MOULTRIE — The whole point of a vacation is the memories, and modern technology offers a great way to preserve those memories with a digital camera. So imagine the heartache of getting home and finding the contents of that camera gone.

That happened to a couple of vacationers at Yellowstone Park when the memory card of their digital camera was lost.

But it was Grace Kelly of Moultrie to the rescue!

Kelly found the memory card while she too was vacationing at Yellowstone in June. Thinking it was a blank card someone had left behind, she pocketed it. After she got home, she plugged it into her computer just to see, and she found several photos from a family’s vacation. The first exposures were from a trip to Washington, D.C., and the rest from the fateful Yellowstone trek.

“This card had some of the same shots I had taken when I was at Yellowstone,” she said.

Who were these people, Kelly wondered, so she set about trying to get the memory card back to its rightful owners.

Only one photo of the whole set offered a clue, Kelly said. In it, one of the vacationers was wearing a jacket with the logo of Gallo Family Vineyards, which is based in Sonoma County, Calif. Of course, she didn’t know anyone who worked for the vineyards.

On a visit to her son in Atlanta, she showed him the picture. He didn’t know anyone at Gallo either. About that time, his mother-in-law, Clare Clare, walked in. She didn’t know anyone at Gallo, but she knew someone who did.

Clare got in touch with Barbara Jessee, whose son, Jim, works at Gallo, and the photo was e-mailed to him. He showed it around his office, and one of his co-workers recognized the vacationers as her aunt and uncle. She had given her uncle the Gallo jacket a few years earlier.

On Friday, Kelly put the memory card into the mail, headed for Darrel and Jane Baker on the Arkansas-Oklahoma border. Jane Baker e-mailed her appreciation for Kelly’s tracking them down.

Baker said she took her husband, a World War II veteran, on a long-overdue visit to the World War II Memorial in Washington. Later, they went to Yellowstone, where the memory card was lost.

“It was an intriguing journey to find them,” Kelly said. “It just kind of made my day when I actually found them.”

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