LEAGUE CITY, Texas — A purse from 1959 found in the floorboards of the old League City School has finally been reunited with the owner's family.
Clear Creek ISD said the purse's owner, Beverly Williams, died in 2016. She had nine children who all live in Texas and California. Two of them still live in League City.
The family said the purse was found sometime around Oct. 5, which would've been Beverly's 76th birthday.
The contractor who found the purse said his crew was hired to replace the stage at the school earlier this year.
“I had to get in there and lay down and kind of dig it out," contractor Armando Rodriguez said. "How it got there, I don't know."
When the crew finished pulling the floorboards from the stage, Rodriguez said he saw something shiny between the joists.
"A little purse stands out amongst the dirt. So, I saw that and we opened it up. We were like, 'Wow, there's some pictures.' So that's when I thought I'd better turn this into somebody," he said.
Soon after, experts got involved and identified Williams as the likely owner, but weren't able to get much further. The school's archives and records had no information on Williams and online searches didn't help either.
That's when the League City Historical Society put out a call to help find the owner. Within days, the puzzle was solved.
"When I got that information, who was Beverly Williams, it just opened up the past," Robert Schleyer, one of Williams' friends said.
Decades ago, Schleyer walked the floor of the League City School gymnasium as a student. Once upon a time, Schleyer knew Williams very well.
"It's written, 'With all my love, Robert Charles Schleyer," he said. "It's really confusing because, in her little diary, she said something about, 'Tonight, at Kemah Teen Club, I started going steady with Walt.' And I'm trying to figure out if that's before or after me."
Some feelings live for a lifetime.
"In a way, she saved my life. I came from a really disturbing childhood and she lived right down the street from me," Schleyer said. "We’d walk, we walked along the beach, sat on the pier, we talked.”
The day Schleyer turned 18, he enlisted in the Marines and was sent to California. Not long after that, the two made plans to meet one night at the beach, but it just wasn't meant to be.
"She was living with her grandmother, and they shoed me away, so that night I slept on the beach, and Beverly and I never saw each other again," he said.
Three years ago, Schleyer became a widower.
"I'm unhappy, I'm alone. I don't like living alone," he said. "I really had hoped that I could come back and we could recapture something that we once had. That ain't going to happen."
Sadly, Williams died six years ago.
However, the treasures found in her purse have allowed her daughters to see what their mom was like as a child.
"Everything she had in that bag meant something to her. It’s either personal notes, prayers that she said, pictures," three of her daughters said. "Here we have this little time capsule to see our mom when she was 13. It’s sad she’s not here to see it."