While fishing at Minnesota’s Lake in the Woods this summer with his family, 14-year-old Connor Halsa made an unexpected catch. The teen from Moorhead, Minnesota was fishing for walleye, but reeled in a waterlogged billfold instead. To the family’s surprise, the wallet contained $2-thousand in cash!
Fortunately, the wallet also contained a business card that led them to get in touch with Iowa farmer Jim Denney. A year earlier, Denney had been fishing in Lake in the Woods when his wallet slipped out of his pocket and into the water. He didn’t even realize it until he went to pay his bill at the resort later that day. He was shocked that someone had found it after all this time. "The odds of ever finding a billfold in there, a billfold in 20-foot water, I don't think there would be a number," Denney says.
The grateful farmer made the trip from Iowa to Minnesota to meet up with Halsa. He tried to give the teen a reward for his good deed, but Halsa wouldn’t take it. "To meet people like that, that is that honest,” Denney shares, “I tried to get them to take the money and they wouldn't do it." Instead, the farmer gave Halsa a custom fishing cooler with “Halsa” printed on the lid and treated the teen’s whole family to dinner out. And on top of that, Denney gave Halsa a compliment he won’t soon forget, saying, “I would take Connor as a grandson any day, and I would fight for him any day."