Airline worker turns detective to help woman reunite with late mom's precious 1940s 'love letter'

Some old letters not only have historical value and act as records, but they also have a deep sentimental value. So when a woman, Rachel DeGoila, lost a satchel full of her late mother's old letters written between the 1940s and 70s on a Southwest Airlines plane, she found herself in a depressing situation. There was a strong possibility that she might have never gotten to see those letters again. However, a determined airline employee ensured that she got them back, as reported by CBS News.

An employee found the bag of letters under a seat and brought it to the Baggage Services Office at Chicago Midway International Airport. However, no one came forward to claim the letters. Another employee, Sarah, noticed that and decided to keep them in a safe office and wait until they found the bag's owner. In one of the envelopes from August 2021, the employee found an address under DeGoila's name. She looked up the name in the airline systems but came up empty-handed. But surprisingly, she found a phone number soon enough. When Sarah called and said, "My name is Sarah Haffner from Southwest Airlines," DeGoila excitedly asked her, "You have the letters?" The family was beyond happy to find the letter again.

DeGoila's mom, Lois, had died of cancer in 1996, four months after her diagnosis, as reported by CNN. So when she found the letters, she was happy to have such a strong memory of her mother with her. The letters Lois had written to her brother Phil were kept carefully by him and then found by DeGoila's cousin in the summer of 2021. The letters went as far back as 1947 when Lois was a teenager when she went to college in Chicago and met her husband. "There were all these questions we’d have wanted to ask her. This felt like a gift – a window into her young adulthood. And to lose it…I felt so stupid to have not at least copied them."

DeGoila's cousin sent her the letters as he found them over the summer. So she decided to take them with her to her daughter's wedding party over the Labor Day weekend. She was quite excited to share her mother's letter with her brother, who was ecstatic to see them. DeGoila didn't make any copies while traveling with the letters and when her brother took them with him to do that, he accidentally forgot the bag on his flight back to Chicago. "He was going to scan them when he got home, so he took them on the plane, put them on the floor and they were somehow kicked under his seat," she recounted. "He didn’t notice they were gone for a few hours. He didn’t even get to read them."

In a tweet, Southwest Airlines–which goes by @SouthwestAir on X–shared the incident with the internet. "When our employees found a satchel full of handwritten letters from the '40s, they knew they were too important for lost and found. They held onto the letters, searching for clues as to who owned them," the caption read. "Finally, our employee Sarah found a return address dated 2021. After some digging, Sarah contacted Rachel, the customer who had accidentally lost the letters, which were written by her late mother. Rachel and her family were overjoyed to be reunited with them," a second tweet added.