Sowing the seeds of honesty.(The Goodness Of America)

In March, Gerald Parish of Spencer, Iowa, passed away at age 85. During the July 4th weekend, his three children (Jody Gardner of Omaha, Nebraska, and her two sisters from California) held a holiday party in his memory at the family home on Iowa's Lake Okoboji. More than 200 people attended the event.

A few days later, the sisters closed their father's bank accounts and signed the pertinent estate documents. Jody Gardner's share of the inheritance included $20,000 in cashier's checks and $1,000 in cash and coins, which she placed in her billfold.

On the trip back to the lake home, Gardner stopped in Milford to buy some groceries. She set the billfold on top of her van while placing the groceries in the vehicle, then forgot about it and drove off. "I can't believe I did it, but I did it," she told the July 25 Des Moines Register. In addition to the money, the billfold included such identifiers as her driver's license, insurance license (she is an agent), and six credit cards.

Later that day, Tim Titterington and his son Dylan, 16, were mowing Conservation Reserve Program land along a state highway near their farm outside Milford. Mr. Titterington told the Register, "We're just finishing up a farm south of West Okoboji. I took off down the road going home. A semi drove past, and it looked like confetti flying around. I got a little closer, and here's 20-dollar bills flying around, and receipts, and everything else." He also noticed a billfold lying in the road, about five miles from the Milford store where Gardner had stopped for groceries. "The cars and trucks were hitting it," he recalled. "It was busy, right around the holidays. Nobody was stopping. A semi would go by and blow everything into the air. Not a soul stopped to help."

Crawling on their hands and knees, Mr. Titterington and Dylan tried to retrieve the debris as cars and trucks whizzed by, "just going vroom, vroom, vroom. You know how it is. Like trying to change a tire in the middle of the interstate." It was, he says, "the Great American Scavenger Hunt."

In all, the Titteringtons spent about an hour tracking down the checks, cash and other items disgorged from the billfold. When they arrived home, Dylan rummaged through it all and came across a telephone number that put him in touch with one of Gardner's friends, who ...