Casino Returns Purse : After 3 1/2 Decades, The Lost Is Found

Thirty-five years ago, Mary Ellen Thomas lost her purse in a struggle with a would-be rapist at a Lake Tahoe gambling lodge. Last week, the black cloth handbag was returned--looking just as it did when she last saw it, at a time when Dwight D. Eisenhower was still president.

A flood of long-dormant feelings surged through Thomas as she examined her old belongings, she said Monday night after returning from the mountain resort community where she retrieved them.

Found Between Walls

“It was just such a flashback. It reminded me of how naive I was in those days,” said the Dana Point woman. “Yet the more I think about it, I see how well-organized I was that I would carry all this stuff.”

The clutch bag was discovered 18 months ago between walls of a washroom that workers were remodeling in the basement of the Cal-Neva Lodge on Lake Tahoe, according to lodge security supervisor Mike Street. It has taken since then, Street said, for the management of the lodge to track down the woman identified only as Mary Ellen Hall from identification in the purse.

Thomas, a Dana Point resident who would give her age only as in her 50s, said she had worked at the lodge during the summer of 1953, upon graduating with an art degree from UCLA. The daughter of the late U.S. District Judge Pierson M. Hall of Los Angeles, Thomas worked as a relief cashier at the resort, which then attracted the likes of Frank Sinatra and Perry Como in their heydays.

Last week, Thomas relived that era after Cal-Neva Lodge management flew her up to return her purse and she once again viewed its contents. The only thing missing, she said, was the $125 she had gotten from cashing her paycheck on Aug. 15, the day she was assaulted.

Still in mint condition were:

* Her California driver’s license, issued in 1947 with the black background that long ago went out of use.

* A complete case of cosmetics, including eyelash curler and an old-fashioned bottle of Maybelline perfume--which, she said, “is still good; I smelled it.”

* A half empty package of Pall Mall cigarettes.

* Her work schedule that summer at the Cal-Neva Lodge.

* Her receipts from the train she took that summer from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and then the bus on to Lake Tahoe where she would work that summer.

Also lost in the handbag those many years were Thomas’ birth certificate, her voter’s registration card, keys to a safety deposit box and to her luggage, a lace handkerchief, a UCLA Bruin key chain and then-recent snapshots of her parents and the family’s home in Los Angeles. There was even a matchbook featuring steaks for $2.75 at a local steakhouse, where she and a group of other lodge employees had gone to celebrate payday the night of her attack.

The 7-inch-long black faille purse, newly bought at the time she lost it, was in near mint condition, except for one side that was ripped out under the handle during the struggle with her attacker.

“I wish I could find one like it now,” she said.

Thomas would go on after that incident to work for a decade for the U.S. State Department in such locales as Paris, Rome and Cairo. She followed that with two decades as a Los Angeles schoolteacher. In 1986, she retired to pursue her ambition to be a painter.

‘Very Traumatic Experience’

But that night in 1953 stood out among the others.

“It was the closest time I’ve ever come to being raped,” Thomas said. “It was a very traumatic experience.”

Thomas remembers that the summer had been otherwise ideal. Fresh from college and filled with youthful dreams, she had gone up to Lake Tahoe to spend one last adventurous summer before settling down into the grind of the workaday world. Everything was perfect until the night of Aug. 15, when she hitched a ride back to the lodge with a busboy who had attended the payday party at a nearby steakhouse.

When they arrived in the Cal-Neva parking lot, Thomas said the busboy attacked her. During the struggle, he apparently grabbed the purse and she let go and fled into the darkness.

“I remember that in the process of getting away from this man, the purse was not that important,” she recalled.

She never pressed charges, she said, “because in those days you didn’t.” Nor did she ever see her assailant again. According to Street, the lodge’s security chief, the man must have placed the purse atop some wall beams in the basement and over the years it slipped down between the walls.

Said Thomas: “He couldn’t have chosen a better place to preserve it.”