Canadian student finds hero in Fairmont

By John Veasey
Times West Virginian

FAIRMONT August 20, 2008 12:49 am

— Andrea Catalano has never met John Greynolds.
But he instantly became her hero.
Andrea, 21, is a college student from Canada who was heading to Myrtle Beach with a friend when she stopped at Brady’s Exxon for gas Monday evening. Her classes at Laurentran University don’t begin until September.
But when she stopped at the Days Inn Hotel in Flatwoods an hour or so later on the trip south, Andrea discovered she didn’t have her wallet. A wallet that not only contained all of her important cards, but $700 in vacation money that she had saved up over the summer.
“She called me around 8 and was crying and hysterical,” her father Bill Catalano, from Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, told the Times West Virginian in a telephone call yesterday. “She was in a panic.
“She knew she had filled up near Fairmont at an Exxon station, but that’s about all,” Catalano said, noting his daughter had no idea what she had done with her wallet.
This is a time when fathers are supposed to come to the rescue, and Bill Catalano responded in splendid fashion.
From his home some 200 miles north of Toronto, Canada, he began checking for Exxon stations in the Fairmont area and later in the evening was able to track down John Greynolds, an employee of Brady’s Exxon, after 10 p.m.
“While he was on the phone, he looked all over the station area,” Catalano said, “but he couldn’t find any wallet.”
But Greynolds wasn’t finished looking.
Later in the evening, he went out onto the road that connects Route 73 with Interstate 79. And it didn’t take him very long to find Andrea’s wallet, still lying in the road where it apparently had fallen off the car.
At 5 a.m., Greynolds called Catalano in Canada to tell him the good news.
“He called and told me what had happened — that he had gone out onto the road and found the wallet,” Catalano said. “What good news that was.”
He said he called his daughter a short time later and she returned to Brady’s to pick up the wallet —intact with all her cards and the money.
But Greynolds’ shift was already over. He wasn’t there when Andrea first stopped and lost her wallet. And he wasn’t there when she returned to retrieve it.
“With the new border regulations,” the father said, “even getting home would have been difficult. All of her important papers were missing. She had nothing.”
Catalano said he knows many people from Canada stop in the Summersville and Flatwoods areas overnight en route to the Carolina coast.
“I think I will recommend that people make Fairmont their night stop and fill up at Brady’s Exxon,” he said.
E-mail John Veasey at jcveasey@timeswv.com.