Family's paper trail reaches happy ending

Eulah Detweiler received her high school diploma in Chicago on June 17, 1932.

In the last 70 years, that piece of paper has been in St. Petersburg, Fla., Wooddale, Ill., Grand Forks, N.D, Mitchel, S.D., Cape Girardeau and Jackson.

On May 6, it traveled from a Jackson storage unit to the Land of Oz and back again.

It was sucked from a box in the unit and came to rest upon the Dumey family's lawn in the Bent Creek subdivision, nearly two miles away.

"I can't believe it came from Mill's Storage," Laura Dumey said. "That's a long flight."

Soon, it will find itself on Fifth Avenue in New York at the home of the late Detweiler's oldest daughter, Susan Harris.

Myra Peo, Detweiler's sister, read Wednesday's Southeast Missourian article about the Dumeys' discovery of the diploma. One of Peo's bridge-playing partners had called and told her to look at the front page.

Detweiler died about 2 1/2 years ago, but Peo has had the diploma in "a box somewhere" since her parents died.

Detweiler graduated from Hyde Park High School in Chicago and went on to graduate from the University of Chicago. She didn't work for pay, but she often volunteered in hospital emergency rooms as a Spanish interpreter.

Peo and her husband, George, have lived in Cape Girardeau almost 24 years.