An old wallet and a handful of family photographs sat hidden inside a Cheyenne home for decades, waiting for someone to recognize the four little girls staring out from the pictures.
J.R. Larsen didn't know George Monroe Long when he discovered the wallet and a collection of old keepsakes tucked away in a hiding spot in his house, but there were clues.
An envelope addressed to George Monroe Long at 3352 Alexander Ave., an old Wyoming Gold bank card in Mrs. Long's name, folded maps and a small stack of faded family photographs.
"Does anyone know George Monroe Long, born April 28, 1929, or any of his family members?" Larsen posted to the Cheyenne Community Connections Facebook page.
"I'd love to track down his relatives and get these pieces of family history back where they belong," he wrote.
It didn't take long before people started calling,.
On Wednesday evening, those girls — now grown women — got their father's wallet back.
For the four sisters, seeing their father's handwriting, photographs and belongings again was a wonderful surprise, 20 years after his death.
Gorgeous George
Larsen's discovery opened a door into a childhood the Long sisters have not forgotten.
Their father had jet-black hair that he slicked back, Elvis-style, and usually wore Levi's 501s jeans with a short-sleeved button-up shirt or T-shirt. He smoked Marlboros, which he usually rolled into a sleeve.
He actually had a wallet mark, Janet said, where a permanent outline was worn into his back pocket.
His brother called him "Gorgeous George."
His daughters remember a newspaper man, a pilot, a veteran, a Jeep tinkerer and a dad raising four girls with his wife, Arlene.
The family moved from Kimball, Nebraska, to Cheyenne when the oldest daughter Cindy was about 4 or 5. They first rented on Pershing Boulevard before a succession of houses on the same street.
"We've actually lived on Alexander in four different homes," Cindy said. "We moved in a wheelbarrow, basically — across the street, down the street. He worked three jobs, but the times that he was home, he always took time to be a father."
That meant badminton and kickball, skateboards, and tennis lessons.
George cut his daughters' hair himself, something the sisters can laugh about now when they look at their childhood photographs.
George earned his pilot's license before his driver's license, his daughters said, and later taught people to fly. He took his girls along, sometimes flying from Cheyenne toward Pine Bluffs and landing on a dirt strip near their grandparents' home near Egbert.
Years later, Cindy's own children learned to listen for their grandpa's plane approaching their home north of Cheyenne.
"You could hear him coming," she said.
The kids would climb onto the roof to watch as he came in low and put on a show overhead.
The four Long sisters — Cindy, Kathy, Janet and Sandy — together as girls. (Janet Long) 
George and Arlene Long with their four daughters, Cindy, Kathy, Janet and Sandy, at their Cheyenne home. (Janet Long) 
(Janet Long)
He Was Brave
Before George was the dad driving four girls across the country, he was a soldier.
A Presidential Memorial Certificate honors George M. Long for his service in the U.S. Armed Forces.
Another surviving document, dated Oct. 23, 1952, shows a commendation from the 74th Engineer Combat Battalion recognizing the officers and men of Company A for their work preparing for an assault on "Snipers Ridge" during the Korean War.
Long's company was tasked with getting four tanks up the steep reverse slope of a mountain with 1,700 feet of elevation, then preparing positions from which the tanks could fire on enemy forces.
They worked within 150 yards of enemy snipers and under what the commendation described as an "almost constant enemy artillery and mortar barrage."
The mission required "the highest degree of courage," the commander wrote.
The operation succeeded.
George eventually came home.
Then came Cheyenne, Arlene and four daughters.
Like many veterans of his generation, George didn't make much of what he had done overseas. To his daughters, he was just Dad — but when they found the wallet, there was an old Army registration document.
Red 228
Years ago, George wrote about one of the most difficult chapters in the Long family's history.
George began the article by wondering what his family had done "to be the repeated target of a torpedo of heart disease."
Arlene had serious heart trouble that was discovered while she was pregnant with Sandy, the youngest of their four daughters. A damaged aortic valve eventually sent Arlene to Denver for open-heart surgery.
George remembered driving her south from Cheyenne on a beautiful winter day, sunlight bouncing off the snow-covered Rockies.
"I doubt if I'll ever see this again," Arlene told him as she looked toward the mountains.
At first, the operation appeared successful. Then, while George waited at the hospital that evening, he heard a call over the intercom.
"Red 228."
It was Arlene.
Nurses rushed to her bedside. Blood was hurried down the hallway. Through an open door, George saw a heart specialist pounding on his wife's chest.
"I believed she had ceased to exist for me," George wrote, "and I couldn't bear the void in my life."
Doctors revived Arlene and rushed her back into surgery. Over a 17-hour period, George wrote, she spent nearly 10 hours undergoing two heart operations.
She survived.
More Heart Trouble
Sandy was still a baby when her mother came home. As she grew, her parents noticed her heart racing whenever she ran, played or became excited.
Tests at Children's Hospital Colorado in Denver revealed what George described as a hole in his youngest daughter's heart "the size of a silver dollar."
Sandy underwent surgery at age 3 in July 1969.
Ten days later, she was home.
George thought his family finally had "a chance for normalcy."
About a year later, the Long family was vacationing in Washington when Arlene walked out of a kitchen, sat beside George and told him something was wrong.
Her face was "ghostly" white, George wrote, and her heart was pounding so violently he could see it through her blouse.
At the hospital, her heart rate was about 200.
Arlene eventually flew home while George drove the four girls back to Wyoming. In his article, he remembered Cindy and Kathy, the oldest daughters, becoming "mini-mothers" to Janet and Sandy during the two-day trip.
Back in Wyoming, doctors recommended a third heart operation.
Arlene initially refused. Eventually, she changed her mind and scheduled the surgery for July 28 — her birthday.
The operation lasted 7½ hours. Surgeons replaced her previous valve with an all-stainless steel one.
This recovery was different. Within 10 days, Arlene was home.
"I can only thank God for the extended lives He has given my wife and my daughter and the extended joy He has given me," he wrote.
"It is evident to me that God's protection is hereditary."
Pieces Come Home
Decades passed.
The girls grew up. The family moved from those childhood houses and started their own families.
George died in September 2006.
"He was just a wonderful all-around guy," Cindy reflected.
The wallet didn't turn up in any of the Long girls' childhood homes. Larsen found it at a 1950s-era house on Henderson Drive, where Janet and her husband, Mike, had lived decades ago.
How it got there remains a mystery.
A father of three girls himself, Larsen stumbled across the wallet while looking for a hiding place for his own daughters’ Christmas presents. It was tucked away on a little ledge in a closet.
"It’s so weird that it just turns up now after all this time," Cindy said.
In any case, all four were touched by the Larsen's willingness to return the item back to the family.
“It shows that there are still very good people in the world," Janet said.
Kolby Fedore can be reached at kolby@cowboystatedaily.com.
