Lost and found: A lifetime of memories

WASHINGTON - The suitcase - a valise, really - was no bigger than two briefcases, just an old, brown thing tucked into a first-floor crawl space.

The demolition guys found it. Guys whose job is to clobber, destroy, and trash. Theirs is not a sentimental enterprise. They are workers who wield annihilating hammers: sledgehammers, jackhammers.

And yet, the suitcase stopped them. For a year, maybe longer, they kept it right by the job box where they stored their tools, in the 11-story downtown building they were gutting and turning into condos. Every morning when Paul Barnett reported to work, he made sure the suitcase was still there. Someday, he and another guy told each other, they would find the owner and return it.

Not that it was worth much.

Inside the mottled, fabric-covered case, whose handle was missing and whose latches had torn off or disintegrated long ago, was a pile of photo albums: baby pictures and family trips, black-and-white photos bordered by white scalloped edges. There was a 1924 high school yearbook, a 1919 letter releasing a man named Shaughnessy from active duty in "The World War," a snapshot of a little boy learning to ride a bike. There were some 8x10s of a pretty woman in a bathing cap and a windblown man posing at the beach, and a long, handwritten paper called "The Causes of the World War" that earned an A+ for Mildred Flynn in 1927 along with a professor's exultation: "This shows unusual ability."

But the suitcase bore no tag. No definitive name or address anywhere. So Barnett, 42, kept his eye on the suitcase and promised that, soon, he'd do something more conclusive.

Earlier this month, he came to work at the Woodward Building, at 15th and H streets NW. The first floor had been cleared out. Everything was gone. Including the suitcase.

"That thing got thrown away," some of the others told him - "pulling my chain," as Barnett calls it now.

"It had better not gotten thrown away!" he remembers shouting. Nearly everyone at the Woodward building knew that the suitcase "meant a lot to me," he said. He had vowed to find the owners. "And if you say you're going to do something, integrity means everything."

So when some of the guys confessed that the suitcase was lying on a loading cart in the basement, Barnett raced down and started going through every piece of paper, all over again.

"There's no way," he worried, "we're going to find somebody who graduated from college in 1923." But on several papers, the name Shaughnessy popped up. One was a Brian Shaughnessy, who was listed on a elementary school graduation program from 1952.

Googling that name, Barnett began calling the 20 numbers that came up. One after another, they had all been disconnected. Or no one was there by that name. Two numbers were attached to addresses on 15th Street, so he and a supervisor trudged up 15th, hoping - fruitlessly - to find that grammar school kid.

The last number on his list was for a D.C. lawyer named Brian Shaughnessy. When a man answered the phone, Barnett told him:

"If your mother's name was Mildred and your dad's name was William, I've got some really important stuff that you'd probably want to see."

Brian Shaughnessy, 68, was born in Massachusetts and grew up in southern Rhode Island.

He has a white rim of hair around his head and lives in a Washington rowhouse overflowing with Victorian furniture, bright glass chandeliers, and his wife's growing collection of marble fireplaces.

His mother, Mildred Flynn, was a schoolteacher who took that "unusual ability" praised by a college professor and earned her master's degree.

His father was a baker who never went past the fifth grade. William Shaughnessy wasn't much for pretty writing but, Brian Shaughnessy says proudly, "When he decorated a wedding cake . . ."

Shaughnessy was an only child with vivid memories of growing up in the Homelike Bakery. He used to take scraps of his father's pie dough, stuff it with apple filling and sell, for a nickel apiece, Brian's Little Pies.

When it came time to clean the pans, his mother made him a deal: If he was reading, he wouldn't get stuck washing up.

This ensured that, thanks to his mom, he spent much of his childhood immersed in books, a fact his wife credits for his success in life. "They were big pans," he says, "and you really had to scrape."

As soon as he got the call from Barnett, Shaughnessy rearranged his schedule so he could rush down first thing the next morning. That Friday, he descended into the basement of the Woodward building, where his wife, Colleen Corrigan, used to own the Bikini Store, and where she had stored the suitcase in an old crawl space in the back. Now, soaked with dust, there it was.

"I'm so glad to get it," Shaughnessy says with lawyerly decorum and understatement. The items inside "don't mean anything to anybody else, but they mean a lot to me."

About a half-dozen others from the site crowded around Shaughnessy and his suitcase. They knew, almost better than he, everything it held inside: the basketball tournament program from the '50s, the baby pictures, the young mother who looks so radiant, the photo of a young boy in knickers taking his first Communion.

And there they were, those construction workers in their heavy boots, those guys with scarred hands who tear down and rip out, respectfully watching the white-haired lawyer.

Shaughnessy's father died in 1985, and his mother died two years later.

Now, two decades after their deaths, he was staring silently at their unearthed pictures, confronting memories of his past.

Later that morning, Shaughnessy left the Woodward Building. He had appointments all afternoon.

But that night, he says, he stayed up after 2 a.m., poring over everything the suitcase held, reading, remembering, and reliving.