A piece of Rochester resident Bill Sullivan's past caught up with him this week, more than 60 years after it disappeared.

It was an envelope containing three small documents: a yellowed and frayed Tenderfoot certification card, a Boy Scout ID card and a black-and-white photo of a young man in an Army uniform.

Sullivan was a 12-year-old boy when he scrawled his name and home address in black felt pen on one of the cards. Then he lost track of them. One night 64 years later, Sullivan, 76, received a call from a Rochester nurse wondering if he had once been in Scouts.

"I was a history major in college, so I kind of like old things," said Sullivan, in the lobby of Fontaine Towers in downtown Rochester, where Geraldine Hider returned the items to him. "I'm living on memories. A lot of my friends have passed on, so this means an awful lot to me."

The documents seemed to open a small portal into Sullivan's past. There, again in black marker, were a list of merit badges he had already earned — in fire building, thrift and safety — all certified and signed by his troop leaders. There, on the ID card, was his address, a house he lived in for nearly 70 years before moving to Fontaine Towers four years ago.

Yet one mystery persisted. Sullivan said he had no idea who the man in the Army uniform was despite it being bundled with his stuff.

Sullivan worked as a classified advertising manager for the Rochester Post-Bulletin for 15 years and as a Realtor for two decades after that.

How the items came to be lost and eventually made their way into Hider's possession is largely shrouded in mystery. Sullivan said he doesn't know how he lost them. Yet they somehow found their way into the pages of a Rochester library book, because that's where Hider's son, Ian Pringle, found them.

A Boy Scout himself, Ian put the cards with his Scout stuff. And there they remained for who knows how long, until one day Hider came upon them while sorting through her son's materials. Ian is now a college student in California.

Hider said the envelope with the documents inside felt like a mysterious connection to the past.

"It was one of those things that you find and you wonder, if he's still around. I just did some searching, and I found him," she said.