As he jumped online at the airport to cancel his passport, a New Zealand call came through to his cellphone.<\/p>\n
It was an Air New Zealand staff member with news that a Virginia man had found the passport. \u201cI was like, \u2018Oh, God, I love you.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Jamie Wall on an earlier visit to Washington DC during his US trip. Photo \/ supplied<\/p>\n
But that was to be only the start of Wall\u2019s good news break and an extraordinary 24 hours that followed. <\/p>\n
His passport saviour, Park Wollam, is a retired army veteran and State Department worker \u2013 and, as it turns out, a handy and patient part-time detective and a hell of a kind person.<\/p>\n
Wollam had found the passport that had slipped out of Wall\u2019s shorts on the Silver Line Metro train and figured out from it, and the boarding pass, how to find its owner \u2013 spending an hour on hold with Air New Zealand for starters.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t think of a better person to find your lost passport than this guy because he\u2019d literally spent a career issuing them and visas and stuff,\u201d Wall told Media Insider.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe family pieced my life together from it.\u201d <\/p>\n
Wollam offered to bring the passport to Dulles Airport, an hour and 15 minutes away by train from his home in Alexandria, Virginia. <\/p>\n
But Wall – who works at MediaWorks as producer\/co-host of Martin Devlin\u2019s DSPN podcast – had already cancelled his flights and was no longer in a hurry. \u201cI said, \u2018No, please, you\u2019ve already done enough.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Laden with his luggage after six weeks covering the All Blacks through South Africa and the US, Wall made his way to Alexandria by train, and traipsed his way to Wollam\u2019s front door.<\/p>\n
\u201cI pulled up to the house, he opened the door, and he\u2019s like, \u2018Oh, you\u2019ve walked all this way with all your gear. You\u2019ve got to have a drink.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cHe goes, \u2018Do you like football?\u2019 And I said, \u2018Yeah, yeah.\u2019 \u2018Oh, come on, come on \u2013 we\u2019re all watching the football.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cAll of a sudden I\u2019m sitting on the couch with a beer, and watching the Washington Commanders play the Philadelphia Eagles. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe just start talking, and they\u2019re all super friendly people. It was him, his wife, his two daughters and daughter\u2019s partner.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wall got up to leave at halftime; the Wollams were having none of it. He stayed for the second half \u2013 and the night.<\/p>\n
Jamie Wall enjoyed the hospitality of a perfect stranger, Park Wollam, in Alexandria, Virginia.<\/p>\n
The next morning, Wollam gave Wall a personal tour of Alexandria. Among the highlights was the high school that was home of the 1971 football team that inspired the film Remember the Titans.<\/p>\n
Wollam also showed Wall a roomful of memorabilia in his home, including antique weapons and an image of his father with Raul Castro. Park Wollam snr was an American diplomat who served as the US Consul in Santiago de Cuba during the Cuban Revolution in the late 1950s. <\/p>\n
\u201cI was just like, man, this is fascinating. I\u2019m not even going to bother going to a museum. I\u2019m in one.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jamie Wall with an antique weapon from the Vietnam War.<\/p>\n
For Wall, it was ironic that, after six weeks travelling through South Africa and the US, trouble came on the very last scheduled day.<\/p>\n
But the experience has confirmed his faith in humanity.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have faith in humanity, so I wouldn\u2019t say it restored it, but it certainly made me feel pretty good about people and their kindness.<\/p>\n
\u201cI remember saying to him, \u2018I can\u2019t believe you\u2019ve done this, this is so, so nice, you\u2019ve been so kind.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd he just looked at me, \u2018Well, I found it. I had to help you.\u2019 He wasn\u2019t like boasting. \u2018I had to do it.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cIt made me feel like there are just good people out there. With America, people have mixed views on the country right now, but it\u2019s the people that make the place. That\u2019s what I\u2019ll think about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wall returned to Dulles Airport that following afternoon, on the train. \u201cI was clutching my passport in my hands the entire time.\u201d<\/p>\n
READ SHAYNE CURRIE\u2019S MEDIA INSIDER COLUMN WITH EXCLUSIVE NEWS AND INTERVIEWS FROM 5AM FRIDAY<\/p>\n
Editor-at-Large Shayne Currie is one of New Zealand\u2019s most experienced senior journalists and media leaders. He has held executive and senior editorial roles at NZME, including Managing Editor, NZ Herald Editor and Herald on Sunday Editor, and has a small shareholding in NZME.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As he jumped online at the airport to cancel his passport, a New Zealand call came through to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":603043,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[5263,30084,118628,36191,3009,7643,22263,293,11127,78,2936,9519,5844,5836,1073,111,139,1536,69,90,65159,6583,10538,23365,6327,3271,37451,213,24994,11685,3040,13558,2988,65508,6923,102,1959],"class_list":["post-603042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-all","tag-beer","tag-commanders","tag-couch","tag-eagles","tag-faith","tag-happened","tag-his","tag-humanity","tag-in","tag-insider","tag-jamie","tag-journalist","tag-lost","tag-media","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-next","tag-nz","tag-on","tag-passport","tag-philadelphia","tag-play","tag-restore","tag-rugby","tag-should","tag-sitting","tag-sports","tag-sudden","tag-train","tag-us","tag-wall","tag-washington","tag-watching","tag-what","tag-with","tag-your"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=603042"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603042\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/603043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=603042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=603042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=603042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}