A Purple Heart medal is given to those who are wounded or killed in service. It’s an honor, and something a family typically cherishes.
So when a friend of Leslie Lee spotted a small, black leather box that read "Purple Heart" in an Ypsilanti antique store, she couldn't just leave it there.
"'That's just not right, she said, that it's in that case,'" said Leslie Lee, an artist from the Traverse City area. "That should be at somebody's home. That should go back to whoever has it."
Lee's friend also noticed a note next to the medal that read: "[In] 1944, General Patton gave this medal to Clifton Moses Chippewa of the 82nd Airborne. Clifton was a driver to General Patton and injured during this war."
Lee's friend recognized the last name "Chippewa" as Native American, and she sent the medal to Lee hoping she could help reunite it with its recipient.
Lee gave the medal to her friend Hank Bailey, a citizen of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians.
"I went to the local [veteran's] post in Peshawbestown, and I tried to get some help through there," Bailey said. "I wasn't getting very far, and I was pretty busy at that time, so I had to end up setting the case in a drawer."
10 years passed. And then one day a couple months ago, Bailey’s wife found the medal again when going through the drawer.
"And she says, 'Hey, look at this.' I said, 'Oh my gosh. I never followed up on that.'”
In the meantime, Bailey had become friends with a tribal member interested in genealogy. He reached out to her this time around.
"I'll be darned, it seemed like two, three hours later, she called me back, and she already had a bunch of info."
It seemed like the family of Clifton Chippewa — to whom the medal belonged and who was a member of the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe — was still in Michigan, not far from the antique store where the medal was found.
When Bailey got a hold of Chippewa’s granddaughter, she told him the family would like to reunite with the medal in the little leather box.
"I think it's an awesome thing if we can complete the story," Bailey said.
The end of this story has been a long time coming. But Bailey said, maybe, that’s as it should be.
"Sometimes we talk about that in our culture, about Indian time," he said. "A lot of times people talk about Indian time [when] they're going to be late for something, and it's an excuse to be late. But the way we really look at it is, Indian time is when things are supposed to happen.
When Bailey puts the medal into the mail this week, he hopes it’ll be making its final journey.
