When Sam Semilia toted up his retirement finances, he was pretty sure that he was due a pension from his time working as a steam engineer for the Diamond Crystal salt company four decades before. Salty is one way to describe the search for his money, a four-year odyssey filled with shredded paper trails and assorted dead ends, along with a brief history of modern American capitalism.
These obstacles included the fact that while Diamond Crystal was still a familiar brand, it had been bought and sold by several companies through the years—each one newly responsible for old pensioners. As he traced that snaking path, he found that his original paperwork may have no longer existed, as business records mostly went digital since he left the company in 1979. “I don’t know how someone would do it without documents,” said Semilia, 71. “I kept all of them, including a worksheet and cover letter, but it still wasn’t good enough.”
