Tag line: Don’t crawl around in the parking lot of a mental hospital in the dark.

First, a clarification: This happened to another pizza delivery guy at the restaurant I delivered for in the early 1970’s in Chicago. Let’s call him Tony, because I no longer remember his name.

Tony took several pizzas for delivery and didn’t return within the expected time (more or less 30 minutes). Meanwhile, deliveries were backing up and we were trying to keep up. After he was missing for an hour, the owners and his girlfriend, who happened to be at the pizza place, were really concerned.

The owner called the last place Tony had delivered to, which was a building at the nearby mental hospital and they confirmed that they received their pizzas. Nobody knew what to do.

Eventually, we received a call from the security people at the mental hospital, where they were holding Tony. The mental hospital was actually a large campus on the northwest side of Chicago with at least a couple dozen buildings. (It was called Dunning, although the official name was Chicago State Hospital. In its early history it was called the Cook County Insane Asylum.)

It turns out that Tony had dropped his keys somewhere between the building where he delivered the pizzas and his car. He was crawling around on his hands and knees, in the dark, around his car, when a security guard spotted him. The guard questioned him. Tony explained what happened but the security guard didn’t believe him and called in reinforcements. They took him into custody while they tried to figure out which building he had escaped from. After about 30 minutes of failing to find any ward that was missing a patient, they finally decided to indulge Tony, just in case his story was actually true, and called the restaurant. Once they reached the restaurant, they were genuinely surprised that Tony had been telling them the truth.

Several guards with flashlights searched and eventually found Tony’s keys in the grass and sent him back with their apologies.