TUALATIN, OR—Former project manager Bill Jacobson, 62, confirmed Monday that he still has in his possession an intricate system of immaculately maintained file folders with the name of his 34-year-old son written on them in black marker.
“I’m just holding onto them for [David],” Jacobson said of the exhaustive collection of his adult son’s old financial, academic, and medical records, which were reportedly collected at various points between the years 1975 and 1997. “I wouldn’t want him to lose anything. There’s some important stuff in there, and it’s easier just to have it all in one place.”
“If he ever needs anything from [the folders] he can just call home,” Jacobson added.
The folders, which are meticulously organized into 15 separate color-coded categories and contained within a legal-sized accordion file labeled “David,” are reportedly stored alongside many other files in a large plastic bin kept beneath the basement stairs of Jacobson’s home.
Jacobson, who ceased having any sort of authority over his son’s life more than 16 years ago, began creating the file system in the weeks before David was born, and over the years steadily added to it various documents ranging from his son’s birth certificate, to insurance forms for his son’s first car, to a handwritten list from 1993 outlining possible summer jobs.
“It’s a good thing I have these,” Jacobson said of the file folders. “Someone’s gotta keep track of this kind of stuff.”
Though it is no longer necessary for Jacobson to have access to the folders—and no new documents have been added in more than a decade—the retiree claimed it was nevertheless necessary for him to keep them a little while longer until his son was ready for them.
“Davey was always a little absentminded,” said Jacobson, whose son owns and operates a successful carpentry business in the San Jose area, is happily married, and has two young children. “Losing school books and jackets and stuff like that. You can’t lose these documents. They’re the only copies.”
“Besides, some of the stuff in there pertains to both of us,” Jacobson added. “Like all of the old bank statements from that joint savings account Dave and I opened when he was in high school. Some of these papers are mine, too.”
Although family sources confirmed that none of the documents in the neatly labeled files has been needed for any reason in quite some time, Jacobson told reporters that he recently spent an evening alone in the basement leafing through some of his son’s old doctor’s bills, college-application essays, and “that little paper with Davey’s baby footprints on them” just to confirm that everything was in “perfect order.”
While he plans to transfer the folders into his son’s possession at some point in the future, possibly once David and his wife buy a larger house with a nice big basement, Jacobson said that at the moment there was no pressing need to do so, as there was “still plenty of room here in the [plastic storage] bin” and he was “still [David’s] father, after all.”
“No, no,” Jacobson said. “Not yet. It would just confuse things.”
Added Jacobson, “Just let me do this.”
