If it is a folding bike that was designed to fold, maybe take it down to your local shop especially one with an older mechanic and see if they can help you get it working again. Talk about how much you love the bike and let them know your investment in the bike (not monetarily but emotionally) We had a lady who brought in her husband's bike from when he was a kid and while it wasn't worth a ton of money it was sentimentally more than worth it and they were going to pass it down to their kids and I loved the story and so did the mechanic who worked on it and really did a bang up job to clean and polish it up and make it work as well as possible. We did go a little above because who doesn't want to see a bike continue life in the family. If I were to adopt kids I would want to pass down my bikes to them (probably from my cold dead hands...LOL) and have them keep the legacy.

You could also follow some of the advice of folks and try and do it yourself, it might not be so difficult but you may not want to do the work yourself and there is no shame in that.