Posted on 03/05/2009 3:44:51 PM PST by Pyro7480
A week ago, 19-year-old Sydney Rector of the Bronx went to a music store in Midtown Manhattan with her boyfriend, Stevin Tyska.
When they left, they were playing around in a tunnel between 48th and 47th streets — and that's where they stumbled across a 66-year-old dog tag.
"It's a plastic tunnel and above you there's a waterfall," Rector tells NPR's Robert Siegel. "So you see the water falling on you; it's pretty cool. We were walking through, dancing around, being stupid, and my boyfriend saw something sticking out. And we always just mess with stuff, you know. We saw it, picked up and read it. I put it in my purse, and that's how it happened."
On the dog tag was the name Joseph Farish Jr., a serial number and the address 283 Cordova Road in West Palm Beach, Fla.
That night at 9 p.m., Rector looked up Farish and found a phone number for his law firm in Florida. She left a message for him, and the next day the 87-year-old World War II veteran called her back.
"I questioned her what was on the dog tag and I knew it was mine," Farish says. "I didn't realize I had lost it."
...The dog tag "meant a lot to me," Farish says. "It brought back a lot of memories 'cause I went to North Africa and into Sicily. I was with the Big Red One [Infantry Division]. We made the landing on D-Day on Omaha Beach in Normandy and went all through Europe and ended up the war in Czechoslovakia where we met up with the Russians."
(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...
Indeed, very neat.
My dogtag never had a home address on it, only name,
service number, religion and blood type.
Smell test?
“So you see the water falling on you; it’s pretty cool. We were walking through, dancing around, being stupid...”
Sounds like a good way to catch an infectious disease.
This story smells to high Heaven.
You and me and every other WWII vet.
...most little things don't, but it not only gave a complete stranger a chance to reflect...but it gave the possibly that a few hundred thousand the opportunity to smile
photo of tag in story...maybe back then, I had thought the same
I am getting senile, I read the head line and thought he had found his dog named Tag.... After 66 years.
It’s not you, it’s the headline writer. I thought, wait, the dog must be long dead after 66 years. I think it’s the word “reunited”. I think of being “reunited” with a person or living thing, not an object. Perhaps it would have been clearer if it read...
Missing dog tags returned to WWII vet after 66 years
Cool site:
http://home.att.net/~steinert/us_army_ww2_dog_tags.htm
So, from 1940 to July, 1943 dag tags included the name and address of the next of kin. Then they changed.
Passes - early WWII tags had addresses of next of kin.
Punched up on an address-o-graph machine you could find all kind of extra data - if the troop was talking with the operator.
Things were a bit less errr - rigid back in the day.
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