Lost and Found

We moved from Penn State University in State College, PA in June of 1963 with my MS in Chemical Engineering in hand and my PhD degree pending the completion of my dissertation and thesis defense. I completed the dissertation and successfully defended my thesis during the next few months and was awarded my PhD in ChE in March of 1964.

I had accepted a position with Esso Research & Engineering Company (ER&E) in Florham Park, NJ and with two young boys at the time, we needed to find a place to live that would accommodate our small family. The company’s personnel department put us in touch with one of their engineers (Bill Emmons) who was leaving for a one-year assignment to an Esso facility in Europe about the same time we were planning to move from State College to New Jersey. Bill also had a small family with a house in Hanover, NJ and was interested in renting his house for the year they would be gone. We talked with Bill, met his wife, Sara, and visited his home and found it to be a perfect match for our needs, so we agreed to rent Bill’s house for the next year. It was a bi-level house with three bedrooms, two and one-half baths, two-car garage on a half-acre lot with a nice yard, on dead-end street with no through traffic…perfect for our young family. We moved in in June just after Bill and his family left for their overseas assignment.

May 4, 1964 was our older son David’s fourth birthday, so Mary Jane decided to invite some of the neighborhood kids to a small birthday party that she planned for David’s birthday. It was planned for a couple of hours over the noon hour that day, so I was not home for the party but was at work at ER&E.

Later that afternoon after the party I got a phone call from a somewhat distraught Mary Jane; the diamond from her engagement ring was missing, apparently having fallen out of its mounting on the ring which she was wearing, and she could not find it anywhere. Not to worry, I told her. When I get home from work, I told her, we’ll try to find the diamond.

When I go home that evening, we had a quick bite of supper and began our search for the diamond. We looked at the obvious places: in the rooms where she had been during the party and the day, in the sinks, toilets, drawers, any place we could think of. I opened the traps on the sinks to see if it could have fallen into one of the drains. After dark, I went out in the yard with a flashlight, hoping that it would sparkle in the light. All to no avail. Diamond gone. End of story.

At least, that’s what we thought at the time. Little did we know that the story would be continued more than three years later. Here’s what happened.

Over the next three years, ER&E sent me on a one-year assignment to the Humble refinery in Baytown, TX where I worked on a computer control system for what was to be the world’s largest catalytic cracking unit, then they returned me to New Jersey for the next year where we again rented another but different house. Then in 1966, I accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at Villanova University in the suburban Philadelphia area beginning in September. We bought a brand new, built-for-us house on a ¾ of an acre lot in West Chester, PA where we lived for the next three years. All this with us having absolutely no idea what had happened to MJ’s missing engagement diamond.

During the summer of 1967, Mary Jane answered the phone one day to hear the voice on the other end say, “Hi, Mary Jane. This is Sara Emmons in Hanover, New Jersey.” MJ knew almost immediately what Sara’s next words would be: “I think I have something that belongs to you.”

As you can guess, that ’something’ was her lost diamond.

So many questions came to mind: Where did you find it? How did you find it? Who found it? How did you know it was mine? And more.

Sara then proceeded to tell the story of finding the diamond. She and her three-year-old daughter Emily were working in the flower bed alongside of the stairs leading to their front door. Sara had walked around the side of the house to deposit some weeds and dead plants in the trash can when Emily came running: “Mommy! Mommy! Look! I found a diamond.” Like most of us, Sara’s first thought was that it was just an old piece of broken glass. But when she looked more closely at the handful of dirt that Emily had deposited in her hand, she could see that this was no ordinary piece of broken glass. As she brushed the dirt from her hand, she could see the facets and clarity of the stone and realized that this just might be a real diamond.

The next day, Sara took the stone to a local jeweler and asked him to take a closer look. When he did, he confirmed that, yes, this was in fact a very nice diamond.

Over the next couple of days, Sara asked around her neighborhood if any of them might have lost a diamond. When she asked her next door neighbor, she said that, no, she had not lost a diamond, but she remembered that when Mary Jane lived in your house, she had lost the diamond from her engagement ring the day that she had had a birthday party for one of her boys.

Sara knew she had found the owner of the diamond. With the help of her husband, Bill, who still worked at ER&E, she was able to track down our current address and phone number and make the call to Mary Jane.

Then Sara said, “We’d like to bring the diamond down to you this next weekend. You were such good renters of our house while we were in Europe and you took such good care of our property, we’d like to see you and do this as our way of thanking you.” So that weekend, Bill, Sara, and Emily made the more than 150-mile drive from Hanover, NJ to West Chester, PA to return the diamond for MJ’s engagement ring.

When Mary Jane got the diamond, she tried putting it back into the setting on the engagement ring, and it fit perfectly. No doubt that the ring and diamond were meant for each other.

Is this an amazing story of lost and found? We certainly think so.

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