A long-lost and long-forgotten dog tag, which has spent the past 69 years in a farm field in France, has returned to the hands of the western New York veteran who lost it.
Irving Mann says he was skeptical when an email from a French woman recently arrived at his Rochester jewelry store. She said she’d found the tag in her barley field and had been looking for its owner.
The 88-year-old chairman of Mann’s Jewelers said that he thought it could be a scam.
However, when the dog tag arrived just in time for Memorial Day, Mr. Mann knew the woman, Sophia LaFollie, was the real deal.
Irving Mann said that he must have lost his dog tag when the 90th Infantry Division, in which he served, stopped for a few days while fighting across Nazi-occupied France in 1944.
That is a Memorial Day miracle if there ever was one.
