Lost in 1958, lifeguard's bracelet found on beach

It was the summer of 1994 and Suzan Abruzzi was at her usual haunt, Robert Moses State Park, Field 5. "We had a special spot that we always went to," she recalled recently.

She was watching her three kids play in the sand when a metallic glint caught her eye. She reached into the sand and fished out a silver-and-gold ID bracelet. A name was engraved on the front, "1958" on the back and insignia identified the owner as a member of the Jones Beach Patrol - an old name, Abruzzi later learned, for the Jones Beach Lifeguard Corps.

"It struck me that for its age it was in pretty good shape," she said.

And she was struck by the name: Dan Konz. When Abruzzi was in high school, she had worked at the Friendly's restaurant in Huntington for a man by that name.

What were the chances?

It would take her 16 years to find out.

The search began in the weeks after Abruzzi found the bracelet, as she knocked on doors in the Huntington neighborhood where Konz had lived. But no one she spoke with remembered him, she said, so "I stuck the bracelet in my jewelry box and forgot about it" - until this past spring, when she noticed the bracelet one day. And it dawned on her that, with Google and Facebook, "maybe I have a better shot of finding him."

But Internet searches yielded nothing. A breakthrough came several weeks ago at the Petsmart store in Huntington, where she does animal rescue volunteering. She began chatting with a customer, Jean Peters of Syosset, who mentioned that her husband, Ed, was a longtime lifeguard. "My ears perked up," Abruzzi, 56, of Melville, said, and she told Peters about the bracelet.

With that, the Jones Beach lifeguard alumni network sprang into action. Jim Rooney, a current lifeguard and the group's unofficial historian, said he heard the story and began searching the State Parks records. He found that Dan Konz had worked as a lifeguard at Jones Beach from 1958 to 1963. Another ex-lifeguard, who had also been a New York Police Department detective, got involved in the hunt, and still others networked through Facebook in search of lifeguards from those years.

On July 15, Dan Konz got a call at his house in Woodridge, Ill. "I couldn't believe it," he said in an interview. "It was one of my old lifeguard buddies . . . I hadn't talked to him in 50 years . . . telling me someone had found my bracelet."

Konz, who lived in Flushing in those years, said the bracelet had cost him $25 - "a fortune in 1958."

He lost the bracelet barely a month after he'd gotten it. "I was riding the waves at Field 4, and when I came out of the water it was gone," he said. "I spent an hour looking for it, hoping it would wash up. It was a huge disappointment. That was like my Super Bowl ring."

Jones Beach lifeguards have worn the ID bracelets since 1931 - just two years after the park opened, according to Rooney, who said they symbolize the esprit de corps of a unit generally regarded as one of the best in the country, a tradition that's no longer continued.

"They were the best times of my life," said Konz, 70, who has battled throat cancer and now speaks through a voice prosthesis. He left Long Island in 1976 and now lives outside Chicago, running a business selling promotional merchandise. He is married for the fourth time.

" 'Grateful' isn't the word," he said of the efforts of Abruzzi, whose youngest son happens to be a lifeguard, Peters, Rooney and the others. "That this happened is almost inconceivable. It shows you that there are still some incredible people in the world."

Abruzzi plans to send Konz the bracelet, and he said he wants to wear it again. "I want to show the people out here. Nobody believes this," he said. "They think there's no way you can find something that was lost 52 years ago." He hopes to visit Jones Beach next summer and donate it to the Castles in the Sand museum - a trip that would also give him the opportunity to visit with Abruzzi.

Yes, it turns out she had worked for him 40 years ago. "I remember her clearly," he said. "She was one of the best workers we had."

But another mystery remains. Bob Difalco, a metal detector-wielding treasure hunter at Jones Beach, points out that ocean currents tend to run east to west - so it's unlikely that an item lost at Jones Beach Field 4 could have ended up at Robert Moses Field 5, miles to the east.

"It had to be that someone else found that bracelet," he said, "and then lost it again."

What's lost, what's found

From Jones Beach State Park director Susan Guliani:

"We probably get close to 400 lost items each year: About 200 sets of car keys and 50 eyeglasses each year. Those make up the largest quantity of lost items. We also get wallets, cell phones, clothing and towels ... Someone left their leather jacket on the boardwalk railing and went for a run. This item was turned in to lost and found and later reunited with the patron. Many items go unclaimed each year."