DALLAS — They have a saying in the lost and found at the State Fair of Texas.
“If you can bring it to the fair, you can lose it at the fair,” said Linda Kindt, who manages the fair’s safety team.
They don’t just mean clothing, wallets or the nearly 300 cellphones they’ve collected this year.
“We had a prosthetic leg,” Kindt said. “We had a set of dentures.”
It’s possible, though, that nothing more valuable or priceless has arrived in the lost and found office than what was found and recovered this year.
Marcie Moore and her husband were headed home to Edmond, Oklahoma, just north of Oklahoma City, when she realized she wasn’t wearing her wedding ring worth thousands of dollars.
“I look down at my hand and realized that I didn’t have my ring on,” Moore said.
Moore remembered she took off her ring to put on hand sanitizer and eat tacos near Big Tex and simply forgot it.
“I had just read somewhere that when you’re putting on hand sanitizer that has the little crystals in it, you should take your ring off so it doesn’t loosen the diamonds,” Moore said. “I will never take it off again.”
She immediately called the fair’s lost and found.
“She was so upset, she had to give the phone to her husband to describe the ring,” Kindt recalls.
“I couldn’t talk. I was in hysterics for sure, like most women would be,” Moore said. “I treasure it, and he picked it out himself. There were just so many things about it that were pretty amazing.”
Lost and found records show just 27 minutes passed from her call to when the ring arrived in their office. A jeweler just happened to find it, recognized its value and gave it to police officers.
“These people were wonderful, wonderful people, but none of this happens without God,” Moore said. “It was crazy. The whole thing was crazy.”
“My faith in humanity, humankind is reinforced every time I come in here because we get wallets with money, with tickets, with credit cards, IDs,” Kindt said.
If you bring it, you can lose it, but it’s also true you can find just about anything at the State Fair of Texas.
“I told my husband we have to go every year now,” Moore said.