Theodore Roosevelt's pocket watch has been found 36 years after it went missing.
The watch was given to Roosevelt by his sister and her husband in 1898-three years before he became president. Although described as a "fairly pedestrian" model, Roosevelt valued the gift, and carried it with him when he fought in the Spanish-American War, when he went on safari in Africa, and when he explored South America. It is believed that that is the same watch mentioned in his 1914 book, Through the Brazilian Wilderness, that "came to an indignant halt" after a bayou crossing.
After Roosevelt died in 1919, it was put on display at the Sagamore Hill National Historic Site on Long Island. In 1971, it was loaned out to the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site in Buffalo, New York. It was there, at the Ansley Wilcox House, that the watch was stolen on July 21, 1987.
The trail was cold until last year, when the watch suddenly appeared at an auction in Florida. Owner Edwin Bailey said he was excited by the engravings on the implement, reading "THEODORE ROOSEVELT" and "FROM D.R. & C.R.R.," referring to Roosevelt's brother-in-law and sister, Douglas Robinson Jr. and Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, but remained skeptical.
Bailey said he did not know the watch-identified as a Waltham 17 jewel-was stolen, and that it used to belong to an art dealer and collector who was active in Buffalo in the 1970s and 1980s. The dealer used the watch as collateral when he borrowed money from Bailey, and left it with him when the collector died.
Shortly after the watch went on auction, the FBI appeared at Bailey's door to take possession of it. After verifying that it was, indeed, Roosevelt's watch, the FBI and the National Parks Service returned it to Sagamore Hill in a ceremony attended by Roosevelt's great-grandson, Tweed Roosevelt.
"This was feel-good news," he said in a phone interview with AP News. "For me, it kind of felt like almost as if a piece of TR's spirit being returned to Sagamore Hill, like a little bit of him was coming back."
