Jansyn and Michael Tropea hold Michael’s watch. A Bremen man found the watch and returned it to him nine months after it fell off his in-laws’ car in Bremen. (Photo courtesy JoAnna McKinney)
Last July, a New Jersey man lost a watch – a gift with great sentimental value – while visiting his in-laws in Bremen. After a fruitless search, he and his family didn’t expect to see it again, but this spring, a Bremen man found it and tracked down the owner.
Michael and Jansyn Tropea, of Bedminster, N.J., were in Bremen last year around the Fourth of July to visit Jansyn’s parents, longtime seasonal residents Jim and JoAnna McKinney, at their home on Greenland Cove.
Jansyn was wearing her husband’s watch one day, and as she and her mother were about to leave for a walk, she set it on the bumper of her parents’ car.
When they arrived home, Jim had left in the car and the watch was gone.
The watch “wasn’t a cheap watch,” but its primary value was sentimental, JoAnna said.
Some years ago, Michael had led the organization of a memorial for a classmate at his Washington, D.C. high school, Maj. Clifford L. Patterson Jr., who died at the Pentagon on 9/11. He received the watch as a gift from his fellow organizers.
Then-Bremen Postmaster Scott Giguere stands behind the counter at the Bremen post office in May 2012, shortly before his retirement. (J.W. Oliver photo, LCN file)
The entire family – Jim and JoAnna, Michael and Jansyn and their teenage daughters, and Jansyn’s sister and her husband – “went out on several search parties,” JoAnna said.
The group searched up their private road and about a half-mile along Shore Road, using sticks to look around and under the roadside vegetation.
When the searches didn’t turn up the watch, no one in the family expected to see it again.
Michael was disappointed, Jansyn said. She replaced the watch at Christmas, but it wasn’t the same, she said.
But in April, JoAnna said, “my daughter contacted me and said ‘Mike has a story to tell you.’”
Nine months after the watch’s disappearance, Scott and Sandy Giguere, of Bremen, were participating in the town’s annual roadside cleanup.
Many in Bremen, including the McKinneys, know Scott as the town’s postmaster from the early 1980s until his retirement in 2012.
Scott found the watch near their mailbox on Route 32. He said he was going to throw it away, assuming it was a cheap watch, but then he noticed the time was correct.
The watch had an identification number on the back, and Giguere contacted the manufacturer, Shinola, a Detroit company that manufactures bicycles, leather goods, and watches.
Shinola was able to connect the watch to Michael because he had sent it in for a new battery. Shinola contacted him for permission to give his contact information to Giguere, who contacted Michael and arranged to ship the watch.
“They wouldn’t take any payment for mailing it,” Jansyn said. Instead, the Gigueres told her husband “the only reward you should give us is a picture of your wife’s face when you open the box.”
The return of the watch “says so much about Scott’s honesty and his decency, and it just amazes me,” JoAnna said. “I think if I had found a watch on Route 32, I might have taken it to a police station, but I wouldn’t have tracked (the owner) down.”
When the Tropeas returned to Bremen for the Fourth of July this year, they wanted to do something for the Gigueres, but they were out of town. They did send a gift.
Jansyn called Scott’s actions a testament to the fact that “good people are still out there.”
“We just couldn’t believe it,” JoAnna said of the family’s reaction to the watch’s return. “We found it so incredible that the watch would have been as far away as it was and that it would have survived the weather for all those months, and what’s more, the watch runs beautifully. It needed no repair or anything.”
