Out there among the sea of spectators are owners of lost car keys, earrings, bracelets, binoculars, sunglasses and credit cards.
Hundreds of items like this are reported lost on the course each day, and surprisingly, many are eventually reunited with their owners.
“I had a great day yesterday, Diane Dash reported. “Someone turned in some car keys with a remote switch. The guy who claimed them came in here and gave me a hug,” she said, laughing. “It made my day.”
Uniquely qualified for her job in the Lost and Found tent, Dash, from Elmhurst, Ill., and Southern Pines, calls herself “the Bag Lady of Villa Avenue.”
“I enjoy taking walks, and I’m always finding things, valuable things,” Dash said. “One time I found someone’s bills. Credit card bills, mortgage bills, everything, all stuffed into an envelope.”
She mailed the bills back to their owner. “But I did not include a return address,” she said. She never gives a return address when she sends items she finds back to their owners.
The list of items lost and found this week is extensive. Some items are described in minute detail: “Lost. 1 p.m. 5/31. Sunglasses 14th fairway black. Hand finish marking.”
Other items are not: “Briar pipe.” “Ford ignition key.”
What happens to these items once they are found?
“If we have the names and addresses of the owners, we’ll send them back,” said Nat Thomas, a volunteer from Pinehurst. If not, they go to the Pinehurst Championship Management office where they are held for several months. “Sometimes people call to claim things long after the golf tournament ends,” she said.
While keeping up with lost and found items keeps the volunteers busy, nothing compares to the constant logging and storing of spectators’ contraband: cell phones, pagers and cameras, which are banned from the Championship grounds.
At 8 a.m. on Saturday morning, the volunteers were revving up. They had already collected five cameras and 10 cell phones.
“Oh glory me,” Thomas said. “Throughout the course of the tournament, we have taken in maybe 400 phones for storage. They need to put a big sign out in the parking lot reminding folks not to bring their phones, pagers or cameras in.”
Other people come to the tournament with plenty of supplies and find they are too heavy to carry.
“We had two backpacks in storage yesterday,” Dash said.
Sadly, some people don’t bother reporting lost items because they don’t think they’ll ever be found. On the other hand, some people attach great value to lost water bottles and cheap sunglasses.
Givens, who lost his chair, was resigned to the idea he may never see it again.
“I didn’t expect to find it, but I just thought I’d check,” he said.
But he went to the right place. The conscientious volunteers in Lost and Found will make sure he gets it back if a good Samaritan turns it in.
