“Man searches for late wife's wedding rings - KABC” plus 2 more

Man searches for late wife's wedding rings - KABC
Hawaii: Couple trolls for beachgoers' lost jewelry - Los Angeles Times
Wedding gowns get a second time around at the Clark County Wedding Expo - Oregonian

Man searches for late wife's wedding rings - KABC

Posted: 22 Oct 2010 06:38 PM PDT

MURRIETA, Calif. (KABC) -- A man in Murrieta is searching for his late wife's wedding rings, which he believes were stolen from her as she lay dying.

"It's tough, I'm trying to work, do the job of two. The kids are great but they miss their mom, it's tough," said Michael Dale, a widower.

Dale's wife, Danielle, lost her battle with cancer earlier this year, just two weeks prior to what would have been their 10-year wedding anniversary.

"I love her a lot. I miss her. I have to keep myself busy so I don't think about things," said Dale.

But one thing he can't get out of his mind is where her wedding rings are.

He thinks they were stolen right off her finger as she lay in a hospital bed at Inland Valley Medical Center days before she died.

"I don't know. I mean they don't get up, sprout legs and walk away," Dale said.

Dale said he complained to the hospital and filed a police report.

On its website, the hospital said, "The patient is fully responsible for any personal valuables brought into the hospital including jewelry, money glasses, dentures, hearing aids, clothing or other articles of unusual value."

Dale said the hospital has offered him $500 in compensation. He has consulted an attorney, but he said what really matters is getting the rings back.

"I don't care how they come back. Put them in an envelope, send them to the police department or something. I just want them back," he said.

Dale said not a day goes by that he doesn't think about his wife and her rings that she held so dear.

"Those rings, even though they're just material, they're hers. That's what the kids saw her with with all the time, and when they're older they'll want them," said Dale. "They have the right to have them, not the person who took them."

An official from the hospital told Eyewitness News that he feels terrible for the family and that the hospital staff is working with authorities to find out what happened.

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Hawaii: Couple trolls for beachgoers' lost jewelry - Los Angeles Times

Posted: 22 Oct 2010 06:45 PM PDT

While visiting the Hawaiian island of Kauai, Marion Levy of Los Angeles spent some time on Poipu Beach. The ocean was rougher than she expected, and she said she had to body surf back to shore. "This was not my intention as I am 75 years old," she wrote to us in a letter that is publishing in the Oct. 24 Los Angeles Times Travel section.

About an hour after she got back to shore, her heart sank when she glanced down at her hands: Her wedding ring, a cherished keepsake that carried an inscription from 1896, was gone.

Paradise lost.

She asked the beach attendants what to do and was given contact information for Dutch Medford, a local treasure hunter who specializes in tracking down jewelry. She met him on the beach at 7 the next morning. She wasn't hopeful and was even less so when the first wave knocked Medford over. At his instruction, she returned to the condo to await his call.

Rinngggg!

Medford had found it. That brought to nearly $1 million the amount of lost treasures that he and his wife, Pam, have returned to their owners in more than two decades of doing this. (That dollar estimate is based on what the owners think the piece is worth.)

"This is a hobby and not a business," Medford told me in an e-mail. "We started out not accepting anything…but we ran across a few instances where the people were so grateful to get their jewelry…that we were told [of the proffered reward], 'Take it or I will kick your back side.'

"We now work on reward basis; whether the person wants to offer a reward or not is fine with us. Over the last 21 years, most people say 'thank you' with big hugs for our service. This is [our] way of extending the Aloha Sprit on our beautiful island of Kauai."

Sometimes he finds things that he's not looking for. Recently on Oahu, he found a 1924 West Point ring.

"I traced the family down using alumni records but unfortunately didn't get to return it to the owner, who died in 1952," Medford told me. "But I did find his oldest son, who graduated from West Point, and returned it to him, 60 years after it was lost."

He also managed to return (after a five-month search) a ring with a family crest that a grandson lost off Poipu. You'll probably recognize the name of the grandfather who gave him that ring: Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Medford asked me to mention one more thing

"Please include the warning not to wear any jewelry in the ocean. As soon as you enter the water in Hawaii, your ring finger shrinks up to one full ring size. Add to this the suntan lotion, the wave action and the natural slickness of the water that will cause rings to slip off of fingers, a lot of times without the owner even realizing the ring is lost."

Medford's e-mail is dutchmedford@hawaiiantel.net; his phone is (808) 651-5470.

Mahalo, Dutch.

Wedding gowns get a second time around at the Clark County Wedding Expo - Oregonian

Posted: 22 Oct 2010 04:29 PM PDT

Published: Friday, October 22, 2010, 3:50 PM Updated: Friday, October 22, 2010, 5:32 PM

And they all lived happily ever after ... with the princess peddling her wedding dress a few years later for a pittance of what she paid for it. The dress was just taking up room in her closet. She was never going to put it on again, and her daughter wasn't going to wear it anyway.

That is how the story really ends for many women; well, maybe not the "happily" part, either. But dress disposal is a commonly whispered postscript to the princess-wedding fantasy.

Brides-to-be often start thinking about their wedding dresses before their fiancés even get off of their knees in proposal, said Kelle Herring, owner of Beautiful Brides for Less, a downtown Vancouver bridal shop. Brides spend hundreds -- sometimes thousands -- of dollars on a gown that rarely is worn more than once. This tailleur surplus typically is borne by the undersides of beds, or corners of closets, or attics.

This weekend at the Clark County Wedding Expo, many of those dresses will be on display and available for a new generation of brides to fulfill their wedding fantasies.

Event organizer Matt Ferris acknowledges he doesn't know much about wedding dresses, but he thought there must be untapped potential in them and created a consignment sale. He expects hundreds of dresses to be bought at the event and then reused, with a portion of the proceeds benefiting The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

Virtually all of these dresses will be white, Herring predicts, an homage to Queen Victoria's choice of hue in 1840, when she married her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg. Before Victoria, wedding dresses could be any color. Within the decade, though, sources such as "Godey's Lady's Book" were declaring: "Custom has decided, from the earliest ages, that white is the most fitting hue, whatever may be the material. It is an emblem of the purity and innocence of girlhood, and the unsullied heart she now yields to the chosen one."

Wedding dresses generally have been white since, except for some wartime rationing, and the occasional rogue "blush and bashful" scheme, a la the film "Steel Magnolias." Dress consultant Herring said most newer gowns can be resold at about half of the retail price, with any item more than five years old dropping to 20 percent of retail or less, with few exceptions.

Price doesn't matter
For some, the return on the investment doesn't really matter. Sisters Tanja Newton and Kristi Sullivan and one of their friends, Paula Deans, were among the first to drop off their dresses at the Clark County Fairgrounds earlier this week. The women -- all in their mid-30s, divorced, Columbia River High School graduates who live near each other in a Hazel Dell apartment complex -- had been lugging around the dresses for years, through many moves.

Newton heard about the sale, told the other two, and they decided to dump their old dresses together. Sullivan acknowledged dreaming about what her wedding gown would look like since she was young, and that she planned the entire event around that choice. Her two daughters, 4 and 5, for years have had her put on the dress whenever they played dress-up princesses together. So when she was packing the dress for sale, her girls were curious about what she was doing with the beautiful costume.

"It's hard to explain to children that age," she said. "They don't understand why I would be selling it."

Newton said even though she would like to get married again, she certainly wouldn't want to wear the same dress.

"It's getting rid of the emotional part, too," she said. She didn't flinch when Herring suggested a consignment price of $200.

After handing over her dress, their friend, Deans, commented, "This is bittersweet. You want to get rid of it, but you don't."

Tough to let go
Nearby, Evy Curl was having different mixed emotions. The Vancouver resident, who has been married for nearly three decades, brought two dresses to the sale.

One was her own white wedding gown that her parents had custom-made by a seamstress in Mexico, when they were living in San Diego. The 50-year-old said the design is Eve of Milady, copied out of a bridal magazine. She had seen the same dress once on a rack in a bridal store for $3,000. Herring, offering volunteer pricing advice, said the distinctive '80s style and condition of the dress likely, unfortunately, ahem, wouldn't fetch any more than $100.

"Eeoow," Curl responded. "I can't do $100. It's a $3,000 gown. I just can't do it."

Herring countered, "How much would you like to sell it for?"

"I'd like to see $500," Curl said. "That's still less than I want for it."

"I know, I know."

"For $100, I might as well take it home and put it on Craigslist. Or donate it and use it as a tax write-off."

Clark County Wedding Expo

What: Fashion, caterers, wedding venues, floral designers, photographers, cake designers, invitations, entertainment, honeymoon destinations, consultants, stylists

When: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Sunday

Where: Clark County Fairgrounds Event Center, 17402 N.E. Delfel Road, Ridgefield

Admission: $8, with free parking

"OK, you tell us the lowest price you'll take for it, and if it doesn't sell, it'll be here for you."

Unsold dresses can be returned to the owners or donated to The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

Curl thought that proposition over, while Herring looked at the other dress she had brought. That one was a 1949 blush dress, mostly tulle complemented by satin and lace, which Curl found at an estate sale last year in the West Hills of Portland. The dress, in near mint condition, was near belongings that included a photograph of the bride standing in the same dress in almost the exact spot where it was being sold more than half of a century later. The asking price: $25. Curl also asked if she could have the photograph, and the sellers tossed that in as well, for no charge.

Herring raved about the gown, "It's gorgeous. That's an extremely rare piece. Such a treasure. ... Why in the world didn't someone in that family want this?"

She suggested a price of $500. Herring watched skeptically as Curl priced her own dress at $500 as well. Curl explained, "I had hoped my daughter would want to wear it someday. I had it dry cleaned and kept it in a special box, under my bed."

Within the past few months, her 21-year-old daughter, Sarah, decided she would rather pick out her own dress and let her mother know that.

"I understood," Evy Curl said. "I'm a little sad, but she's her own person."

When Curl heard about the consignment sale, dubbed Get Rid of Your Gown, she thought it might be a way to fund her new dream, a jewelry business called From the Heart. Curl needs the money to hire a designer, this time to create a website.

--Brett Oppegaard, Special to The Oregonian

Wedding Jewelry

Friday, October 22, 2010