Among items found by beachcomber Marcus DiNardo on the Pacific Beach-Bird Rock border are a wallet with cash, a class ring, “tons” of lead weights, surfboard fins, sunglasses, and GoPro cameras, plus dog tags belonging to WWII veteran William Collin McDaniel of Texas.
Once he’d moved to San Diego seven years ago, Massachusetts-native DiNardo “didn’t want to lose walking the beach and finding cool stuff.”
He found that perfect beach stretch at False Point between Tourmaline parking lot in North PB and the southernmost part of Bird Rock in La Jolla.
“This turned out to be the best beach, just a wealth of fun and lots of things to find,” said DiNardo.
As to why False Point has become such a treasure trove of lost articles, DiNardo surmised, “It must be the currents in the cove which wash into it. One day I found 30 pairs of sunglasses that had washed into this area.”
DiNardo’s even surprised himself by what turns up.
“Money sometimes washes up, $20 bills,” he said. “I have found probably 500 pounds of lead weights, and up to 500 surfboard fins. I have a whole wall at home I’ve decorated with surfboard fins and action figures — Superman, Batman, Spiderman — I’ve found.”
Then came the biggest — and most unusual — finds of all for DiNardo: a wallet filled with cash, and dog tags from one William Collin McDaniel, DOB 12-05-21, who turned out to be a fifth-generation Texan who’d been in San Diego training for WWII in the early to mid-1940s.
Enter DiNardo’s wife Tasha, who, though not a “collector” like Marcus, nonetheless takes part in his beachcombing by sleuthing for him, tracking down the owners to some of the items he’s found and returning them.
“He does the finding, and I do the detective work. It’s fun to get someone’s property back to them that they’d thought was lost forever,” said Tasha noting once, right before Christmas, Marcus found a wallet containing $300.
Tasha ultimately traced the address down of the wallet’s owner from cards found in it, sending him mail via a P.O. Box to come to pick his wallet up.
“When it got to the owner in Ramona, he had tears in his eyes when he came down to pick it up,” Tasha said. “He tried to give us a reward. Finding it was enough.”
Regarding the found WWII dog tags, Tasha was able to link up with the grandson, and then the daughter, Vicki Stubblefield, of the owner, “Judge Mac” McDaniel, who became a highway patrolman, a lawyer and then a Texas judge for 24 years after getting out of the Navy after WWII.
Stubblefield said she was “in total surprise and shock,” when the DiNardos contacted her to return the long-lost dog tags of her dad, who died in 1999.
“I didn’t even know it existed,” Stubblefield said of the tags. “It had to have been sometime between 1940 and 1946 when he was out in San Diego training. It was just one of those miraculous things. To have it back … It was just really special.”
Marcus recalled yet another “reunion” of a person and their lost valuables he’d uncovered.
“We returned a class ring from somebody from 20 years ago and he was stunned,” said Marcus, who does not use a metal detector. “We never ask for a reward, just give it back.”
“It restores my faith in humanity,” said Tasha DiNardo answering what she, and Marcus, get out his beachcombing hobby.