Never give up
ALBANY, N.Y. — It took 50 years for a Long Island woman to finally complete her quest to return a World War II veteran’s lost dog tags she found on a New York City beach.
Laurie Lubin, of Bellmore, N.Y. began her search by poring over phone books in the 1960s and continued into the Internet era. She recently hit pay dirt when she learned that one of the veteran’s daughters lives just a few miles away in Queens.
Lubin’s quest to find Brooklyn native Irving Isaacs began in the summer of ‘66 when she was about to turn 14. One day at Rockaway Beach in Queens, she spotted something shiny in the sand: a pair of dog tags on a metal chain, along with a small metal mezuzah, a religious pendant some Jewish servicemen attached to their tags. She knew immediately what the items were because her father still had his own mezuzah-accessorized dog tags from serving in the Army during WWII.
Lubin took the dog tags home and tried to find Isaacs’ name in New York City phone books, but was unsuccessful. During the decades that followed, Lubin would periodically resume her mission to track down Isaacs, only to keep hitting dead ends.
Last February, she read an Associated Press story about an Indiana soldier’s WWII dog tag being returned to his family after it was found on the Pacific island of Saipan.
She contacted the AP, which led to the news agency’s Randy Herschaft, an investigative researcher based in Manhattan, digging up information on two WWII U.S. Army veterans from New York named Irving Isaacs.
Herschaft’s efforts eventually led to the dog tags being returned to the right man’s family.
