TR's pocket watch recovered

[Rick Smith]

https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/theodore-roosevelts-historic-pocket-watch-recovered

 

 

 

Federal Bureau of Investigation

News

Thursday, June 27, 2024

 

 

 

 

Theodore Roosevelt's Historic Pocket Watch Recovered

126-year-old watch was missing almost 40 years

 

 

When a Florida auctioneer was asked to auction off a pocket watch from the late 1800s, his research led him to believe that he may be holding a piece of U.S. presidential history.

The auctioneer realized that the watch may have belonged to Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt, the 26th president of the United States. He contacted two historic sites closely associated with Roosevelt—Sagamore Hill National Historic Site and Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site—who confirmed the authenticity of the watch.

Roosevelt’s watch had been in possession of Sagamore Hill National Historic Site since he died in 1919. They loaned the watch to the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site in 1971 for a six-year term to be shown in an exhibition. The loan was extended, but, unfortunately, the watch was reported stolen from the site in Buffalo, New York, on July 21,1987, and wouldn’t be identified again until 2023 at the Florida auction house.

Since Sagamore Hill National Historic Site and the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site fall under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service (NPS), they reached out to NPS to recover the stolen artifact. NPS, the lead investigative agency, contacted the FBI Art Crime team for additional assistance. Both the NPS and FBI confirmed that this was the watch stolen almost 40 years earlier.

"This watch was a fairly pedestrian Waltham 17 jewel watch with an inexpensive coin silver case. It's a 'Riverside' grade and model '1888' with a hunter-style case, meaning it has a lid on either side which fold and encase the dial and the movement," said Special Agent Robert Giczy, a member of the FBI Art Crime Team who investigated the provenance of the watch in this case.

"The repatriation of the watch would not have been possible without the close collaboration between the FBI and NPS. This partnership ensured that this historic treasure could be returned safely for future generations to enjoy."

Special Agent Robert Giczy

Roosevelt had many pocket watches during his life, but this one is unique due to its sentimental value. Roosevelt received this watch from his youngest sister, Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, and his brother-in-law, Douglas Robinson, Jr., prior to Roosevelt’s departure to Cuba during the Spanish-American War. The inscription, which includes Corinne and Douglas' initials, reads: "THEODORE ROOSEVELT FROM D.R. & C.R.R."

After NPS recovered the watch, they coordinated with the FBI to navigate the asset forfeiture process. As Paralegal Specialist Kellie Dodd from the FBI Tampa Field Office explained, this "allowed the FBI to begin the process to return the watch back to the rightful owner, the Sagamore Hills National Historic Site."

Roosevelt’s watch was returned to Sagamore Hills National Historic Site during a repatriation ceremony in New York on June 27, 2024. Representatives from the NPS and the FBI—to include our New York, Miami, and Tampa field offices and members of the Art Crime team—attended.

"NPS does a great job in enforcing and recovering our national property,”] said Special Agent Giczy. "The repatriation of the watch would not have been possible without the close collaboration between the FBI and NPS. This partnership ensured that this historic treasure could be returned safely for future generations to enjoy."

 

 

Rick Smith

5264 N. Fort Yuma Trail

Tucson, AZ 85750

505-259-7161

Rsmit...@comcast.net

 

[hankschoch]

Kudos to the auctioneer for his/her suspicions and for doing the right thing.

Hank

[Ed Rizzotto]

I dimly remember this incident and somewhat associate it in time with the theft of Teddy’s pearl-handled pistols from Sagamore Hill. I was then stationed at Federal Hall and perhaps like everyone in the Service was directed to walk around checking our locks and security. We discovered that we were in relatively good shape except for the roof door which surprisingly had no lock at all but we fixed that pretty quickly.

This sort of story is always a bit of good news but regularly raises the questions: Who were the perpetrators and what happened to them?

ed

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[Hank Schoch]

Back in the early 1970s, there was a free-standing glass display case in the South Unit VC at THRO which contained several of TR's possessions, among them a saddle, an elegant custom Winchester '95, and a custom Parker shotgun.  We never gave security much of thought until someone broke into the mansion at the nearby Marquis de Mores SP and stole its entire gun collection.  Then we scrambled to install an alarm system with sound and motion detectors.  A moth flying across the exhibit room or a mouse scurrying across the floor would set the thing off, not to mention every time a train rumbled slowly through Medora and gently shook the building.  Of course, when the alarm would go off at 2:00 am, we couldn't ignore it because we never could be sure of the exact cause.  I logged quite a few wee-hour responses.   For whatever reason, the system lacked an automatic dialer, so we relied on a very loud bell high on an exterior wall of the VC to alert us.  After it had been operable for a year or so, a visiting FBI agent casually mentioned that all an intruder would have to do to defeat the system on a cold night would be to bring a ladder, pour a heated can of STP into the bell mechanism, and wait for the stuff to gel.

Hank

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[Jimmy]

So, how did the auctioneer get it?  In Buffalo, was it a snatch-and-grab operation, or inside job? 

I remember reading a few years after i retired about thefts from the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace, of documents or books as i recall, mostly or all part of the collection of the Theodore Roosevelt Association stored at the park site.  The Association is the group that rebuilt the Roosevelt house and got it created as a memorial to TR despite TR's voiced disapproval.

So, in that case, it turned out the Executive Director of the Association had walked off with the pieces.  He had long been a board member before he became executive in charge of the Association, but with the squalor following the death of the man who had been the heartbeat of the Association for years, the office fell to a familiar. Familiar enough that the park staff had long been used to seeing him working as a scholar we thought in the collection -- "their" collection -- and no one thought to keep an eye on him.

From what little i read in the papers, the treatment by the Association and very local constabulary for their associate was full of the kind of empathy only people from similar Prep Schools enjoy.  

Roosevelt Inaugural on the other hand is a partner-managed site with inadequate federal funding. I've known none of the people involved way back when this watch event happened, and clearly at neither of these Roosevelt sites do we see the kind of riches  purloined from the Isabella Steward Gardner Museum near the Fenway in Boston. One assumes the Roosevelt thefts come from people saturated in Tee-Dee's identity, who MUST have some of him for themselves.  I once watched a classmate stare for several hours at a complete Limited Variorum Edition of the Poems of William Butler Yeats.  He had checked it out from the open stacks from the very large library of our very small college.  Because students there knew by name practically every other student, my classmate became quite convinced the longer he stared at the signed edition that no one at the school, only he, could appreciate the depth and significance of the Works.  In cash value, it couldn't have been worth all that much at the time, maybe a thousand, but the point was the melding of the Identity of this English Major and a premier poet of the 19th and 20th Century.  The "Second Coming" was only for starters.  Eventually his greater love of the majesty of libraries worked on him until he returned the book. Later i wondered aloud to staff, wouldn't it be better for such a work to be off the stacks and locked up?  What a look that received in return !  Why we have dozens and dozens of such books, and the point is, we are a community of scholars and the free association and exchange of ideas and works of merit is the whole enchilada.  (Or words to that effect: enchiladas were unknown in that country)

As we got a taste again from Trump's outrageous desecration of the electoral process on Thursday, an astonishing amount of law abiding and civilization floats on the general love and respect for civilization among our citizens.  As all thinking persons in law or law enforcement know, no constabulary can keep the peace unless most people are right there too. As we see from the monstrous Administrative Procedures (EPA) decision and the January 6 decision the other day by none other than Chief Justice Roberts, at a significant enough scale, we all stand there in the face of inconceivable law breaking with nothing to do but drop our jaws and look at road maps to Canada.  Many in the NPS were outraged on this page when the documents were stolen right from under the NPS rangers at the TR Birthplace site, for failure of normal prudence and accountability.  

(Don't you remember when Mr Roberts testifying on his own behalf convinced the Committee that all he would be doing would be, "calling the balls and the strikes.")

But more, it is the failure of imagination by good people that something so reprehensible could even be conceived, much less carried out.  

Literally