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Sometimes Disneyland's Lost and Found department returns the missing smile to a child's face by recovering a lost toy. Sometimes it literally returns the hair to a man's head by salvaging a stray toupee.
But Kay McFaul, who ran the department for 20 years, witnessed perhaps the biggest change to a visitor's face when she returned a missing item: the woman's glass eyeball.
“Immediately I put out a call and said, ‘Have the sweepers check their pans, because we have a woman who has lost her artificial eye,' ” says McFaul, now 83 and retired for 15 years. “It wasn't but a short time later that in came this young guy, and he just handed me his pan. He thought it was a marble. Then he got the call and realized — it was looking at him.”
Disneyland's Lost and Found collects about 140,000 objects each year, most of them hats and sunglasses. Some quests are hopeless, such as trying to recover rolls of film. When patrons came looking for those, McFaul would present a large bin of identical rolls and ask, “Any of this look familiar?”
James Gonzales, the current chief of Lost and Found, says the task has gotten easier since the advent of digital cameras to connect the right camera with the right seeker.
Now the burden is gadgets. Although the era of the baskets of beeping and shuddering pagers largely is past, Lost and Found collects about 300 cellphones a week, along with assortments of personal digital assistants and iPods.
When it's something of great value — car keys, large amounts of money, jewelry — McFaul and Gonzales also see some visitors to the Happiest Place on Earth at their most desperate and miserable.
“Sometimes there's nothing we can do but fill out the report and give them a lot of sympathy,” McFaul says.
Other times, the menagerie of mundane items is rocked by the truly weird.
As Disneyland celebrates its 50th anniversary, McFaul and Gonzales look back at a few of the more memorable moments:
•McFaul recalls a couple who had stored their caged canary at the park's kennels, which board pets — most of them dogs — while vacationers enjoy the park.
“At the end of the day, this dumb woman was so glad to see her little canary she took it out of the cage, and it went right into the trees of the Jungle Cruise,” McFaul says. “I didn't tell them that hidden in the bushes — and definitely in the Jungle Cruise — are the most beastly cats. I thought, ‘That poor little bird lasted that long,' ” she says, holding her fingers an inch apart.
http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/life/20050617/dd_disney17.art.htm
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