PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — Jordan Felo and his wife recently bought their first home in Southeast Portland. Like many new homeowners, they’re buying furniture.
In March, they bought a vanity, likely from the 1940s, from a person on Craiglist who came to own the vanity through a storage unit auction.
The vanity sat in the Felos’ garage as they planned to refurbish and re-sell it.
Last Friday, he was moving the desk around and heard some clinking.
“We checked inbetween the drawers and I found these dog tags,” Felo told KOIN 6 News. “When you find dog tags, the right thing to do is find the person that they belong to, to try and return it.”
The dog tags bore the name O.A. Kennerly Jr.
“I did a bunch of internet sleuthing and anytime you type in ‘Kennerly,’ this guy David Kennerly, who’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, comes up,” he said. “So it was really hard to find this O.A. Kennerly.”
Felo said he gave up after a while but kept reading about David Kennerly and went to his Wikipedia page. He spotted the name O.A. Kennerly “And I was like, wait a minute. O.A. Kennerly?”
He sent David Kennerly an email through his webpage and assured him “this is not a scam. I think I might have found your dad’s dog tags.”
David Kennerly “vetted me a little bit” but got back quickly, Felo said. “He was like, ‘Yeah, sure enough, that’s my dad’s dog tags. That all completely adds up.'”
“I was pretty blown away,” Kennerly told KOIN 6 News in a phone interview.
O.A. Kennerly Jr — the O.A. for Orlie Alden — was the youngest of 13 children, he said.
“We’re all native Oregonians,” Kennerly said. “My dad came out in the mid-’20s on a truck, went to Klamath Falls. My grandfather was the Chief of Police in Roseburg.”
He knew his dad was in the Army — “he joined right at the end of World War 2” — but was never deployed. O.A. Kennerly died November 5, 1994, and though he has a lot of his dad’s memorabilia, he never knew anything about his dog tags.
Kennerly said “this is a remarkable find” and said getting his dad’s dog tags back “kind of brings it all full circle. That’s a really important element and will be a great part of the family archives.”
Members of the Kennerly family still live in the Portland area and he said his dad was a proud Oregonian.
Though he lives in southern California, David Hume Kennerly described himself as a “card-carrying Oregonian. I’ll eventually end up in Oregon for good.”
Jordan Felo plans to send O.A. Kennerly’s dog tags to David Kennerly very soon because it’s what you do when you find dog tags.
But Felo will have something new decorating his Southeast Portland home.
“He said that I could have any one of the prints of his, that I get to choose,” Felo said. “He has this really cool one of Miles Davis in 1966 in Portland which, I’m really into jazz, so that one would be really cool.”
David Hume Kennerly’s niece and O.A. Kennerly’s granddaughter, Amie Donovan, told KOIN 6 News he received the dog tags on Wednesday and also decided to buy the vanity for Donovan.
“Words can’t express how much we appreciate this family for doing the research and finding my uncle so he could return the dog tags,” she wrote.