Lost weekend: More than money gets left behind after trips to Vegas

Kimberley McGee

Tuesday, June 26, 2001 | 8:32 a.m.

What do the more than 37 million tourists who fly in and out of McCarran International Airport leave behind?

Seemingly everything.

McCarran airport's lost and found is a treasure trove of souvenirs, mementos and oddities that have been inadvertently forgotten.

"We've had urns (containing ashes), kittens, cell phones and jewelry, lost people," Celeste Hamner, acting airport passenger services manager, said. She has worked in the lost and found at McCarran for more than 10 years.

Of the 1,200 items that the lost and found department receives monthly, some such as beepers, jewelry and cameras have owners running back to retrieve them quickly.

Others end up boxed and labeled at the airport's lost and found, located behind a thick glass window on the esplanade of the airport's main terminal.

A 2001 Silverado High School yearbook filled with written requests to stay sweet and to "call me" rests in the backroom bin marked "books." (A high school senior with the initials B.W. might want to call the lost and found.)

Among the marked bins lay a pair of crutches and a box of walking canes.

How do people get on the plane without the assistance of these walking aids?

"It's a mystery to me," Hamner said.

A small refrigerator hulks along one wall for employee use, but it serves a dual purpose. The cold storage is regularly used to store lost insulin found in luggage bags.

How do people forget such important things?

"We can't figure that one out either," Hamner said.

Recently a woman called looking for her teeth.

"We didn't have them," Hamner said.

What the lost and found does have is cell phones -- lots of them.

They tend to ring at night, bundled in the bins in the back room. The clerk who sits at the desk in the front office unlocks the thick door to the back room and fishes the ringing phone from the pile.

Usually it is a friend of the phone's owner, or sometimes a boss looking for the phoneless owner. The clerk gently urges the caller to let the owner know that to pick up the phone McCarran lost and found. Please.

The clerks also track down the owner by perusing the phone's directory. When they find a number labeled "Mom" or "Sis," they call to inform them where the phone is and inquire to the whereabouts of the owner. It usually gets a laugh.

Palm Pilots are the latest rage -- of items to lose. Fortunately, those are the easiest cases to solve because the electronic organizers usually carry personal information.

"We have a 99-percent return rate for those," Hamner said, none too proudly.

Detective work

McCarran's lost and found is open from 6:30 a.m. to 1:30 a.m. every day.

The clerks take more than 100 calls daily from people looking for lost treasures. They also log myriad articles left behind in the airport's bathrooms, terminals and shops.

Each inquiring call for an item, as well as descriptions of items turned in, is logged into a computer database and cross-referenced for easier sleuthing.

The clerks then play matchmaker. Odds of finding the owner of an inadvertently lost item are iffy, but they do their best.

"That's the fun stuff," Hamner said. "We get to look through people's stuff. We get to know more about their lives than we want to."

Luggage turned into the lost and found is X-rayed before it is searched by one of the four clerks who work four 10-hour shifts each week at the lost and found.

"Anything left unattended in an airport is X-rayed," Hamner said. "We don't take chances."

If there is no address the clerks dig deeper into the personal effects of the owner to find a clue. They flip through organizers, read prescription bottles, letters, love notes and even messages on laptops to find a clue as to who the owner is and how to contact him or her.

They have even sent notes to addresses in books and on envelopes to locate an owner.

"We get to know a lot about these people," said Dawn Lund, passenger services representative and a lost and found clerk at the airport for four years. "Stuff you don't really want to know. But we don't talk about that."

The luggage often reveals hygiene habits (or lack thereof), how and where the people enjoy vacation time, as well as their sick sense of humor.

For their protection (and preference), the clerks wear rubber gloves when searching luggage. They have found blow-up dolls, personal pleasure devices and loads of dirty laundry.

"Think of what you have in your carry-on luggage after a long weekend," Lund said. "Yuck."

Lining the shelves amid expensive jewelry and electronic gadgets are the not-so-valuable items, such as a well-worn child's toy that has sentimental value.

"Somebody is missing that," Lund said.

Finding an owner is part of the joy of her job, she said.

"Something as trivial as a makeup bag may have sentimental value to them," Lund said. "We don't know. We just try to find them."

The items that have a found owner are mailed back free of charge by the airport.

"We try to return as much as possible," Lund said. "It doesn't belong to us."

Lost, not forgotten

But there are some items that are not easily returned, such as the ornately decorated urn left behind in an airport lounge.

The clerks scratched their heads over who to call and what to do with the remains.

They couldn't give them away. They couldn't throw them away.

After the health department declined to get involved, Hamner called the coroner, who finally came to deal with the unknown person.

"That was the hardest one," Hamner said.

Some lost-and-found inventory tugs at the heart strings.

Animals have been abandoned at the gate when families realize too late that Fluffy or Spot is too big to be carried on the plane and it's too late for the pet to be checked as luggage.

A worried kitten, cage and all, was delivered to the lost and found last year.

No one really knew what to do with the scrawny feline. A clerk made the decision to expand her own family by one.

"His name is Guido now," Lund said.

Endangered species have also made their way to the lost and found. A live desert tortoise was confiscated from a passenger attempting to smuggle the animal onto the plane.

The Humane Society doesn't handle endangered species because of laws barring anyone from removing them from their natural habitat in the first place. The clerks again were stumped, but eventually tracked down the Desert Tortoise Association to take care of the problem.

"You have to have a little bit of Sherlock Holmes in you to work here," Hamner said. "It's a lot of phone work."

What forgetful tourists don't seem to know is that the lost and found is looking for the owners of its inventory.

"We want to return these items, but the owners don't know to look for us," Hamner said. "If that wasn't the case, we wouldn't have as much as we do back there."

Despite their efforts, many items go unclaimed.

If an item is not claimed after 30 days, the person who turned it in has 10 more days to claim the item.

After that the items are auctioned off once a month and the proceeds are given to a local charity.

Secret passages

The lost and found at McCarran doesn't receive a lot of illegal substances, Hamner said. But when a lost bag is found to contain drugs or drug paraphernalia, Metro Police are called.

The bag itself is usually kept at lost and found to be claimed by the owner.

One man recently called to retrieve his camera bag and was told by the clerks that Metro had his camera -- along with the illegal, organic plant matter crammed inside.

"He was afraid to come get the bag," Hamner said. "He thought he would be arrested. But no, we just wanted him to get his bag back. The police dealt with the drugs."

The X-ray and subsequent search of lost luggage doesn't always yield hidden surprises. Unwittingly, a bag with a significant amount of cocaine strapped to the inside of a zippered side pocket was sold at auction last month.

The person who bought the bag opened it on site and found the large packet of cocaine. The police, who attend each auction for reasons such as that, disposed of the drug.

Metro is very involved with McCarran's lost-and-found operation. The police routinely run an audit of the items and have found stolen electronic equipment, cameras and a bike. All were hot property left at the airport.

It is one of many checks and balances the lost and found has in place to ensure that items are returned to their rightful owners.

Ownership must be proven by describing the item and where it was left, or some other obvious clue that shows ownership of the article in question.

Recently a man came running up to the window claiming to have lost $2,500 in an envelope. Moments earlier someone had turned in an envelope with exactly $2,500 stuffed inside.

Something seemed fishy.

The clerks asked him where he had lost it, why he had it and how he could have lost such a large sum of money.

Frantic, he told them his mother had stashed the cash in his coat. He later wrapped the coat around his chilly toddler, who must have lost the bundle.

They called his mother to verify his story. After a lengthy conversation with his mother, the clerks reunited him with his money.

"We want to get the right thing to the right person," Hamner said. "It's our job."

archive