INDIAN RIVER COUNTY — After more than 50 years without it, Hugh McCrystal is wearing his gold ID bracelet again.
How he lost it in 1962 and got it back in 2012 is an unlikely yarn that involves a bar on Key Biscayne, an Air Force captain’s trunk from the Korean war, a grieving daughter and a Vero Beach jeweler.
The story begins in 1953, when Hugh McCrystal, 22, who would become the first urologist in Vero Beach, was a lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force in Korea. In 1956, a week after he gets out of the Air Force, he enrolls in medical school at SUNY, the State University of New York.
February, 1958: The young woman he is dating, a secretary at the med school, gives him an 18-carat gold ID bracelet, which he puts on and never takes off. His name is engraved in swirly cursive on the gold nameplate.
In June, 1960, McCrystal finishes medical school and heads to Miami for a general surgery residency at bustling Jackson Memorial Hospital, where he meets open heart surgery nurse Ann Marie Bouse from New Jersey in July.
A few months later, they begin dating.
In March,1962, McCrystal, still a resident at Jackson, has a date with an American Airlines flight attendant. He describes her as “an old Army buddy” to Bouse.
“I had a lot of those old Army buddies, myself,” Bouse said recently, after 50 years of marriage to McCrystal.
But back to the date with the flight attendant: McCrystal takes her for drinks and dinner on Key Biscayne at the Key Hole, a little bar across the main drag from the water. He has a Maker’s Mark, conch fritters and a steak sandwich. (He doesn’t remember what she has.)
They walk on the beach. He drives her back to her hotel in his 1958 Buick convertible.
The next morning, he wakes up at his Jackson residency quarters near downtown Miami and realizes the bracelet is not on his wrist. He searches his car. He returns to the bar. He walks up and down Crandon Park Beach where they walked the night before.
He goes to her hotel and inquires at the desk.
No bracelet.
July 1, 1963: McCrystal goes to Georgetown in Maryland for a urology residency, returning to Miami 10 weeks later to marry Bouse. They spend the first night of a three-day honeymoon at a motel on US 1 in Vero Beach.
They drive to the ocean, look around, and agree they really like Vero. Then, they high-tail it up the East Coast to Georgetown.
Two years later, with toddler Carolyn and baby Hugh, the family of four moves to Vero Beach, where McCrystal sets up the first urology practice here in an office on the ocean where Citrus Grillhouse now is.
When their third child, daughter Kelly, is a toddler in the early 1970s, McCrystal moves to the 777 building — which he partially owns — on 37th Street in what is now the medical district.
McCrystal serves as chief of staff of the hospital for decades, which moves to the current 37th St. location in 1978.
In 1975, Ann Marie McCrystal and several friends form the Visiting Nurses’ Association with a single employee.
Over the next 25 years, the VNA grows to hundreds of employees and volunteers; the hospital grows by leaps-and-bounds, and Hugh McCrystal witnesses sweeping changes in the diagnosis and treatment of urological disease, including PSAs, Gleason scores, robotics and radioactive seeds.
April 20, 2002: Retired US Air Force Cpt. Jack McCormack, a veteran of the Korean War, dies in Miami. His daughter Cher Frederick inherits his military trunk, but doesn’t open it for almost a year, when her grown children are visiting for Thanksgiving.
Going through the battered green trunk, they marvel at the keepsakes: Grandpa’s Eagle Scout badges and knives, the wooden heart-shaped box he whittled to hold their grandmother’s wedding ring, the flint arrowheads, the balls and bullets from the civil war.
Next to military medals in the bottom of the trunk, they find a small bag that contains a gold ID bracelet.
The name “Hugh McCrystal” is engraved on it.
Next to the bracelet is a note: “Everything in here has a story. It is up to you to find the meaning of the items.”
Hugh McCrystal. A deceased Air Force buddy? A military friend from the Pacific who paid a debt to McCormack with the bracelet?
“We weren’t sure who he was – except we thought Hugh McCrystal was connected to my dad through the Korean War,” said Frederick.
In 2003, she moved to Palm Bay, put the trunk in storage and didn’t open it for nine years, until she moved to Vero Beach.
Opening it in March 2012, she saw the bracelet. She put it in her purse. A few days later, Frederick was at Indian River Mall and saw a sign that said “Gold Dealer.”
A salesman weighed the bracelet and offered her $1,000 for it.
“But I couldn’t sell it until I knew the story behind it,” said Frederick.
On the way out of the mall, she passed Gordon’s Jewelers and went in to see what the man inside had to say about the bracelet.
“Hugh McCrystal lives here! ” David Musick said, looking at the swirly cursive on the nameplate. He grabbed a phone book and wrote the number down for Frederick.
When she got McCrystal on the phone a few days later, her first question was: “Were you in the Air Force in the Korean War?”
When he said “yes,” she immediately asked: “Did you know my father Cpt. Jack McCormack?”
McCrystal racked his brain but couldn’t come up with a connection. Then, he listed places he lived before Vero Beach.
“Miami!” said Frederick. “My dad was chief of parks in Miami in the 1960s.”
Parks. As in Crandon Beach Park.
McCormack either found the bracelet in the sand where McCrystal had walked with the flight attendant 50 years before, or an employee turned it into McCormack, who put it in his military trunk.
McCrystal and Frederick met in the mall at Gordon’s a few days later.
He offered to pay for the bracelet, but Frederick wouldn’t have it.
“My dad would want it this way,” she said.
McCrystal put the gold ID bracelet on and hasn’t taken it off since.