St. Petersburg collector returns war medals to hero's great great grandson
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. - Fresh off a plane from Colorado, Matthew Hamstra recently put his hands on something he never thought he would see, much less touch: Three war medals belonging to Hamstra’s great-great-grandfather.
The medals have been in Bob Hagarty's vast collection of war medals longer than Matthew has been alive.
These war medals belonged to Matthew Hamstra's great-great-grandfather, Dick.
Hagarty, a former Army veteran, schoolteacher and historian, lives in a home surrounded by World War I artifacts in St. Petersburg. And FOX 13 was there when Hamstra laid his eyes and hands on the precious medals for the first time.
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"Wow, wow. That is something," Hamstra said with a smile when Hagarty handed them to him. And Hagarty seemed just as excited to return them as Hamstra was to receive them. It's a reunion 60 years in the making, by chance, no less.
We found Bob Hagarty last May when he invited us into his museum of a home. His heart tuned to a patriotic beat at the tender age of ten because his father-and-son trips were to cemeteries on Memorial Day.
"We would put flags on the headstones, and I remember watching my father and the soldiers and families step back and salute," he said with a quiver in his voice. "It almost brings tears to my eyes today, that patriotism."
Not long after that, Hagarty's father pulled two buttons off his World War I jacket and handed them to him. Born was little Bobby's lifelong passion for collecting and preserving war history.
Bob Hagerty has collected war medals his whole life.
Today, his collection includes more than ten thousand medals he's collected over the years. Tossed aside or sold by many.
"These are all heroes in my mind," he says, wondering how someone could get rid of them. And he tried returning some of them over the years to the soldier's families, only to have a door slammed in his face.
"The actual words were, 'I don't give a damn,'" Hagarty says, brokenhearted at the thought that no one cared anymore.
But we were determined to show him others would still care, so we had him pull five sets of medals randomly.
The first set of medals he pulled were 3 medals belonging to PFC Dick Hamstra with a rare one in the middle called a "Croix de Guerre" medal. Those were only given to American soldiers for bravery while serving in France.
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After some research, FOX 13 located Private Hamstra's grandson, Jim, in Colorado. Surprised, he told us his family had been looking for that medal for years and would love to have it back.
He immediately emailed us a photo of his grandfather wearing that very Croix de Guerre medal.
Bob Hagarty and Matthew Hamstra - from strangers to newfound friends.
"I'm amazed you have it," Jim told us while meeting Bob over a Zoom in May. "I'm glad you took care of it," Jim told Bob.
He also told Bob his son, Matthew, also shared his passion for his family's military history and even wrote and published a blog recently about his great-great-grandfather, Dick Hamstra, earning the Croix de Guerre medal, never knowing he'd soon have his hands on it.
And when Matthew showed up last week at Bob's house to retrieve it, he couldn't believe their luck when we explained to him how FOX 13 asked Bob to randomly pull several medals for us to help him locate a family member and his great-great-grandfather's was the first set of medals Bob pulled.
"To have something physical, to be given back to us," Matthew said while choking back tears, "...there's nothing that can express how it feels. It's incredible," he told FOX 13.
It was a relief for Hagarty as well, who just wanted someone to care. Yesterday, strangers. Today, newfound friends bonded by a family treasure now on its way home, restoring the patriotic faith of a little boy and his buttons along the way.