Circumstances are murky as to how Orville Iveland’s military dog tag ended up in the farm grove of Russell and Doris Wenzel in Springwater Township.
What’s clear is that the dog tag is now safely in the Iveland family’s procession.
An Oct. 22 Star Herald story with the Wenzels about an unusual rock unearthed during a farm tile project led Russell to showing me a dull-colored metal dog tag he found recently in his grove.
The day the newspaper edition appeared on newsstands, I received a call from Orville Iveland’s daughter, who saw the story and wanted to connect with the Wenzels for the I.D. tag.
Kris Waknitz of Luverne told me it would be one of very few possessions she and her three remaining siblings would have of their late father’s.
Orville received that I.D. tag upon entrance in the Army on Jan. 6, 1941, according to records with the Rock County Veterans Service Office. He was discharged on Oct. 11, 1945.
Kris shared that an accident in the Army motor pool left Orville with a head injury that resulted in epileptic-like seizures. He was discharged because of the injury and returned to Rock County as a World War II veteran.
Due to his automotive repair skills, Orville became known as “the best mechanic around.”
Kris suspects her dad kept his military I.D. tag in the tool kit he used to carry.
The Wenzel farm used to belong to Orville’s sister and brother-in-law, Robert and Alice Mann.
When Kris and her brother, Dan, picked up the dog tag at the Wenzel farm, they speculated it had dropped out of the toolbox.
Orville divorced their mother, Betty, when Kris was in elementary school and moved to California. He died in the early 1970s.
Kris said finding the almost 80-year-old dog tag decades after it was lost and other unexpected signs from loved ones are “nuances from heaven.”
Over the years she has experienced those nuances in various forms such as distinctive smells, songs on the radio and recently in another object.
She was at Creekside Antiques in Beaver Creek recently, sorting through the old wooden children’s blocks on display. She held three in her hand while looking at the others in the basket. When put in the correct order, the three held blocks spelled her son’s name, S-A-M.
With the needle-in-a-haystack find of her dad’s dog tag and the seemingly random selection of three wooden blocks, I am beginning to be a believer in “nuances from heaven,” too.