Originally published at: Florida man bought wooden plaque at garage sale to use for gun repair, turned out to contain Louisiana's long lost moon rock | Boing Boing
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An amazingly American story
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Got guns and everything in that story.
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Good for him! Many people would have tried to sell it, but he did the right thing.
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It really is, as true an image of the decline of empire as the marble being stripped from the grand buildings of the Forum Romanum to be used for more mundane purposes.
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Makes me wonder if he truly is a FLORIDA MAN.
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I have no idea how you buy something like that only realize a decade later the significance of a plaque like that. Most of them are nondescript and not adorned with a giant “marble”.
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Boy, Louisiana seems to have had a loose definition of ‘official’ state flag. I Googled for images and found at least a dozen flags that all seem to be one-offs, including the one they sent to the moon. It’s like each time somebody needs a flag, they draw it by hand, from memory - which makes for some ugly damn birds.
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Great image, although I’m sure the rest of these plaques are “George B. Ivey, 40 Years with Dothan, Alabama Rotary (1953-1993)” and whatnot
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It was the 70s. It was a space age plastic. They seemed to do that to a lot of things. But also, if just left out, I bet it would be easier to swap out or lose.
“OH shit, I dropped it in the decorative rock out side the capital! Is it this one? This? Oh, god, I am so screwed.”
– Picks up a chunk of lava rock. –
“Oh thank god, saved! I got it right here!”
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Considering that it was lost anyway, I’d say that the acrylic was superfluous. 
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Sounds like a stand-up guy, I suppose, but I cannot imagine seeing something like that and having such an astounding lack of curiosity that I wouldn’t read it immediately, even if I did plan to scrap it. Did he only see the back of it for 15 years, or what? I can’t imagine the person who sold it at a garage sale ever bothered to actually look at it either.
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Did they not even put him up and give him a nice dinner?
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Louisiana’s misplaced moon rock from the Apollo 17 mission of 1972 turned up in a most unusual place: a Florida man…
…plucked it out of an alligator’s mouth after capturing the critter with a garbage can
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Holy Mooncheese! That’s an amazing collectable. 
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How do you buy this and not know what it is? It’s labeled.
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It was hand drawn by a union justice confidence man.
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