The coin rolled through a crack in the porch, but that's just the beginning of the story

EPHRAIM — Cristin Edmunds was having a hard time watching, as her childhood home was demolished.

"This is where I was raised, and it has always been home," she said.

And on the front porch of the home is where she had one of her most cherished memories with her father, Rick Gonzales, when she was about eight years old.

“He had given me a 50-cent piece coin and I was tossing it in the air and catching it, and I dropped it and it rolled down in a crack on the porch, underneath the front window," she said.  

She was devastated as she watched the half dollar roll out of sight. "I thought I was the only kid in the world with one of these cool coins,” she said. “It was pretty special."

Years later her father passed away from cancer in 1985.

“She was a daddy’s girl,” Edmunds’ mother, Lynette Olson, said of her daughter.

So when Olson saw that the home on Ephraim’s Main Street she sold a few years ago was being torn down to make room for a parking lot, she thought about her daughter's lost 50-cent piece.

Wednesday, she was in a car with a friend. "We just got past the house and I said, ‘You need to turnaround. I've got to go find her (Cristin's) money.' It was almost like something said, ‘Go get her money,’" recalled Olson.

The man behind the controls of the backhoe was Dustin Barton. Olson used to babysit him in the home he was now tearing down, and together they grabbed a shovel and started looking for Edmunds’ coin.

He said there wasn’t much digging. It was more scraping bits of dirt at a time. And in just a couple of minutes, there it was.

"It felt pretty good to see the reaction of Lynette and to know what it meant to Cristin and the people who were here with them,” Barton said. “They were pretty excited."

Olson took the coin right to her daughter, knowing she was already having a tough day.

"I could tell she had been crying,” Olson said. “And I said ‘maybe this will help you to feel a little better,’ and I held out my hand and handed her her 50-cent piece and then she really started crying."

"I always remembered that I'd lost it, and it was something special from my dad, so I've always thought about it,” Edmunds said.

The coin has been buried in the dirt for 31 years, still worth 50 cents.  But to Edmunds, the 1976 half dollar is priceless.

“My dad, when he gave this to me, he said I could either run down to Mr. Lee's and spend it, or I could keep it forever, and now I can keep it forever,” she said.

E-mail: spenrod@ksl.com