Raul Trujillo’s mystery began with a clank.
In nearly 17 years of living in Decatur, he had sodded, tilled and turned up dirt in every corner of his backyard. So when he slipped into spiked shoes last Sunday to aerate it, he didn’t expect any surprises.
That was when he heard it.
When Trujillo lifted his shoe and dug around, he saw a warped piece of metal riddled with holes and covered in dirt. At first he couldn’t tell what it was.
“But then I quickly realized there was writing on it,” Trujillo said. “That’s when I started digging through [the dirt] and took it over to the hose to clean it off.”
Then he read the name impressed on the front.
After a few days of research he knew what he had along with a phone number for a lawyer in Clearwater, Florida, Charles Lykes, who he hoped had more answers. When he called and told Lykes the name on the inch-and-a-half piece of metal, Lykes said he was amazed.
“Oh, so you found Uncle Tommy’s dog tag,” he said.
A World War II veteran, John “Tommy” Lykes was born in Georgia in 1912 and died in Florida in 1989. He enlisted in 1942 after working as a merchandising manager at The Atlanta Constitution. Trujillo figured that much out with the help of an amateur genealogist as well as through the archives of the AJC, where he’s a multimedia sales manager.
As for how Tommy’s 70-year-old dog tag ended up in his backyard, that’s still a mystery.
A 1940 census showed Lykes and his wife at the time lived in Decatur, but they lived four blocks away from Trujillo’s current address. Charles Lykes said he remembers staying at a different house where his uncle lived in Decatur in the ’50s, but he can’t say for sure if it was Trujillo’s.
After Atlanta, Tommy Lykes moved to Florida, remarried and lived outside Tampa Bay until he died in 1989.
Charles Lykes said Uncle Tommy was like a second father to him. Whether it was giving him a place to live, a car to drive or anything else to support him, Tommy was there for him.
And it wasn’t just his own family, Lykes said. His uncle was a friend to everyone.
“You couldn’t meet Tom and talk to him for more than 10 minutes and you felt like you knew him for a long time,” Lykes said. “You’d be laughing and smiling.”
Tommy Lykes didn’t have a son to tell stories and mentor, so Charles said he served that purpose.
While Trujillo called Charles to piece together the back story to his find, he mainly reached out to get the dog tag back in the right hands.
Charles said he doesn’t even have his own father’s dog tag, so having Uncle Tommy’s will be a meaningful addition to his photos of both his father and his uncle in uniform.
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