Miami -- Hector Ruiz remembers moving here from San Antonio in 1962, when he was only six years old. 

The Ruiz’s were an upper-middle-class family.  Hector’s mom worked as an executive secretary and his dad was a pharmaceuticals salesman.  When his father was promoted to Southeastern sales manager, the Ruiz’s used a moving company to transfer all their possessions the 1,400 miles from their three-bedroom Texas home to Florida.

One piece of important furniture never arrived – at least not until June 2008.

As Hector relates in an interview, his grandfather, Alejandro, purchased the 54-inch cherry roll top desk in 1941 at a furniture auction and used it proudly until his death in 1953.  

The desk passed to Hector’s father.  As a child, Hector remembers being fascinated by the desk and all its “magical” drawers.  

Upon the Ruiz’s arrival in Miami, Alejandro’s roll top desk was not among the family’s boxes and crates.  The desk never showed up and ultimately the mover (www.x-moving.com) paid the Ruiz family $2,500 in compensation.

“The lawyer told me he has no idea why the desk had never been delivered or why no one else had every bothered to track down its rightful owner,” Hector says. 

Hector says he doesn’t know what his grandfather originally paid for the desk, but assumes it was quite well made because even 40-years ago it was valued so highly.

In the four-decades since the Ruiz family arrived in Miami, Hector’s parents both died and his four siblings moved to new locations.  Only he remains at the Miami family home.

“I was stunned,” is how Hector describes his reaction when he was contacted by a San Antonio attorney in mid-June who informed him that he was handling the estate of the Texas man who had owned the moving company that the Ruiz family used in 1962.  The business owner died in October 2007 and his real estate holdings were being liquidated.

In a storage facility owned by the San Antonio movers, the Texas lawyer came across Alejandro’s cherry roll top desk in a crate addressed to the Ruiz family’s Miami home.  The lawyer did an Internet search and found that Hector still lived there.

“The lawyer told me he has no idea why the desk had never been delivered or why no one else had every bothered to track down its rightful owner,” Hector says.  

Although technically the claim on the desk had been paid decades earlier, the lawyer told Hector he believed the desk belonged with the Ruiz family and the mover's estate paid to ship the desk to Florida.

When the roll top finally arrived “home,” Hector says, he and his siblings gathered to see what kind of time-capsule mementos might still be locked away in the desk.  But all the drawers and compartments were empty.

“Whether dad shipped it empty or it was emptied along the years,” we’ll never know says Hector.  “What I do know is if I ever move from here, I’m taking the desk with me in a U-Haul.”