Photo

Jimmy Neary with his 18-karat gold watch that is a lifetime pass to Ebbets Field in Brooklyn.Credit Caitlin Ochs for The New York Times

On Thanksgiving Day in 1990, a customer sat down in a restaurant on the East Side of Manhattan and plopped a gold watch on the table.

“This is yours,” the customer told the startled owner of the restaurant, who flipped the watch over. The lettering on the back said it was a lifetime pass to Ebbets Field, the arched-and-plastered home of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

The customer was Lt. Col. Anthony F. Story. He had been the personal pilot for Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the supremely egotistic Army war hero fired by President Harry S. Truman during the Korean War. The restaurateur was Jimmy Neary, who understood immediately that the watch was a relic.

What he did not understand then was that the watch was also a mystery. When was it made, and why? And when was it given to Colonel Story?

Lifetime passes have been issued to celebrities for generations. Some are good at any Major League Baseball stadium, some only at specific ballparks. Either way, they were prized. In the movie version of “Sweet Smell of Success,” when the scandal-mongering gossip columnist J. J. Hunsecker wanted someone roughed up, he turned to the press agent who did his dirty work, Sidney Falco. But this time, Falco refused, saying he would not do what Hunsecker wanted. “Not for a lifetime pass to the Polo Grounds,” he said.

MacArthur received a lifetime pass to Ebbets Field at a Brooklyn Dodgers game in May 1951, a few weeks after his falling-out with Truman — a lifetime pass to a now-distant New York, a New York with two National League teams and Red Barber calling the Dodgers’ games on the radio.

It was a New York in which Brooklyn was the world, to borrow the title of a book by a Brooklynite. The author, Elliot Willensky, was the longtime borough historian of Brooklyn. He was also the vice chairman of the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission from 1985 until his death in 1990.

And it was a New York in which, 60 years ago next month, the Dodgers beat the Yankees to win their first World Series. Mr. Willensky said the victory was when Brooklynites “at last fulfilled their promised destiny.”

Anyone who knows that Bedford Avenue and Sullivan Place is the address of Ebbets Field also knows that Sept. 24 will be the 58th anniversary of the Dodgers’ last game there. The heartbreak known as the move to Los Angeles followed. Or, to quote Mr. Willensky again, “For many loyal fans, the fate of ‘Dem Bums’ represents the fate of Brooklyn.”

Judging by the photographs in the newspapers, the pass the general received looked like most lifetime passes, which are about the size of a credit card. A pocket watch, it definitely was not. When Jose Bautista of the Toronto Blue Jays posted a photograph of his pass to every major league ballpark on Instagram in 2013, the website BuzzFeed declared that a lifetime pass was the “ultimate wallet accessory.”

MacArthur’s pass was presented by Walter F. O’Malley, the president of the Dodgers, and was “solid gold” and rectangular, according to The Brooklyn Eagle. Neither The Eagle nor The New York Times mentioned a lifetime pass for Colonel Story, whose departure from the military had followed the general’s.

Colonel Story told Mr. Neary that only two lifetime-pass watches were made, and the other went to MacArthur. “I said back to Colonel Story, ‘And the reason you got this was President Truman fired your boss,’ ” Mr. Neary recalled, adding that Colonel Story had shown him the watch many times before his death in 1991. “But I never knew he was giving it to me,” Mr. Neary said.

Mr. Neary had known Colonel Story since the 1950s. Mr. Neary’s first job in the United States, after he immigrated from Ireland, was as a porter at the New York Athletic Club, and he met Colonel Story there. After Mr. Neary opened his restaurant — Neary’s, at 358 East 57th Street, near First Avenue — in 1967, Colonel Story became a regular. “A daily communicant,” Mr. Neary called him.

In the 1950s, Colonel Story was enough of a celebrity that he figured in stories about MacArthur. When the general’s corncob pipe disappeared on the way to a Senate hearing, it was Colonel Story who found it in the Army car that had taken them from the airport to the Capitol. When smoke seeped from a window at the Waldorf Astoria and Colonel Story reported it, the headline was about him, even though the article misspelled his last name as “Storey.” (The curtains in Room 1286 had caught fire. The people staying in that room were out, and no one was injured.)

But about the watch. If MacArthur received the other watch, why does no one know about it?

The general’s son, Arthur MacArthur IV, said he knew nothing about a watch. He said he “sent everything that was important” to the MacArthur Memorial in Norfolk, Va., after MacArthur’s death in 1964. James Zobel, the memorial’s archivist, said it has no such item in its collection.

Was it just a coincidence that the watch bore the name Jaeger? Four years after MacArthur received his lifetime pass, Colonel Story was named president of the American division of that Swiss company, which has manufactured expensive watches since the 19th century.

He apparently lasted until late 1956. A spokeswoman for Jaeger-Le Coultre, as the company is now known, said that the American division had been “having a difficult time” financially when he arrived. “Colonel Story was not able to save the company,” she said.

Jaeger-Le Coultre had no record of Colonel Story’s watch. But when Mr. Neary took the watch to the Jaeger-Le Coultre boutique on Madison Avenue, the eyes behind the counter widened. The watchmaker, Nathalie Valdez, knew the MacArthur story, because she was born in the Philippines.

“Who would have thought I’d be holding a watch that had been his right-hand man’s, his confidant’s?” she said. “General MacArthur’s a part of our history class. It’s a part of history that my grandparents were a part of. They hid from the Japanese. And when MacArthur left, he said, ‘I shall return,’ and he did.”

Peter O’Malley, Walter O’Malley’s son, remembered Colonel Story but not the watch. The MacArthurs attended many games at Ebbets Field, sometimes sitting in Walter O’Malley’s box, and Peter O’Malley’s mother, Kay O’Malley, was friendly with MacArthur’s wife, Jean.

Did Walter O’Malley say something like, “I want you men to have watches” — after the ceremony in 1951? Or did the watch come later, when Colonel Story was running Jaeger’s operation in this country — in the same year the Dodgers won the World Series?

There is apparently no way to know.

Mr. Neary, who turns 85 on Monday, would not have found his way to Brooklyn, flashed the watch at the gate and found a seat in the stands.

“I hated the Dodgers,” he said. “I rooted for the New York Giants.”