A long time ago, a woman tried to sell me her home, hinting at the prospect of gold treasure long hidden and lost within.
She told me her husband had died suddenly, and his last words to her were: “There’s gold coins behind the wall in the bedroom closet.” She was willing to split anything found.
I didn’t bite on that strange sales pitch, but it reminded me of another similar case, even more interesting, up the country a ways.
In the little Texas town of San Diego, about an hour west of Corpus Christi, there once lived a Dr. Jose García. In 1933, he was the primary doctor in town and preferred to store his wealth in the form of gold coins. He hid it in a tight crawl space beneath a trapdoor in his kitchen.
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No one knew of this treasure except García and his daughter, Gloria. He told her the coins were hers to use, for taking care of her disabled brother later in life.
When the good doctor eventually died, Gloria asked her husband, Hector López, to find the coins. After Hector’s repeated determined explorations into the tight crawl space—even with a metal detector—he couldn’t find the coins.
Since García had suffered from dementia late in life, Gloria and Hector began thinking the gold coins had been the invention of an imaginative mind or a mind that forgot he had moved the coins.
Years later, Gloria and Hector sold the house. Then, more than 20 years after that, a plumbing leak sprang up underneath it.
A plumber went through that old trapdoor the doctor had created almost 100 years before. While laying in a new line through the muddy soil, the plumber saw a flicker of something shiny.
He brushed away the mud and discovered a very old gold coin. He dug deeper and found a gold mine: some 500 coins in various sizes and denominations.
He was elated, of course, but he didn’t alert the homeowner. He calmly asked his assistant to get him an empty coffee can and absconded with the coins—worth about $500,000 at the time.
But the plumber didn’t handle it well. He went around paying for things with gold coins within the little community. The gossip erupted immediately, and Hector and Gloria soon got word.
They sued the plumber, saying the coins belonged to Gloria.
The new homeowner, too, sued for ownership, but after a long legal battle, a jury in Duval County decided that the coins belonged to Gloria.
Next, something even more unexpected and beautiful happened: Gloria and Hector gave the coins to the Museum of South Texas History in Edinburg.
As it turned out, the coins were a small part of Gloria and Hector López’s wealth. They both graduated from the University of Texas in the 1940s, and then Hector earned a law degree and amassed a $275 million portfolio while working in the oil and gas industry.
Since they had no children, the Lópezes left their fortune to the children of Texas in the form of the Hector and Gloria López Foundation, which provides college tuition—especially for Hispanic and first-generation students, known proudly as López Scholars.
