By Andrew McGinn, Staff Writer 9:39 PM Tuesday, March 16, 2010SPRINGFIELD — Juanda Dale could shimmy her way up to the top of a rainbow, look down and still pick one out.
So on this St. Patrick’s Day, if you think you’re up to challenging her to a hunt for four-leaf clovers, do yourself a favor — lay off the green beer.
To run with the woman who could very well spot a few crumbles of corned beef in a leprechaun’s beard from 100 yards out, you’re going to need your eyes to be extra sharp.
“I just have an eye for picking them out,” the Pitchin resident confessed. “My grandmother and I used to have clover wars from the house to the car, just to see how many four-leaf clovers we could find in five minutes.”
She’d always find five or six.
“I don’t know how much luck is involved,” Dale said.
Then again, some people are lucky to find just one.
Rather, some people are lucky to have that much patience — four-leaf clovers aren’t all that rare, said local horticulturist Pam Bennett.
But by her own estimation, Dale has found thousands of them in her lifetime, theoretically making her the luckiest nonfictitious person in the world — and second overall only to the little dude pictured on the Lucky Charms box.
“I probably have a couple hundred of them at home,” she said.
In the mid-1990s, she got herself a cheap laminating machine and really went to town, forever sealing the lucky charms in plastic.
She gives many away.
As the receptionist at the Springfield Museum of Art, she sells others for $2, with the money going to the financially strapped Cliff Park Road institution that could use a little luck of its own about now.
Several years ago, she sent 50 of them to a friend in Las Vegas, who promptly sold 47 of them to gamblers on the Strip for as much as $10 each.
“People are always looking for something to change their luck in Vegas,” she said.
Her brother, museum facilities manager Marty Brewer, is nothing short of amazed by his sister’s keen eyesight.
“She can find lost things,” he marveled. “She found my wife’s wedding band she’d lost while helping me gut a deer.”
“My husband,” Dale added, “was sitting there with $1,500 in metal-detecting equipment.”
Luck?
“It’s a knack,” she said.
Posted via web from fourleafclovergoodluckcharms's posterous
