Danny’s South owners Rose Prenoveau and Mark Ebeling were leaving Baker Victory Manor on Sunday morning when Prenoveau got a text from her son that read, “you’re not going to believe this.”
Their 85-year-old father, Richard Ebeling, had just died at Baker Victory, six months after the siblings lost their mother, Rosemary, rattling them and others in the tightly knit family-run business.
After the text, a call from a Danny’s employee. Someone had left a cardboard box with a letter taped to it just outside the back door of the Orchard Park bar and restaurant.
The brother and sister owners arrived at their Abbott Road restaurant to find an NFL football, encased in a rectangular plastic frame, autographed by Hall of Fame quarterback John Elway.
The unsigned letter was an apology for the sports collectible stolen from the bar two decades ago.
In a bar jam-packed with sports collectibles, Ebeling told The Buffalo News on Wednesday he didn’t even know the football missing.
The letter came from someone who was with a group of friends “in an intoxicated state” on a Saturday before a Bills game who created a diversion at the bar in order to steal the football from near Danny’s entrance. The author identified as a big Elway fan.
“Somehow, our plan worked and it’s been hanging in my garage ever since,” the letter read. “At first it was a great story. But once I got older and had kids, I felt embarrassed about it. I took it down and planned to return it.
Two days later, Ebeling shared the anecdote on his Facebook page, connecting the memorabilia return and its timing with his father’s death as “weird.”
He does not know who stole and returned the Elway football, but he suspects it’s a “neighborhood guy.”
“I’m sorry we did what we did,” the letter continued. “We never should have done it. The ball did not belong to us and it wasn’t ours to take. But you can’t change the past; all a person can do is…
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