well I won my first real knife at beach bend park in bowling green KY way back in the early 1960's,

it was a sheath knife with a cowboy head at the top of the handle, I won it at the shooting gallery, i scored enough to get the nicer of the knifes on the prize board.

I packed that knife all that summer and into the fall cutting such things as baler twine , sharpening cane fishing poles, and frogs legs off of the frogs I would gig. even skinned a few squirrels with it.

but alas late in the fall we had moved the baler into the barn and was rebaleing some broken bales that was loose in the hay-loft, so in a rest break i started throwing it at a board, and one time it did not stick and fell in a crack below the hay and between the wood siding on the barn

that was the last time i saw that knife for 50 years and a friend who's dad had bought that farm and knew the story found the knife after a storm blowed the old barn down, and brought the knife back to me a year or so back

it was not as shiny as when I first won it, but it was still sharp , and a surprise to me was it was a German kissing crane knife, I would have bet that it was a imperial or something of that stature.

i carry a stag handled German bulldog canoe in my pocket all the time
now, i hope the son has a great deal of memories with the nice knife the OP gave him