A Ring Returned - 38 Years Later!

**mrwilburino** · Aug 29, 2010, 01:27 PM

I was fifteen years old in 1976 when I found this beautiful 1973 Lakewood High School class ring. I was detecting a small Cleveland park located on the boarder of Cleveland and the suburb of Lakewood. I was hunting with my old Garrett BFO in an area which had yielded more than a few pocket spills in the past; the result of many years’ worth of football games between the neighborhood kids. From the depth at which it was buried, I knew that the former owner could not have had it for very long. When I took it home and cleaned it up I discovered a name engraved on the inside of the band. I showed it to my parents and my mom said: “well, we have to find the guy who owns that ring,” so we got out the local white pages and started making calls to everyone with the same last name as the one on the ring. No one seemed to know who this person was. I guess it hadn’t dawned on either of us that we could have possibly located the owner through Lakewood High School but eventually we gave up and the ring was tossed in a cigar box with the rest of my finds and forgotten. A few years later I put my Garrett away for the winter and it was forgotten also. I rediscovered metal detecting earlier this year and that brought to mind the fact that I still had the ring. I decided to start searching for the owner again. It didn’t take long to find him. The first place I looked was on Facebook and there he was! The name was the same and his profile stated that he graduated from Lakewood High School in 1973. I sent him a message and told him the story of the ring and he was pretty stunned. He told me that he had gotten the ring in the fall of 1972 when he began his senior year at Lakewood. He lost it at the park during soccer practice exactly two weeks later. He said that he was devastated at the time. I can understand that; class rings were a big deal back then, maybe they still are. We made a date to meet and return the ring. On Saturday, August 28th we got together at a small Italian restaurant along with our wives and spent three hours talking about the past and having a good time. I got a free lunch, he got his ring back.