Greetings all. I didn't take any pictures of my find today. I didn't even use the detector to find these items today. But above everything else, the day ended with a very good feeling.
We arrived at a park where I've always found a lot of change. I even found a watch one time here that was buried 5 inches down and despite having a leather band, it was in good shape and after some cleaning I got it to run. I called the park office to report finding it, but they had no report of one ever being lost. It was after all, an inexpensive watch. But today we had no sooner gotten to the park and walked into the pavilion to eat a bit of lunch when we noticed on the end of the picnic table two shiny rings, both with diamonds!
Now this made me wonder about something right off the bat. When you find something like this, do you think to yourself, "Screw that guy, I'm keeping these rings!", or do you think,
"I sure hope I can get these back to the poor girl who lost them."? Well there was no question. We knew the right thing to do was to find the owner and get her rings back to her. One of them was a diamond promise ring, and you can't take something like that away from a girl. The other, much to our good fortune was her high school class ring.
Most class rings have of course, the name of the school they attended, the year they graduated, and on the inside, either the initials of the person or even their full name inscribed on the ring. If it is just the initials, you can usually go through a yearbook/annual from the school in question at your local library if the school is in town. If it's not local, you'd be amazed how quickly a newspaper from the town where the high school is will get involved in helping you if they think they will get a feel good story out of it. Anyway, this ring had the girl's name on the inside of the ring. Man I wish we had always had the internet. Back in the day it could take weeks of research to find a person to return a class ring, but as things go these days, I put the girl's name into the search engine on my cell phone, and within seconds I had 4 websites with information about her, to include her Twitter account and her address. We had a phone call off to her within about 10 minutes, and within an hour of finding the rings, we had set up a time and a place to go meet the girl to return her rings. She hadn't even noticed they were missing until she called to ask why we had left a message on her home phone. When we met up with her, she was tearful and said she wished she had some way of rewarding us for getting the rings back to her. To be honest, seeing the gratitude in her eyes was all the reward needed.
I've read stories about class rings finding their way to their owners after 40 years, but this ring was only missing for a couple of hours and it felt every bit as good. When I was overseas in the military (Army) in 1973 my class ring and another ring of mine went missing after I had left them on a sink edge and walked away for about 2 minutes. I came back to see a guy walking away down the hall and then realizing too late that he had probably just scored a couple of pieces of jewelry. Seeing that he wasn't American, I doubt he had an idea of the significance of a class ring. I'm always hoping though that some day, these many years later, the person who took my rings will have a change of heart and will find a way to get at least the class ring back to me. I don't care what the circumstances are, or were in my case, getting that kind of ring back after any period of time would be nice.
So the next time you score the jewelry, think about whether you'll feel better about keeping it and maybe getting a few bucks or a good story out of the deal, or getting the jewelry back to the owner and knowing how good it feels to have done the right thing.
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