THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, December 17, 1994 TAG: 9412160009
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A13 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: George Hebert
LENGTH: Medium: 58 lines
That great story the other day about the finding of a class ring lost in 1927 brought to my mind some other occasions on which lost rings and/or metal detectors were involved in remarkable recoveries.
In the case of the high-school ring restored to its Elizabeth City, N.C., owner, Kate Hall Byrd, 67 years after she lost it in the water at Ocean View, both a detector and the ring were active contributors to the outcome.
The sensing device was in the hands of a retired Norfolk fireman, Jim Daniel, who not only used his instrument effectively on the beach sands, but conducted the subsequent detective work that found the ring's owner. And in that pursuit, he was aided by information on the ring - the identity of the school, a date and the owner's initials.
Not quite as elaborate a sequence of events, but involving some similar elements, followed the loss of a class ring by the newspaper carrier who served our home several years back. Somehow when the young man came to collect, his ring slipped off his finger and fell down into a matting of pine needles beside our small brick porch. Neither he nor I was able to sift it out by poking around, but when he left I promised to keep looking.
What I did right away was to borrow a metal detector from a friend and in nothing flat located the lost jewelry despite the density of the plant debris. Ring and youngster were reunited.
On an earlier occasion (at the time I wrote a piece commenting on the slick police work) the missing article was a Maury High School class ring owned by my daughter, Christine, and stolen from a hotel room where she and some friends were staying in New York City. Months after the theft, an arrest netted a big batch of stolen goods, including the ring with its date and initials. Through the manufacturer, detectives tracked down my daughter here.
Yet another incident involved my own wedding band. My wife, Donna, and I had been sitting atop a small dune at Sandbridge, watching the ocean and the people on the beach. When we got ready to leave, and were brushing off, I flung the ring from my finger, straight down and deep into loose sand. Frantic sifting produced no result, so we set off for a nearby store to see if anyone knew of an available metal detector. Someone did. The generous owner, reached on the phone, promised to get to us in about 15 minutes.
Oddly enough, while waiting on the dune for him, I tried throwing down a quarter as a possible guide to where the ring had buried itself. Wriggling my fingers down in that spot, I indeed came up with both the coin and the ring.
But even though the detector didn't get to do its thing, this time, I know very well it could have. I still feel a sense of gratitude to the owner, whom I profusely thanked then and later.
So I say that this detector, in a crazy kind of way, deserves a place right in there with other episodes I know about - where its electronic cousins or the lost objects themselves have made for happy endings, ring-wise. MEMO: Mr. Hebert is a former editor of The Ledger-Star.
by CNB