If you’ve ever lost a class ring, cheer up. There’s a chance your ring might track you down. I wrote a column once about a man who had a class ring found by fisherman who plucked it from a paper cup he had hooked in Chickamauga Lake. Amazing. I thought nothing could top that story.
Then somebody in the newsroom last week handed me a letter from Joyce Tindall, 70, of Chickamauga, Ga. I telephoned Mrs. Tindall, who says her Rossville High School class ring found its way back to her after 50 years in a furnace duct.
Last month, Mrs. Tindall said, she received a call from an employee at Ridgeland High School, who said a heat and air-conditioning worker had found her ring.
“You’re kidding,” Mrs. Tindall said.
Mrs. Tindall remembered clearly what had happened to her “Class of 1956” ring with the initials J.L.H. inside. (Her maiden name was Joyce L. Harbour).
“I had my (1-year-old) daughter in a doctor’s office in an old house near Rossville one day in 1959,” Mrs. Tindall remembers. The baby was restless, and the mother took off her ring to distract the child.
As will happen, the baby dropped the ring on the floor. Mrs. Tindall recalls watching the yellow gold ring with a blue stone roll across the floor and rattle into a floor grate.
At the time, the doctor and his staff were either unwilling or unable to fish out the ring. Mrs. Tindall would have to remember her high school days without her keepsake. She was Miss Rossville at Rossville High’s May Day celebration in 1956, when the since-closed school was still in its glory.
“I was really proud of that ring. Back then, nobody had much money. I remember thinking it cost quite a bit,” Mrs. Tindall said.
Fast-forward to 2008.
Last year, while working in an old home near Rossville, heat and air-conditioning worker Chris Roden of Chattanooga heard something “sliding around” in a length of metal ductwork.
“I dumped it out,” he said. “The ring was in good shape.”
With the price of gold at near historic highs, Mr. Roden might have been tempted to sell the bauble for scrap. Instead, he resolved to track down the owner.
“If I had lost a class ring, it would thrill me if somebody returned it,” Mr. Roden said in a telephone interview last week.
He called around to libraries and North Georgia schools to look for an owner. An employee at Ridgeland High School found Joyce Harbour in an old yearbook and then discovered her brother’s name in a phone book.
Eventually the circle was completed, and Mrs. Tindall called Mr. Roden directly. He asked her to meet him in the parking lot of the Walgreens on Frazier Avenue, where he handed over the class ring.
“He’s a nice guy,” Mrs. Tindall says. “Now, I wear the ring sometimes. It looks like a brand new one.”
E-mail Mark Kennedy at
mkennedy@timesfreepress.com
Kennedy is the content editor of the Times Free Press Life sections and writes the “Life Stories” column. Previously, he was the first Sunday editor of the Times Free Press. Before Chattanooga’s newspapers were merged in 1999, Kennedy was the coordinating editor of the Chattanooga Times, where he had previously been an education reporter, feature writer and team leader. His first newspaper job was as sports editor of the Cleveland (Tenn.) Daily Banner. Kennedy’s human ...
My brother lost his 1959 high school class ring in 1960 with no hope of ever finding it. Forty five years later in 2005 the man who was the latest owner of our home place found the ring with my brother's initials, lodged in some shallow dirt in the yard. He located my brother and returned the ring.
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