I've featured many stories about lost class rings being found. But the story of the ring you see above stands out for at least three reasons:

1. The ring was lost in 1970 and found this year -- a 44-year gap!

2. The ring was successfully reunited with its original owner.

3. The ring was found by a St. Louis sewer crew, which found it while cleaning a clogged sewer line. The ring (which was not the source of the clog) had apparently been there for four decades. Hmmm, would you wear a ring that had spent that long in a sewer, or even want to own it?

You can read more about this here.

(Big thanks to James Poisso for pointing me toward this one.)

Last week I wrote about a 1975 high school ring that PermaRec reader Frank Bitzer recently discovered while going through his late mother's belongings. There's been a new development on that front.

First, a quick recap: As you may recall, Frank's mother found the ring on the side of a highway in 1984 but apparently never attempted to locate its owner. Frank had trouble reading the school's name on the ring, so he sent it to me, hoping I could find the owner. I determined that the ring had belonged to Jeff Weeks, who had graduated in 1975 from Indian Lake High School in Ohio. I had two short conversations with Jeff's brother, Todd Weeks, and traded a few awkward voicemails with Jeff, but Jeff never actually gave me his shipping address for returning the ring. For that matter, he didn't seem particularly interested in the ring at all. Then he stopped responding to my calls.

For the next few days, every time the phone rang, I thought to myself, "That's gotta be Jeff Weeks." But it never was. And whenever I received a voicemail, I thought to myself, "That's gotta be Jeff Weeks." But it never was.

Then I came home one day to find a voicemail from Todd Weeks — Jeff's brother. The message, which was spoken in a very slow, almost disinterested-sounding voice, went like so:

Hello, this is Todd Weeks. My brother said you keep missing each other. You wanted the story on the ring, but he doesn't even remember — it was 30 years ago. [Long pause.] He doesn’t even know. I was thinkin' you might wanna mail him the ring. It's Jeff Weeks, [address redacted]. That's Jeff Weeks, [address redacted]. [Long pause.] He doesn't remember anything about the ring. [Long pause.] Thank you. Bye.

There was an additional long pause — about seven seconds — between "Bye" and the official end of the voicemail. Very odd. Even odder, if Todd and Jeff discussed my attempts to return the ring, as appears to be the case, why did Todd call me back instead of Jeff? Those Weeks brothers — such inscrutable characters!

And just to be clear, I never asked Jeff or Todd for "the story on the ring." Rather, I thought Jeff might be interested in hearing the story of the rather circuitous route the ring had taken on its way back to him. But I guess he doesn't care, which of course is his prerogative.

Anyway: Since Todd gave me Jeff's address, I dropped the ring in the mail. I included a note with my phone number, just in case he wants to get in touch and provide a bit of closure, but I don't expect to hear from him. If I do, though, I'll provide an update here.

For all photos, click to enlarge

I've written several times now about lost class rings being found. But the ring shown above is different — it's been found twice, in two different contexts. And it doesn't seem to want to go home.

The story begins with an email I recently received from reader Frank Bitzer, as follows:

I recently rummaged through my now-deceased mom's old cedar chest, where she kept a lifetime's worth of keepsakes. I came across something odd: a 1975 class ring. My mom had it in a plastic baggie with a note saying she found it in the emergency lane on Interstate 271 east of Cleveland in September of 1984. (She was moving my kid brother to college; they made an emergency stop.) Mom died in 2005 and I just discovered the ring now.

My eyesight isn't good enough to make out the school's name on the ring. But if possible, I would like to see it returned to its rightful owner.

So the ring was first discovered by Frank's mother and then again, nearly 30 years later, by Frank himself. I told Frank I'd be happy to look into the situation, so he sent me the ring, along with his mother's note, which is shown above.

Frank wasn't kidding about the school's name on the ring being hard to read. The lettering is teeny-tiny and a bit weathered. I couldn't make it out with the naked eye, so I took a close-up photograph of it and then enlarged the photo, at which point the words "Indian Lake" became apparent:

School rings are often marked with owner's initials, but this one has something much better. The owner's name, Jeff Weeks, has been engraved on the inner shank:

Some quick Googling revealed that there's an Indian Lake High School in Lewistown, Ohio (about 170 miles from Cleveland), and that the school's class of 1975 included a Jeff Weeks. So I contacted the school, where a helpful staffer agreed to post something about the ring to school's alumni group on Facebook.

About two weeks later I received a call from a gentleman named Todd Weeks — Jeff Weeks's brother. He had seen the Facebook post and wanted to know more. I explained the situation and he said he'd pass my contact info along to Jeff.

About 10 days went by with no further developments, so I called Todd Weeks and told him I hadn't heard from Jeff. He sounded surprised, and then he gave me Jeff's number and encouraged me to contact him myself. I called the number, left a voicemail about the ring, and went out to run some errands.

When I came back, there was a message waiting for me. The voice sounded rather distracted: "Um, yeah, this is Jeff Weeks, just returning your call. [Pause.] Thank you." That was it — no mention of the ring, no curiosity about how I came to be in possession of it, no nothing.

That was five days ago. I've called Jeff twice more since then and have left messages, but no response. Maybe he doesn't want his ring back..? Could be — I can imagine all sorts of scenarios in which the ring might be a bad reminder of unpleasant times.

I'll post an update if I ever hear back from Jeff. For now, though, this story remains frustratingly unresolved.

Another day, another story about a lost class ring. This latest one, shown above, belonged to a Virginia high school student named Shannon O'Donnell, who lost it while riding an amusement park ride in 1999. It was recently found by man named James Lawrence, who returned it to Shannon's high school.

Although Shannon's name was etched into the ring's inner band, the school's staff no longer had contact info for Shannon. So they put a photo of the ring on the Facebook page for the school's alumni, which set the wheels in motion for Shannon to reclaim her ring. You can read further details in this article.

(My thanks to Beverley Brookes for letting me know about this story.)

I've recently come across a bunch of PermaRec-ish stories from the past 15 months or so, all of which I missed when they originally moved across the news wires. Here's the rundown:

1. A South Carolina woman whose pocketbook had been stolen back in 1990 was surprised when she received a call from the local police, who had found the bag with most of its contents (shown above) still intact. The bag had been found in the ceiling tiles of a bathroom a few miles from where it had been stolen — presumably stowed there by the thief, who took the cash but left everything else.

2. This is pretty good: A Michigan man named Joshua McKinney was removing some old insulation in his attic when he discovered a bunch of old love letters and other ephemera from the 1940s. He was able to return it to its family of origin but nobody could explain how the letters ended up in McKinney's attic, because the family that had originally owned the letters had never lived in McKinney's house, or even in his town. After some further investigation, it turned out that the family had lived in the house after all — but in another city! The entire house, complete with the letters tucked away in the attic, had been moved to McKinney's town after the family moved away. McKinney later bought the house and found the letters. You can get the full story here.

3. Last May I wrote about a hatbox full of old letters from the 1940s, which had been purchased for $1 at an estate sale. When I blogged about this story last year, the woman who bought the hatbox had enlisted the aid of a researcher, who was trying to find the family connected to the letters. It turns out that the researcher's efforts were successful.

4. Last month I wrote about the issue of class rings that are lost and later found. Here's another story in that same vein, about a class ring that was found at the bottom of a lake by a diver in the early 1960s and then returned to its owner nearly 50 years later.

5. And speaking of rings, an Indiana woman was remodeling her bathroom and was surprised to find a wedding band wedged behind the vanity. The ring was engraved with initials that matched those of the house's original owner, making it relatively easy to return the ring to the woman who had lost it 40 years earlier.

Photo by Colin McConnell / Toronto Star

One winter day in the mid-1970s, when I was maybe 10 or 11 years old, I was walking home from elementary school in Blue Point, Long Island, when something glinting in the snow caught my eye. I bent down and discovered that it was a class ring from our local high school. I don't recall the class year, but it was the same as the year in which I found it, so it belonged to someone who was due to graduate in a few months' time.

I brought the ring home and showed it to my parents, who saw that the owner's initials had been stamped into the ring's inner shank. They brought it to the high school, and we were later told that it had been returned to its rightful owner.

I hadn't thought about this episode until a few days ago, when I learned about a Toronto-area man named John Slade (shown above), who had a childhood experience remarkably similar to mine. In 1979, when he was nine years old, he found a then-current high school class ring in the snow while walking to his elementary school. Thirty-five years later, he hasn't been able to track down its owner, although I suspect that will change now that this article has been published.

When I found that ring back in the mid-’70s, I assumed that its owner had simply lost it. When I got a bit older, I learned that high school girls often wore their boyfriends' class rings as necklace pendants, or even on their fingers (after wrapping a bit of yarn around the shank to help the rings fit on their smaller hands). Once I became aware of that ritual, it occurred to me that the ring I'd found might have been tossed into the snow by the owner's girlfriend in a pique of disgust after a nasty breakup. If that's the case, then the discovery and return of the ring would have added an interesting epilogue to a little high school soap opera.

Oddly enough, I have no idea what happened to my own class ring, which disappeared at some point during my 20s. I'm not sentimental about it — no need to return it if you find it in the snow. On the other hand, I care a lot about the class rings that belonged to my father and brother, both of whom are deceased:

I have those rings as keepsakes, and every now and then I'll wear one of them when I want to feel closer to a departed family member.

I do a fair amount of thrift-shopping, but I don't recall having seen many (or perhaps any) vintage class rings for sale. There are lots of them, however, on eBay and Etsy. Since they tend to be stamped with the original owner's initials, these artifacts would seem to offer lots of possibilities for PermaRec-style reconnections. Hmmm — a subject for further study, perhaps.

(My thanks to Taha Jamil for alerting me to the story about John Slade.)