Corpus Christi Caller Times Caller.com - Lost class ring found 34 years later in the sewer

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Thursday, December 2, 1999

Lost class ring found 34 years later in the sewer

Scripps Howard News Service

CINCINNATI - A high-tech search on the Internet combined with a low-tech sewer cleaning in Cincinnati to reunite a Michigan man with a class ring lost 34 years ago.
   Robert Williams, who received a bachelor's degree in civil engineering from Lawrence Technological University in Southfield, Mich., in 1957, had not seen his class ring since his Detroit home was burglarized in 1965.
   While restoring an old car, Williams had placed the ring in a box atop his dresser to prevent it from being damaged. When he went to wear it again, the ring and other items were gone.
   The ring remained missing for more than three decades - until Rahn Wuest, a Cincinnati Metropolitan Sewer District worker, found it last summer while his crew was cleaning a sanitary sewer.
   In preparing to inspect the sewer, Wuest's crew first cleaned the line. "We pulled several buckets of gravel and debris from the sewer," Wuest said. While another crew was shoveling the debris into a dump truck, Wuest's co-worker, Dave Edwards, spotted the ring.
   Noticing that a class year - 1957 - and the initials "RDW" were engraved on the inside of the ring, Wuest decided to try to track down the owner.
   When Wuest e-mailed Lawrence Tech's Alumni Relations Office, Williams' name was the only match for the Class of 1957. University officials then located Williams, who lives in a Detroit suburb, and informed him that his ring had been found in a sewer about 220 miles south of where it was stolen. How and when it made that long trek remains a mystery.
   About a month ago, Wuest mailed the ring back to the campus office, where Williams reclaimed it and pronounced its blue inset stone hardly the worse for wear.
   "Getting my ring back makes me feel young," said Williams, a retired structural engineering consultant and computer software salesman who now conducts water quality studies of local lakes. "After so many years, it's one of those most unexpected things."
   Williams began his college studies in 1949, transferred to Lawrence Tech in 1951 and earned his degree in 1957, after a break for military service during the Korean War.
   He had purchased the class ring just before graduation.

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