| Shirley Timmons shows off her class ring that was taken 20 years ago from her home in Topeka, Kan. The ring was recently returned to Timmons. |
People tend to lose a lot of things. Other people find things. But Shirley Timmons’ high school class ring is a unique lost and found story.
In 1957, Timmons graduated from Seaman Rural High School in Topeka, Kan.
The 1957 Seaman High graduates selected class rings that were very different from prior and future years.
“We decided as a class not to have any stones in the ring, but just gold,” explained Timmons, a current resident of Price. “It was a different kind of ring. But my initials are on the front just like all my classmates.”
As the years passed, after graduation Timmons treasured her class ring.
But in the late 1980s, the ring came up missing, possibly in a jewelry theft involving two of her wedding bands.
A few years later, Timmons moved to Carbon County and, for the most part, forgot about the missing class ring she had prized at the moment of graduation.
Then a few months ago, Timmons indicated that she received a telephone call from out of the blue from a former high school classmate named Dorothy Miller.
“She asked me about my class ring and I told her it was long gone and I didn’t know where it was,”pointed out Timmons. “Then she said ‘you aren’t going to believe this, but I have it.”
Miller told Timmons that a fellow Seaman High classmate, Berneice Albright, had a daughter who recently visited a laundromat to wash her clothes in Topeka, Kan..
When the daughter was removing some clothes from a washing machine, she heard a clanking sound.
Timmons’ classmate’s daughter looked inside the washing machine, saw the school ring and realized it was almost identical to the one her mother had from the Seaman High Class of 1957.
“She gave it to her mother and her mother, in turn, gave it to Miller at the 50th class reunion that was held this summer,” pointed out Timmons. “I was not able to go.”
However, it wasn’t until a short time later when Miller recognized the ring as Timmons’ because she hadn’t looked at the initials.
With the S.T. engraved on it, the ring could only belong to Timmons because she was the only one in the 1957 graduating class with the initials.
Recently, the high school class ring showed up in the mail and Timmons was excited as ever to see it again.
“It was wonderful to see it again,” commented Timmons. “All those years. Is that unbelievable or what?”