High School ring found 1,000 miles away, returned to Gainesville woman after being lost for 33 years


Gainesville resident Carole Fife Long was reunited with her high school ring, worn on her pinky finger in this photo, last fall after it’d been missing for 33 years.

The class ring featured the letter H on the front and the year 1987 engraved on the side. Carole A. Fife was engraved on the inside of the band.

The class ring featured the letter H on the front and the year 1987 engraved on the side. Carole A. Fife was engraved on the inside of the band.

Carole Fife and John Long dated throughout middle and high school and were married in February 1987 after several years of dating. John joined the Army and in 1989 the couple moved to Colorado Springs, where John was stationed, when this photo was taken.

John “Jack” Pundt III, pictured left, made it his mission to return a high school ring that was found in 2015 at Our Lady of Victory, a Baltimore Catholic school and church he was employed with at the time. It took Pundt more than five years to find its rightful owner, Carole Long, who lives in Gainesville. He asked his son, John “Jack” Pundt IV, pictured center with his son by the same name, to meet Carole’s brother-in-law at the Baltimore County Police Department to exchange the ring. Her brother-in-law’s wife then mailed it to Carole.

It’s the time of year when students around the county are taking their last steps as high school seniors, walking across a stage or stadium platform to claim their diplomas and begin adulthood. With dozens of friends and family snapping photo of smiling teens donning graduation caps, gowns and tassels and then sharing the pictures on social media, it’s easy for those who’ve already made their own high school graduation march to reminisce about their senior year.

Gainesville resident Carole Long says she’s smiling just a little bit wider this graduation season because her high school class ring was returned last fall after a miraculous 33-year journey halfway across the country.

 

A gift of love paid for in hard work

The tale of the class ring began more than three decades ago in 1986, when Carole was a 16-year-old junior at Hereford High School in Parkton, Maryland. Her name then was Carole Fife. 

She and her boyfriend, John Long, had been “dating” since they were in middle school.

“He was really my first boyfriend,” she said. “I think I was 13 when we started dating.”

The relationship blossomed as they got older, and the two high school sweethearts fell in love.

When the time of the school year came around for juniors to order their letterman jackets and class rings, Carole decided not to order one.

“I couldn’t afford it,” she said. “But John had a different idea.”

Carole said John spent the whole summer before her junior year working with his Uncle Jerry at Jerry’s roofing business, “spreading hot tar and shingles on buildings in Baltimore city on many 100-degree days” to make enough money to surprise her with a class ring, she said.

John, who had left school during his own senior year to earn his GED and enlist in the Army National Guard at age 17, hadn’t had enough money to buy a class ring of his own but made the extra effort to buy one for Carole.

At that time, the school’s class rings were all the same design, made of yellow gold with an onyx inlay on the front emblazoned with a large H, which stood for Hereford High School. The metal on the sides of the ring were etched with 1987, the graduation year. On the inside of the band, John had her name, Carole A. Fife, engraved.

“I loved that ring because of what it meant – that he’d worked so hard to surprise me with it,” Carole said. 

She wore it frequently, but six months later, she looked down at her finger one day and realized the ring was gone. 

“Back then it seemed like I had to take it off pretty often. I’d take it off to wash my hands or when I took a shower. During gym class at school, you weren’t allowed to wear jewelry, so I had to take it off then and leave it in my locker, which was never locked,” she said.

Once she’d discovered it was gone, Carole looked everywhere for the ring – at her own house, at John’s house, at school and anywhere else she could remember going, but it was no use. 

She had lost it.

 

Life goes on

“I never told John that I lost it, and thankfully, he never asked,” she said. “But I’ve thought about the ring pretty often through the years, especially in the first years after I’d lost it.”

Life went on, and John and Carole were married in February 1987, just before Carole’s high school graduation. Their first daughter, Jessica, was born that same year. 

John served in the Army National Guard, and they lived together in Maryland for a year and a half until 1989, when John joined the Army full-time and they relocated to Colorado Springs when he was stationed there. Some years later, John’s military career took him to Panama during Desert Storm, and the family relocated with him there. 

Then, in 1992, pregnant with their second daughter, Rebecca, Carole moved to Ozark County to be closer to her mother and father, Ron and Phyllis Fife, who lived on T Highway near Mammoth. (Phyllis Fife died in 2005.)

Soon after, John received an honorable discharge and moved to Ozark County with Carole and the two kids. A third child, Bode, was born in 1996, and John served in a variety of occupations including as a truck driver and as an employee for the Missouri Department of Conservation. In his final occupation, he served as Chief Deputy for the Ozark County Sheriff’s Department. He died of a sudden unexpected heart attack in 2006, when he was 40 years old.

In 2005, 2010 and 2015, when it was time to order a class ring for each of her three children, Carole was reminded of her own class ring, lost so many years ago.

“I’d think, ‘Oh, that’s right. I had a class ring once.’ I never even imagined I’d see it again. I just would remember it and wonder what happened. As the years went on, though, I thought less and less about it. Until I went back to Hereford for my 20th high school class reunion in 2015,” she said. “Then, because we were all together, it popped in my mind, and I’d wondered again where it went.”

But the thought was fleeting, and after the trip, she didn’t think about the ring again for years.

 

A glint of gold in a sea of construction

Meanwhile, more than 1,000 miles away from Carole and her Ozark County life, a complete stranger, Jack Pundt was serving as a facilities manager at Our Lady of Victory, a church and 500-student Catholic school in  Baltimore, Maryland. 

In 2014, Jack had been employed for 24 years at the church and school – the same school he attended as a boy.

“That year they were doing some renovations and were adding a big addition onto the front of the church,” Jack told the Times recently. “They had a bunch of heavy machinery in there, and they unearthed this ring. It’s pretty amazing that this small piece of jewelry turned up as they were digging for the foundation and pouring the footings.”

A man working the site on a dozer had spotted the glint of gold and got off his piece of equipment to dig the ring out of the dirt by hand. He passed the ring off to the contractor, who then found the school’s facilities manager, Jack, and gave it to him.

“The contractors were good people. They could have kept it, but he gave it to me and said, ‘See if you can find who this belongs to,’” Jack said. 

He told the contractors he would do his best to find the owner. He took the ring and placed it on his desk.

“I was busy, and it just wasn’t a time when I could just drop everything and find the owner. So the ring stayed on my desk for probably another year before I did anything with it,” he said. 

Then, sometime in 2015, Jack found the ring on his desk and decided to see if he could reunite it with its owner. 

“It didn’t have any labeling for what school it had come from. It just had a big H on the front and an inscribed name on the inside band,” he said. “So I really didn’t know where to go.”

Dedicated to the mission of returning the ring to its rightful owner, Jack pondered what he could do to solve the mystery.

 

Trying to solve the mystery

“So it sat on my desk a bit longer. Then I’d remembered that my old high school had always used Jay Jenkins & Sons as their class ring supplier, and they serviced most of Maryland.  I thought, ‘Why not take it to them?’” he said. 

Jack contacted a Jenkins representative and presented the ring, asking for any information the company could provide about who’d purchased it.

“They told me it was a ring from the Hereford High School class of 1987,” Jack said. “But they couldn’t tell me any more information about who’d bought it or an address of who had paid. We had the inscribed name, but I had Googled it and didn’t have much luck finding anything.”

Carole’s maiden name had changed from the inscribed name to her married name, Carole Long, in 1987, meaning any information about her online or any social media page would not have been brought up by searching the maiden name.

Jack decided then to change directions and Google “Hereford High School.” He found an alumni website that featured a page where former Hereford students could get in contact with other alumni.

“So I just wrote an email on there saying that I’d found a class ring and described it and included the [inscribed] name. Then I left my contact information,” he said. 

Apparently, one of the alumni page managers took Jack’s email and placed the “found class ring” notice on the alumniclass.com website with the description of the ring and Jack’s contact information.

 

An unexpected message

Then, the journey went stagnant for five years. The ring still sat on Jack’s desk at the school, and the post remained on the website, but there were no responses. Carole’s life continued in Ozark County.

Then, on September 26, 2020, one of Carole’s best friends from high school, Lynnell Crouse Gravelle, who had then relocated to Montana, sent her a text message.

The message included a screenshot from another former high school classmate, Eileen Boyce, who had posted to the Hereford High School Alumni Facebook group asking, “I know this is from 5+ years ago, but does anyone know how to get ahold of Carole Fife? I can’t find her on [Facebook]. I stumbled across this lost and found school ring post.”

The post on alumniclass.com, which had been made five years earlier, on Jan. 15, 2015, showed that someone had found a class ring from Hereford High School class of 1987. The band was engraved “Carole A. Fife.” The post listed a phone number with the message, “Call and ask for Jack.”

 

Skepticism and careful consideration

“I was thrilled but a little skeptical. I thought it might be a scam,” Carole said. “But when I really thought about it, I couldn’t think of any way he could be scamming me – and I really had lost my ring,” she said. 

So, on Oct. 6, 2020, Carole texted the phone number and asked if he still had the ring he’d mentioned in the post five years earlier. 

Jack replied, saying that he’d since retired as facility manager of Our Lady of Victory Catholic School where the ring was found, but he did still have it in his possession. 

“I’m a very cautious person. I want to see the ring given back to the rightful owner,” Jack texted Carole. He told her to call him sometime between 8 a.m. and 2 p.m. 

The next day, Carole called, and the two chatted. Carole recounted the story of how she’d lost it, and Jack explained how he’d come to have it.

“I was in shock of everything he was saying,” she said.

“The real mystery is how the ring came to be from Hereford High School to the church, all the way on the other side of the Baltimore County,” Jack told the Times. “I have no clue how it wound up in a plot of ground that had a huge pine tree on it. Once we took that tree down, it was found.”

Carole agreed, explaining that she’d never been to the area of Baltimore where the ring was found, which is approximately 30 to 40 miles from where she had lived and attended school.

To prove that Carole was who she said she was, she sent a photo of a newspaper clipping from her high school days about the cheerleading squad she a member of,  a senior class picture from Hereford and a modern day photo of her. It was enough to convince Jack. 

 

Another setback

“She asked me to mail it to her, but I told her I wouldn’t do that because I didn’t want to be responsible if it got lost in the mail or something,” Jack said.

Carole told Jack that John’s brother Jeff lived in Baltimore County and could meet him to get the ring. Jack told her that his son worked for the Baltimore County Police Department in Towson, Maryland, and could meet her brother-in-law there with the jewelry.

Jack gave Carole his son’s phone number to pass on to her brother-in-law so the meeting could be arranged. Carole messaged the information to Jeff’s wife, who relayed it to him. He agreed to meet with Jack.

“After about a week, I decided to check in to see if he’d gotten it. I didn’t want to be pushy, because it was so nice of him to help me and go get it,” Carole said. “It turns out he’d been waiting for Jack’s son to call him instead of him calling Jack’s son.”

The two men met at the BCPD headquarters. Jeff got the ring and sent Carole a photo that night.

 

Lost in the mail

Jeff’s wife put the ring in a box and took it to the post office on Oct. 24. He got a tracking number that said the estimated delivery would be six days later, on Oct. 30. 

But Oct. 30 came and went, and there was still no ring.

“I was tracking it constantly, and it just kept saying it was at a Kansas City post office. For weeks, it was the same, at a Kansas City post office,” Carole said. 

She said she felt horrible because Jack had gone through such a journey to get it back to its rightful owner and wouldn’t send it in the mail because he worried it would be lost – and then, as he’d feared, it was lost again. 

“I’d almost talked myself out of ever getting it,” Carole said. “I thought, ‘Well, maybe I’m not meant to have it.’”

 

A happy ending

But then the tracking information changed, and on Nov. 17, almost a month after it left the post office in Maryland, the ring arrived at Carole’s house. 

“It was almost surreal to see it,” she said. “After all that time, and after all that trouble, it was finally there.”

She took it out of the box and tried to slip it on her finger, but the ring was too small for any finger but her pinky.

“All that, and it doesn’t even fit,” she said, laughing. 

Instead, she placed the ring in her jewelry box as a reminder of the love she shared with John when they were just teenagers.

“That’s what the ring means to me, but it’s pretty cool to think about the journey it’s been on all these years,” she said.

Jack says he’s happy the ring is finally where it belongs. 

“I could tell it was really special to her, and I’m happy that I could be a part of getting it back. It was pretty rewarding for myself to do that,” he said. 

Jack added that he’s now looking for the owner of another high school class ring that’s been found.

“I have a ring that’s from the class of 1952 Baltimore Evening High School,” he said. “But from what I can tell, there’s no record of that school anywhere.”

Still, he has it sitting on a shelf at his house to hopefully, one day, finish its own journey back to its owner. And when it does, there’ll no doubt be another story to tell. 

Ozark County Times

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