Ring returned after 44 years
Published: May 16, 2006
A lost class ring that made an epic journey from the bottom of a Massachusetts lake to a Hartford parking lot is now safely with its owner, thanks to the efforts of Cambridge Street resident Todd Storck.
Dana Kennealy, of Attleboro, Mass., lost the black onyx ring 44 years ago when she and her boyfriend Tim - now her husband - were out swimming in Lake Cochituate.
“I thought: It’s gone we’ll never see this again,” Kennealy, 61, said, “and here it is 44 years later.”
Storck, a 37-year-old mechanical engineer, said he noticed his friend wearing the ring and learned that she found it in the parking lot of a housing project in Hartford eight years ago. He asked her if he could take the ring to try to find the owner.
“It seemed like a challenge,” he said, “and it seemed like a good thing to do.”
The clues were there: Engraved on the ring were the owner’s initials and the name of Kennealy’s hometown, Natick, though the letters were obscured through the decades.
Storck used the Internet to locate Natick High School alumni whom he later contacted by phone. The former classmates identified two people in the graduating class of 1963 with the same initials as those on the ring.
One of the two was a man, who could be ruled out, since the ring was clearly for a woman. Storck began making calls to people with Kennealy’s maiden name and eventually connected with her brother, who gave him her number.
After talking to her briefly, Storck confirmed it was Kennealy’s ring and sent it to her by mail over a week ago.
“I was just blown away,” Kennealy said of finding the ring in the mail, “and I know the moment I saw it that it’s my ring.”
Kennealy and her boyfriend exchanged their rings in 1962 as a sign of “going steady,” a common tradition in those days, Kennealy said. They married in 1964, when she was 18.
Storck said he liked the mystery involved in trying to return the ring, though there was also a moral principal to it.
“I think if someone found my ring,” he said, “I would hope they would try to return it.”
George Moore can be reached at gmoore@newbritainherald
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