Lost 1968 Class Ring Found and Returned to Owner
This is a really neat story with a happy ending. Karen A. Shaffer graduated from Huntington High School in June 1968. Like most students she bought a class ring and had her initials engraved inside the band. Unfortunately, she lost the ring nearly four decades ago.
Recently an e-mail came into the Huntington School District’s website. “My brother who lives in Texas told me he found a girl's class ring many years ago,” wrote Dee Antonucci. “It was a ring from Huntington H.S., 1968, blue stone, initials KAS on inside of band.”
Mrs. Antonucci, who lives three blocks from the high school and has two children in the district, wrote that she had called someone in the district many months ago and left a message about the matter but was never contacted. “I'm sure it would be a perfect ‘homecoming’ if anyone has time to research these initials from an old yearbook.”
Well, as it turned out, someone did have the time to conduct such research. Fortunately, the annual commencement bulletins were handy and a quick inspection of the one from 1968 revealed there was only one senior with the initials KAS that year. The late night research continued with the latest copy of the Huntington High School alumni directory. There in the pages of that thick book was the name, address, phone number and some personal and professional information of Karen A. Shaffer.
Since Mrs. Antonucci’s e-mail was fielded late on a Friday night and the research into it wasn’t concluded until well past midnight, no attempt was made to contact Ms. Shaffer and discuss the ring that had gone missing so many years earlier. But, at about 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, a call was placed to Massachusetts and the clearly surprised Huntington alum learned about the high school memento she had lost so many years before.
At Huntington, Karen Shaffer was on the business and literary staffs of the yearbook and the literary staff of the school newspaper, then known as The Devil’s Mirror, serving as its exchange editor as a senior. She also participated in the school’s American Field Service chapter as a sophomore, junior and senior, sang in the chorus, played in the orchestra and took part in the intramural program for two years. As a junior and senior she was a member of Arista, a service club for girls.
In the years following her high school graduation, Karen Shaffer earned a Bachelor’s degree in English at Ithaca College in 1972 and a Master’s degree in education at the University of Pennsylvania in 1973. She then worked as a teacher for eight years before deciding it wasn’t a career for her. So, she returned to the classroom, this time at the Boston College Law School, where she obtained a JD in 1984. Since then she has worked at several law firms and is currently associate general counsel at Reed Elsevier Inc., a global provider of professional information and workflow solutions in the science, medical, legal, risk management, and business sectors based in Newton, MA.
The Huntington grad also got married. Together with her husband Richard Levy, she is the mother of two sons and a daughter. The family resides in Auburndale, MA.
Found on Scuba Excursion
Back to the missing ring; Ms. Antonucci’s brother, Barry Charletta, who graduated from Kings Park High School in 1973, has a fondness for scuba diving, an activity he pursued up and down Long Island’s north shore. He has a vague memory of finding the Huntington ring during a scuba diving excursion on the Long Island Sound.
“I began diving in the early 1980s,” Mr. Charletta said. “I seem to recall that I found the ring at the edge of a beach parking lot and dropped it into a pocket on my BC (buoyancy compensator) vest; from there it later went into my dive bag. I am sure I removed it from the dive bag while hosing off my equipment later that afternoon. I have a recollection of having stuck it on the end of my pinky finger so as not to lose it while cleaning the gear. I remember thinking at the time that I would eventually return it to Huntington High School when I ever got the chance.”
Ms. Shaffer has a sketchy recollection of the ring and losing it. “At this point, all I can remember is that I bought a class ring in high school, the rest is blank (such as losing it and where I may have lost it),” she wrote in an e-mail. “I used to go to the beach, so it is very possible that I lost it there, although I am speculating.”
But the ring had to be lost within the four year period following Ms. Shaffer’s high school graduation. “I have not lived in Huntington or on Long Island since the summer of 1972, although I still return to visit my mother,” Ms. Shaffer said.
Sat in the Sand
So it appears the ring rested in the sand for at least a decade before it was found by Mr. Charletta, who later attended college in Daytona Beach, FL, but never lost possession of the ring. “I was doing wind tunnel testing at Grumman at that time and I had very little free time, so the ring quickly left my thoughts,” he said. “I re-found the ring a few months ago amongst my drafting equipment. My wife and I moved to Texas from Long Island in 1994 and moved into a new house in 2005. The box in which I found the ring was then opened for the first time since it was packed in 1994. It was then that I asked my sister whether she could check through a 1968 Huntington High School yearbook. She took it from there.”
The ring found its way back to Huntington and Mrs. Antonucci handed it off one morning in the lobby of J. Taylor Finley Middle School to someone from the Huntington School District who has been in contact with Ms. Shaffer and who promptly mailed it to her in Massachusetts. When she tried it on last weekend, she found the ring still fit!
“I love stories with a happy ending,” said Mrs. Antonucci.
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