A Wisconsin woman who misplaced her high school class ring on a class trip to Germany in 1986 was reunited with it 35 years later.
Amy Wildman, a sophomore at Wisconsin Heights High School in Mazomanie, said she lost her class ring on a class trip to Germany in 1986.
“I was lifting my glass up to drink and realized that my ring was gone. And then it was complete panic,” Wildman told WKOW-TV. “I didn’t ever, ever expect to see it again.”
Bev Whalen, a Wisconsin Heights School District employee, stated that officials were recently approached by Daniela Schmidt-Mueller of Munich, Germany.
Schmidt-Mueller claimed that she discovered a ring at a train station in 1988 but was unable to read the inscription. She said that her children recently re-examined the ring and were able to connect it to the kindergarten.
“So the first thing we did, is we went to the yearbook of that year to find out who would have graduated in 1988. And that’s kind of where we started and we knew that the name was Amy, so those were the two clues we had of the ring, the year and the name,” Whalen said.
She said Wildman, whose last name was Ayers before she got married, was originally skipped over in the search because her name was spelled “Amiee” in the school yearbook.
Whalen said one of the other Amys contacted by officials pointed them in Wildman’s direction.
“I called up my mom right away and told her that she was not going to believe this in a million years,” Wildman said. “And then my family, when we got the ring, we went out to dinner and celebrated.”
The ring, according to Wildman, appeared in the mail after four months of postal delays.
After a much longer period of time, a Connecticut man was recently reunited with his own class ring. Dan Hoey misplaced his Xavier High School Class of 1983 ring in 1982 while visiting Misquamicut Beach in Rhode Island.
Nancy Hedman, who now lives in Tallahassee, Fla., discovered Hoey’s ring in a box in her attic and reunited him with it. Hedman had served as a nurse at the Rhode Island beach, and the lost and find was discovered in her medical station.
“The only thing I can think of is someone found it in the water or the sand and brought it to the first aid station. I don’t remember seeing it or receiving it, but it ended up in the lost and found stuff,” Hedman said.