Two Escalon High School class rings lost. Two found. Two reunited with owners.
The path that the pair of rings took – one was simply lost, one was stolen – came full circle on Saturday at the Escalon Historical Society Museum on Main Street, as the second ring was returned to its grateful owner.
A strange twisting, turning tale, Escalon High School teacher and coach Roger Beeman had lost his Class of ’76 ring shortly after receiving the prized piece of hardware during his high school days. Last fall, after nearly 40 years, his ring was found.
“It was found on a service road, somewhere in Merced County, it was found almost 40 years from when I lost it,” Beeman said.
That got him thinking about another Escalon class ring, one that had been given to him at a track meet a few years ago by friends in Hughson.
“He works for MID and found it along one of the canal banks in the Waterford or Hughson area, he saw it as an Escalon ring and gave it to me,” Beeman said of his friend passing along the Class of ’68 EHS ring to him.
Beeman said he asked around about the ring after it was given to him, did some checking at the high school, even passed it on to the Journalism class in hopes they could dig up information about the owner.
Leads dried up, though, so Beeman tossed the ring into a kitchen drawer.
Until he got his own ring back. That started him, again, wanting to find the rightful owner of the one in his possession.
He took it to the Historical Society and from there, society members got busy.
David Marino said he used the initials – which he perceived as ‘C.C.’ (a middle initial appeared to be a ‘J’ or ‘I’ – and dug out the high school yearbook for that era.
“The only ‘C.C.’ I found was Carolynn Curci,” Marino explained.
Using the Internet, he was able to discover she was not too far away – Waterford, to be exact – and he was able to track down a phone number, call her and report that her EHS Class of ‘68 ring was safe and sound.
“It was stolen,” Carolynn I. (Curci) Troedson said when reunited with the ring on Saturday morning. “September 30, 2001, we were in church, we live on a corner lot in Waterford and they cleaned us out, they got my husband’s guns, they got vehicles, my jewelry.”
Some of the items were eventually found and returned following the burglary, but the ring never did turn up.
Until it was found on a canal bank.
Still living in Waterford, Carolynn was excited to get the ring back and eager to hear Beeman’s story about his own ‘ring reunion.’
Marino said others at the museum had been involved in putting information about the ring out on Facebook and helped get to the solution, and several people were on hand Saturday for the reunion.