Alabama wastewater workers clearing a clogged sewer main recovered a 1965 class ring and tracked down its owner decades later, a keepsake that still fit his finger.

Workers at the Sheffield Wastewater Plant pulled an old high school class ring from a clogged sewer main and handed it to operator Junior Riner. The ring carried the year 1965 and the initials OJM, and Riner set out to find who it belonged to.

UPI reported that the ring came from Burrell-Slater High School, a school for Black students in Florence, Ala., that closed amid integration in 1969. Riner posted about the find in a Facebook group for alumni, then waited.

Months passed with no solid lead. Then Riner’s son-in-law joined the search, found an online photo of Burrell-Slater graduates, and matched the initials to Oscar James Meredith.

A city council connection closed the last gap. The son-in-law’s father serves on the council and helped reach Meredith’s daughter, April Meredith Moore. She asked her father a simple question: had he ever lost a class ring?

Meredith had given the ring to his sweetheart

Meredith, now 79, said he had given the ring to Anna, his high school sweetheart. She later became his wife and Moore’s mother. Anna told him she lost the ring a few years before they married. She died a few years ago.

Riner traced the sewer line to a spot right across the street from Anna’s childhood home. The ring had likely gone down a sink years earlier and sat in the system until the clog brought it back up.

Riner met Meredith in person and handed the ring over. It still fit. Meredith said the return brought happy memories and that the ring would go in a display case at his house.

Local effort, not a government program

No task force found this ring. No agency ran a lost-property campaign. A plant operator, his crew, a son-in-law with a search habit, and a council member who knew how to reach a family did the work the old-fashioned way, ask around, check the record, make the call.

The ring sat in a sewer for decades. The people who pulled it out treated it like property that still belonged to someone, not trash to bag and forget. That is the part worth noticing.

In a country quick to outsource neighborly duty to offices and forms, a wastewater crew in Sheffield just returned a man’s class ring, and reminded everyone how much still gets done when ordinary people decide to finish the job.