Surprise Homecoming: Class ring finds its way back to owner after 6 decades

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Deloris Whitlock (right) stands with Terry and George Blackert of Prophetstown on Wednesday evening outside the old Sterling theater. Whitlock found a class ring 60 years ago and finally found the owner, George, in October this year. (Chris Padgett/cpadgett@svnmail.com)

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ROCK FALLS – A class ring lost more than 60 years ago has found its way back to its owner’s finger.

Deloris Whitlock of Rock Falls was dating Donald Whitlock, the man she was destined to marry, when she found the ring outside the movie theater in Sterling in 1949.

She returned it to George Blackert of Prophetstown last month, more than 6 decades after it went missing.

“My wife, Terry, and I were going together at the time, and I had given it to her,” Blackert said. “She was wearing it on a chain around her neck, and the chain must have broken. Deloris must have found it the same night.”

She was in the right place at the right time.

“We had just gotten out of the car in front of the theater,” Deloris Whitlock said. “I looked down at the curb and saw a ring lying there.”

She showed the man’s class ring to her beau, tucked it into her pocket, and went inside to watch the movie. A few days later, she put an ad in the lost-and-found section of the Daily Gazette, but no one called to claim the ring.

She put it into her jewelry box, where it spent the next 60 years.

“I would come across it every now and then and wonder,” she said. “But the years go by so fast.

“One day after Donald died, I was looking through my jewelry box and saw the class ring. I thought, ‘Now I have time, and I’m going to look for the owner.’ I thought Donald would have liked that.

“I think I would have given up looking for the owner a long time ago, but Donald always wanted to get the ring back to him.”

The initials GB were engraved inside the band. That and the letter P and date – 1949 – on the decorative front were the clues she needed to begin her quest.

“Donald had said the ‘P’ probably stood for Prophetstown. I took it to my daughter, Theresa Collins in Sterling – she was her dad’s secretary in his business, D&W Heating and Air Conditioning – and she said we needed to go to Prophetstown to ask around,” Deloris said.

“No one could go with me, so I went alone. Pat at the library in Prophetstown got out the old high school yearbooks, but there was no 1949.”

Pat Stewart, head librarian at Henry C. Adams Memorial Library, called library clerk Pat Albrecht, whose late husband, John, had graduated from PHS the same year. In the 1949 yearbook, Albrecht found a boy whose initials matched those on the ring. George Blackert, John’s cousin, was the only boy in the graduating class with the initials GB.

“I think it’s really exciting,” Albrecht said. “Sixty years is a long time. To have lost something that long ago and to get it back is great. And to have it turn out to be my late husband’s cousin is really exciting.”

Stewart called the Blackerts and told them the story of the ring.

“And it was the right guy,” Whitlock said. “He said he and his wife, Terry, could be right there, so I waited for them.

“I didn’t want to just leave the ring after all that time. I wanted to see the expression on his face when he saw his class ring again after so many years. I lost one of my rings once, and I know what a relief it is to get it back. There is so much meaning to our rings.”

Blackert called the return “quite an experience.”

“So many years had passed that I had kind of forgotten about it,” he said. “I spent $20 on that ring, and back then that was a lot of money.

“When Pat Stewart at the library called, we were kind of excited, so we went right away. Deloris said if it hadn’t been for Pat, she probably never would have found me.”

The ring no longer fits Blackert’s finger, but it has made quite a stir in Prophetstown.

“Now I could probably get it on my finger, but I’d never get it off,” he said. “Terry served at a church luncheon last week, and she said probably 50 people asked her about it.

“She said if she had thought about it earlier, she would have worn it on a chain around her neck. But I won’t let her have it again,” he said with a laugh.

Terry lost the ring not once, but twice.

“It was so neat and so funny,” Stewart said. “Terry wanted to see the ring, and George said, ‘No, you’ll lose it.’ She said she wouldn’t, but the first thing she did was fumble it and drop it. It rolled under some shelves, and George had to get down on the floor to find it.”
 

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