Class ring comes full circle after almost 50 years, reunited with original owner
RICHMOND HEIGHTS, OHIO — Back in 1993 or 1994, Michele Widmann was shooting hoops with her son Anthony, then 15 or 16, at Richmond Heights Community Park when, in a high-grass area a few feet away from the basketball court, the boy saw something shiny.
“I don’t remember exactly what he said,” Widmann recalled. “I just remember something like, ‘What is that? Hey, Mom, it’s a ring.’ He handed it to me and I realized it was a class ring.”
What the teen found was a Richmond Heights High School Class of 1968 ring belonging to someone with the initials RP.
“I took it home and cleaned it and it looked great,” Widmann said.
Approximately 28 years later, the mystery surrounding the identity of that ring’s owner has been solved.
For the man who lost it, Richard (Rick) Piunno — still a Richmond Heights resident and now a grandfather of five — the mystery of what happened to his lost class ring also has been solved.
Shortly after finding the ring, Widmann, a former Richmond Heights resident who has lived the past several years in South Euclid, took it to Richmond Heights High School and spoke with an administrator, asking for help in finding the ring’s owner.
Widmann said she did not hear back from the school, so she put the ring in a box with other jewelry and forgot about it.
“In those days,” she said, “we didn’t have social media that could have helped me find the owner.”
But now there is Facebook, and Widmann — preparing for a move with her husband, David (also a Richmond Heights High graduate), to a Lake County home
— was going through her belongings and came upon the ring.
Widmann, a Brush High School graduate, put a posting on her Facebook page and on the RHHS alumni page, inquiring if she could get help in finding the ring’s owner.
She received a response first from Joe Sykora, a RHHS graduate now living in Brunswick, then from Richmond Heights resident Frank Erjavec. Sykora and Piunno are longtime friends of Richmond Heights Councilman Frank Lentine, also of the Class of ’68.
“My friend (Sykora) had called me and said, ‘That was your class, ’68,’” Lentine said. “And he said, ‘Who in your class has the initials of RP?’ Well, a dear friend of mine who I play golf with on Sundays, and I see him at least once a week or so, his name is Richard Piunno.
“So I looked in my yearbook and he was the only one who had those initials from my class. So my friend said, ‘Did he buy a class ring and did he lose it?’ I had no idea. I said, ‘Let me find out.’”
Lentine called Piunno and asked if he had bought a class ring. Piunno had. Lentine then asked his friend a question to which he already knew the answer — did he still have the ring?
“He (Piunno) said, ‘Frank, I lost that ring a long, long time ago,’” Lentine said. “(Piunno) said, ‘I can’t even remember when I lost it.’ He said, ‘I don’t have that ring anymore.’
“I told (Piunno), ‘I think I found it.’ He said, ‘You’ve got to be crazy. What are you talking about?’”
Lentine then revealed how the ring had been found nearly three decades ago — 20 years after it had been lost.
When asked what he was thinking when Lentine told him the ring had been found, Piunno said: “If you know me and Frank, we go back 50 years, so we drive one another crazy. We kid around and stuff like that. So I thought he was calling me to mess around and joke around. He kept asking me more questions about the ring; then I knew he was serious.”
“We played softball in the early ’70s,” Piunno said. “In between ’70 and ’73 is when I think I lost it. Over the years, when you lose something like that, it’s gone. I didn’t know where it was, so what could I do, you know? It was gone and I never thought about it anymore.
“It looks real good,” Piunno said of the ring.
“They found it in the grass, and I thought that something that the city cuts the grass with would have run over it. And nothing (was wrong with it). Maybe it could use a little bit of cleaning, but that was it.”
Erjavec put Widmann in touch with Piunno and the two arranged to meet.
“When she met me and gave (the ring) to me I said: ‘Oh my God, look at this thing. It’s still in pretty good shape.’”
Piunno is thankful for Widmann’s efforts, and said that the ring is now safely stored away in his safe.
Of the ring saga, Widmann said: “It’s taken on a life of its own. I’m glad he got his ring back and that we met. I made a new friend. He even knows some people I know.”
Widmann said she called her son, now living in Wooster, and told him that the ring’s owner had been found. Her son, she said, vaguely remembered finding the ring.
Being that Facebook has been around a few years, Widmann said: “I just wish I would have done this earlier. The best part of the story, though, is that he did get his ring back.”