The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
LOST AND FOUND
1968 class ring returned to owner after 50 years through a social media search
She tossed the ring in her jewelry box, where it remained for over the next 20 years.
Richard Piunno, a 1968 alumnus of Richmond Heights High School, lost his commemorative class ring in the early 1970s while enjoying the Richmond Heights Community Park one afternoon. Once he realized it was gone, he assumed he would never see it again. To his surprise, he got a phone call in mid-March from his friend and fellow 1968 Richmond Heights graduate Frank Lentine, who told him that there was a Facebook post going around searching for the owner of a class ring from 1968 with the initials “R.P.” — which, of course, match up perfectly.
“When he called me, you know, me and him, we fool around with one another quite a bit,” Piunno said, “But he calls me up, and I figured this is another one of his jokes — I thought, what’s he screwing with me for? And he said, ‘no, I’m serious.’” Michele Capretta Widmann, a Richmond Heights resident during the 1990s, said she was playing basketball in the community park with her teenage son in either 1994 or 1995, when something in the grass caught her son’s eye. He ran over to grab it, and found a class ring covered in dirt. Upon realizing it was from a graduating class over two decades before they found it, they were astonished at the good condition it was in. “That’s what we can’t figure out, how it didn’t get mangled by tractors or a lawnmower or something,” Widmann said. Widmann said she tried to locate the ring’s owner shortly after finding it — she reached out to the high school’s administration to see if they could track the original owner down, but did not have any luck. She said she was not sure where to continue looking at that point, since social media did not exist yet. She tossed the ring in her jewelry box, where it remained for over the next 20 years. When Widmann stumbled upon the ring again in March while cleaning out the box in preparation for moving, she decided to give one more try to tracking down the owner — this time using Facebook to get the word out. Widmann said she was not initially sure what would come of putting the search out on social media, but that she “never in a million years” could have imagined it taking off the way it did. Joe Sykora, another Richmond Heights High alumnus, spotted the post and decided to give Lentine a call to see if he had any idea whose it could be. “He asked me if I knew of anybody in the class that had those initials, and I said the only one I know is my good buddy, Rick Piunno,” Lentine explained. Lentine, a city councilman who owns the Styling Den Barber Shop in Richmond Heights, happened to be in the shop with another longtime friend, Frank Erjavec, when the call came in. Erjavec suggested that they double-check the 1968 high school yearbook to see who had the initials “R.P.” “Rick Piunno was the only one, so we came to the conclusion that it had to be him,” Erjavec said. From there, calls and connections were made, and Widmann was able to meet up with Piunno to give him back his class ring, still in good condition — 50 years from when he lost it.