"Missing Class Ring Finds Its Way Back To Owner"

 an article from
The Spring Hope Enterprise
Thursday, March 18, 2010 

Ellen Rose Mills Jones
CCSAA  
* 1st President (1974) *

     An area woman has been reunited with her long lost high school class ring.
     Rose Mills Jones, who last saw her Spaulding High School Class of 1955 ring back in the late 1950s, got it back last Saturday.
     When reached by telephone Tuesday and asked if the ring’s return made her happy, Jones was as excited as a kid at Christmas. “It did, it did,” she laughed. “Is that not wonderful?”
     Last December, the Enterprise ran a short notice in the People You Know section asking for help in finding the owner of an old class ring.
     Jim Kea, who lives in “Little” Washington, said he had what he thought was a 1955 Spring Hope High School ring with the initials E.R.M. inside.
    Kea, who grew up in Rocky Mount, said the ring was found in the yard of his parents’ house near a brick walkway back in 1958 or 59.
     “I still have no idea how it got there,” Kea said. “The ring had an “S” on it and we thought it might have been a Spring Hope ring.”
     The ring then went into his mother’s jewelry box and remained there until his parents died in 2005. Kea rediscovered it when he was cleaning out his parents’ house.
     He wondered for years if he would be able to find the owner.
     “Then last year, I started looking around a little bit and found your paper,” Kea said Tuesday. “You guys ran the little blurb about it for us and started hoping. That’s when the ball really got rolling.”
     Kea said he got up with Matilda Turner, who was in the Spring Hope High School Class of 1955. Turner, who lives in New Jersey, found that two people in her class had those initials: one in Nashville and one in Florida. But the ring did not belong to either of those people.
     “I found out, in the meantime, that Spring Hope rings had black onyx stones. This one had a red stone with the letter S in it,” Kea said. 
     He was then told about Spaulding High and got in touch with Herff Jones, the class ring company. A person there did some research and told him it was probably a Spaulding ring.
     Kea then met with Mark Strickland with Nash-Rocky Mount Schools. Strickland hooked him up with Bill Newkirk, Director of the Spaulding Family Resource Center.
     “Bill is the one who found Ellen Rose Mills Jones and she said it was her ring,” Kea said. “When I talked with Rose she told me that she got married in 1960 and had given the ring to her mother a couple of years then and that the ring must have grown legs and wandered off.”
      Jones told Kea that people were in and out of her mother’s house all the time and figured it had been stolen.
     Kea mailed it to Jones and after she got it she called Kea to thank him. “She was so excited,” he said. “She said it was just like the day she first got it.”
     “Talking about it was one thing, but getting it in my hand is another thing,” Jones said. “It’s amazing, amusing, and confusing how it all came about. It’s wonderful.”
     Jones, who lives between Sims and Wilson, said she took the ring to church and showed it off just to prove that she did graduate and did have a class ring.
     “The ring fits, believe it or not,” she said. “It fits perfect.”
     “I think I got as much joy out of it as she did,” Kea said. “It was like giving someone a present they didn’t expect. This is one of those little pleasures in life.”
     Jones said she is going to send Kea a gift card. “I want him and his wife to go out to dinner on me,” she said. “So many people would not have gone to so much trouble. He seems to be a very nice man and I want him to know how much I appreciate him.”

By KEN MURCHISON