On Saturdays, this blog celebrates heroes, good news stories, or good deeds. Today is about a good person of the week and his good deed in reuniting family with a class ring lost over 50 years ago. Kudos to Dale Chasse, who found it and tried various ways to track down its owner. There's a twist there, too.
ENFIELD, Maine — A man from Howland who has a hobby of metal detecting recently made a special discovery. Dale Chasse spent a recent day at Cold Stream Pond in Enfield with his metal detector.
“I thought, you know what, I’m going to try to get in the lakes. Man — I found a lot of stuff in the lakes. I got this nice low tone, and that’s what gold rings up and, I mean, it was solid. So, I took my sand scoop, dug down about a foot and was sifting it out and I looked in the thing and there was a ring," Chasse said.
When he looked closer, he discovered it was a 10-karat gold class ring from 1971. He also found an inscription and started doing some internet sleuthing to try and find the owner.
“I started trying to find somebody with the initials T.M. from 1971 that went to Schenck High School," he said. "So I went to classmates.com, but I wasn’t going to pay. It’s a paid site, but I just happened to notice there was a couple of random names there and hers was one of the names, Tawndra Merrill. And so, when I Googled Tawndra Merrill, her obituary came up. She was valedictorian, 1971 Schenck High School. I said, 'This has got to be her ring,' and I found her sister, Shelly Joe Merrill, and I found she had one daughter, whose name is Melissa. So immediately I went to Facebook and so I reached out to both of them with a message," Chasse said.
He said he didn't hear anything for a month until a message suddenly popped up Saturday night.
"For me, it’s fascinating to think that this man who didn’t have any connection to somebody who finds this ring is like, 'I want to find the owner' and then is also able to do so. It was such, I feel like, not a lot to go on," Melissa Haynes, Tawndra’s daughter, said.
Chasse called Merrill to find out more about the ring.
"I called her, she picked right up, and, you know, we were just conversing. I was telling her the story of how I found it, and I asked her, 'When did she lose this?' And she said, ‘She lost that in 1970.' For 53 or 54 years, that ring has been in the lake," Chasse said.
Chasse has mailed the ring to Melissa, who now lives in New Hampshire.
WATCH VIDEO INTERVIEW: https://www.wabi.tv/2024/04/17/howland-metal-detectorist-finds-returns-ring-lost-1970/
“When I was in high school, and you could order a class ring, it was like different, that like you just really didn’t do that, and I remember her a couple times being like 'Don’t you want one? Do you want one? Don’t you want one?' and I was like, 'No, nobody gets a class ring. Were you living vicariously through me, is that what’s going on?'" Haynes said.
Both Chasse and Haynes said this story is about doing the right thing and spreading goodwill.
"When you get a chance to do something like that and make somebody’s day, it makes it all worth it," Chasse said.
"It spreads joy and love because you’re making these connections that I don’t think you always recognize and realize and those are the things that help you move forward and feel good about things when they’re either not there or when you don’t realize you need that in that moment," Haynes said.
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