Ring returned to C-H grad after 38 years
Carol Gloady’s 1979 class ring is adorned with a likeness of Chartiers-Houston High School and the year of her graduation.
Wesley Yeater returns Carol Gloady’s class ring 38 years after it was lost near his Chartiers Township home.
In 1978, Carol Gloady’s mother bought her a gold class ring with a center stone the maroon of Chartiers-Houston Buccaneers pride.
The year before, Gloady’s boyfriend, John Macik, gave her his class ring, which the junior wore with a strip of angora wrapped around the band to fit her smaller finger. At night, she would hide it in an Avon box, aware that her mother, Betty, didn’t approve of high school students exchanging class rings with their sweethearts.
But three days after getting her ring, Gloady reciprocated the gesture, presenting it to Macik, who wore it on a chain around his neck.
“He was just chomping at the bit for me to give it,” she said.
One night while preparing dinner, Betty asked her daughter where the ring was.
“I told her and she said, ‘I didn’t buy that ring for him. I bought it for you.’ That night, he called and I told him I needed it back. He said, ‘There’s a problem. I lost it.'”
“It was such a big deal back then. Everybody had one,” said Gloady. “Just knowing that I lost it … it was the one thing I did that disobeyed my mother.”
Macik was riding his motorcycle through the undeveloped fields of Chartiers Township when the necklace holding Gloady’s ring broke. He searched the area, but didn’t find it. And though Macik would later replace it with a diamond engagement ring, the class ring was thought to be lost forever – until Monday.
On that day, Wesley Yeater was digging in his garden on Allison Hollow Road, Chartiers Township, when he saw a red hue.
“I’ve tilled (the garden) five times. Monday night, I was using a hoe and turned over this ring,” said Yeater, who purchased the five-acre property and built a house there in 2011. “I don’t know how that happened.”
Yeater posted on social media to see if he could locate the owner of the ring, which bears the date ‘1979’ (Gloady’s graduation year) and is inscribed inside with ‘CAG’ (Gloady’s initials).
The post received over 500 shares, some from high school friends who remember the story of the lost ring. Gloady’s sister, Elizabeth Bruckner, also saw the post and contacted Yeater.
On Wednesday night, the sisters went to his home, where the Yeater family returned the treasure.
“It was the most exciting thing I’ve done in a long time. It ranked right up there with childbirth,” said Gloady, who works as a bank manager. “It’s, like, the best feeling.”
The ring is in perfect condition and though it’s a little snug, Gloady plans to have it cleaned and resized.
“And I’ll probably never take it off again,” she said.