Good Samaritan Returns 1973 Class Ring to Late Owner’s Family

A man with a metal detector returned a priceless piece of family history after stumbling upon a 50-year-old class ring buried in the ground.

Jim Winter, who goes by the name the Driftless Digger online, happened upon the class ring while metal detecting near the roots of a tree in an old churchyard in Arthur, Wisconsin, at the end of July, WMTV reported.

“It’s not very often where I dig something up and I’m just amazed and speechless. That one I was. It was about 2-3 inches under the ground, under a root, so I knew right away what it was,” he told the news station.

Winter saw that the 1973 Platteville High School class ring had the initials MEV etched on the inside of the ring and set off to track down the original owner by accessing an old yearbook from the University of Wisconsin-Platteville library, he said in a Facebook post about the discovery.

He found only two people in that graduating class with matching initials on the ring, and only one was a male student that the ring would have belonged to: Mike Vacha.

After identifying the lost ring’s suspected owner, Winters began to research Vacha online, he said in the post. “The only thing I really found was an obituary, so that made me really sad that he had already passed away 17 years ago,” he told the outlet. Winters found the man’s family and saw he left behind a wife and two children.

After unsuccessfully reaching out to the son over Facebook, he decided to pop over to the family’s house, and it was there he met Denise Vacha, Mike’s widow.

“I think he knows. I think he had something to do with it. I honestly do,” Denise Vacha told the news station. “He just put Jim in our way to help us. And what Jim does is amazing. This is about him and doing the right thing, and more people should do the right thing when given the chance.”

Vacha said Mike had grown up in the area where the ring was found. “And all the neighbor kids hung out here in front of the church, that used to be a school. So, this was an area they were of course always at, always doing something in,” she said.

She said the ring is important to their family, particularly for four of her five grandchildren who were never able to meet their grandfather. “Any part of him that comes through now means something because he’s not here, but this is,” she said.