Kansas student lost his class ring during a snowball fight with his future wife: 53 years later, when campus workers dug it out, the couple happened to be passing through the cityWhat are the odds of finding something lost for 53 years? Very slim. Now imagine it being discovered when its owner was driving through the same city, with the same person involved in the half-century-old incident, on the same stretch of highway. At some point, the coincidences start to feel almost impossible. And yet, that’s exactly what happened.Jim Burkhart lost his class ring to a snowball fight in 1973, while he was a student at Dodge City Community College (DC3). He wasn’t alone when he lost it. Marilyn Crockett was there, the woman he’d throw a snowball at with his left hand, the hand the ring sat on. She was there when it vanished into the Kansas dirt. Fifty-three years later, when the phone call came, she was there again, sitting next to him in the car, this time as his wife. The irrigation workers unearthed the ring while they were repairing the ground.This lost-and-found story gets so much better that, if you tried to pitch it as fiction, a filmmaker might send it back with a note: ‘Too many coincidences. The audience won’t buy it.’
The ring lost in the 1970s
Pic credit: Lance Ziesch
Jim Burkhart, a football player at DC3 in the early 1970s, lost the ring somewhere during the autumn of 1973. He was outside with Marilyn Crockett, the woman who would become his wife, and they were fooling around in the snow. Burkhart threw a snowball at her using his left hand, the same hand he wore his ring on. “I was feeling a little ornery… and I threw a snowball at her with my left hand,” Burkhart said, according to a news release by the college. He wore the ring on his left hand because of a childhood injury on his right. “She doesn’t remember if I hit her. I probably did. I had pretty good aim.”Whether or not the snowball reached the target, the ring surely flew off with the snowball. They searched the surrounding area. “We went back, looked a couple of times, and never did find the ring. And we would always kid about it. But yeah, we lost it that day,” he recalled. After the search turned up nothing, the couple moved on with their lives.
Campus workers unearth the ring
Years passed by: more than half a century, to be precise. Burkhart went on with his life, and the ring remained submerged in layers of dirt. On August 7, Daemian Serna and Craig Mellecker, members of the DC3 grounds crew, were finishing up excavation work near the Administration Building when Serna spotted something shining in the soil. “I thought it was a gold hose clamp, which we don’t have. So, my interest was pretty piqued,” Serna said. But once he brushed the soil off, he realised it was a ring. “It said Kinsley High School. It had a little coyote on it and 1973. Then, I cleaned it a little more, and I saw two initials, one on each side, J and B. Craig right away looks over, and he goes, ‘Oh, somebody’s going to want that.’”After finishing their work, they called Kinsley High School. “Within an hour, he had a name and a story, and he got in contact with Jim right away,” Serna said. The find was quite rare for the workers, too. During their work, they stumble upon lots of things, but not something like this. “Usually, I just find old soda cans or trash in the dirt. Not an old high school ring from 50 years ago!”
The heartfelt reunion
Pic credit: Lance Ziesch
Burkhart and his wife, Marilyn Crockett, were driving to Tulsa that same day they got the call. In fact, they’d just visited Dodge City a week earlier, and during that visit, they’d talked once again about the missing ring. “You know, the ironic thing about the whole thing is, over the years, how many times we were in Dodge, and Marilyn would always bring up how we needed to go by the school and see if the ring was in the lost and found,” he said.Somewhere on the road, Burkhart’s phone rang, with a woman on the other end asking if he’d lost a class ring on the college campus back in 1973. “I said, ‘Yeah, in 1973. I sure did.’ She said, ‘Well, they found it!’”For Serna, too, the whole incident was ‘kind of surreal’. “When we took him down to the quad, he went exactly where he remembered, and it was practically right there where we found it,” Serna said. “It’s really cool. It’s really movie-esque. It’s something you hear about in movies or on the news, not something you actually run into in real life!”
Pic credit: Lance Ziesch
About the couple
Burkhart and Marilyn hadn’t initially dated as high school classmates. They’d started seeing each other the summer after graduation, just before enrolling at DC3 together. He studied general studies and played football. She worked towards a secretarial certificate. After his football career ended, Burkhart transferred to Emporia State and had a career in education. The couple got married in 1976 while he was still a student. He worked in Kansas for 37 years, in different roles including teacher, coach, and administrator. His work took them to Meriden, Deerfield, Mulvane, and, ultimately, Goddard. Marilyn worked in secretarial positions at many of the same schools. They raised two daughters and eventually settled in Goddard. They have four grandchildren now.Over the years, the lost ring became a favourite story retold during Thanksgiving and family dinners. And just like that, life came full circle for Burkhart and his wife when the ring was found. Marilyn said she planned to take the ring to a jewellery store to have it cleaned up properly—a ring that had survived in the Kansas soil through seasons and years that neither of them would have predicted when that snowball went flying through the air. “I’m going to take it to them and say, ‘You’re not going to believe this!’” she said.