After 52 years a lost ring is found

Lenora Ann Stephens Steadman surely never thought she’s see her Sneads High School class ring again. It was lost in 1959, shortly after she graduated with the class of 1958.

She had given it to her boyfriend to wear, a young man who worked for Florida State Hospital. Back then, the hospital did laundry for employees. He had apparently stuck the ring in his pocket, forgotten it was there, and sent a bundle of clothes to the hospital laundry with the ring still in the pocket.

Fast forward 52 years, to a phone call Steadman got at her home in Fort White just before Christmas of 2011. Her old SHS science teacher, Tom Daniels, was on the line. He asked if her ring was missing. She told him it was. With that, he told her he knew where it was, and put 90-year-old Milton Mooneyham on the phone.

It turned out that Mooneyham had also worked at the hospital back when Steadman’s old sweetheart had been there, and he, too, had his laundry done there.

The ring had wound up in a bundle of clothes that Mooneyham brought home one day, never knowing that the object was inside. He and his wife had stored the clothes in a chest years ago. When they went searching in the chest for something else one day in late 2011, the ring fell out. Mooneyham then contacted Daniels in hopes that he might know who belonged to the initials “LAS” that he found inscribed in the band of the ring.

As it happened, Daniels had an idea, and an easy way to find out for sure. As fate would have it, Steadman had done something in 2008 that gave Daniels the clue he needed. In preparation for class reunion that year, Steadman had compiled a booklet for everyone. It included the names and numbers for as many students as she could find from the old class, including her own information. Daniels put in his call, and soon Steadman was on her way to Sneads to retrieve her ring. Mooneyham turned it over to her himself in a meeting at her sister’s house, glad to be part of reuniting Steadman with her ring. Steadman said she was grateful for the effort by Daniels and Mooneyham.

“Needless to say, this was an emotional time for me, partly because I could not let the boy know the ring had been found because he had passed away in 2003, but his sister was informed,” Steadman said in an e-mail about the experience. “I am very happy to have my 1958 Sneads High School ring back and be able to pass it on to my son or daughter. Thank you Mr. Daniels and Mr. Mooneyham.”

Steadman said that, although she comes home for family reunions every April, she couldn’t wait that long to get her ring back-she figures after 52 years that she’d waited long enough. So on Jan. 21, the 71-year-old left her house 35 miles west of Gainesville and made the extra three-hour journey. Her sisters, Bertha Holland and Jean Cunningham, and her brothers, Shorty and C.J., and their spouses can still look forward to another visit in April.

Daniels said he was happy to be part of putting the ring back on his one-time student’s finger.

And this isn’t the first time he has been a key player in such a reunion.

The other story may be even more amazing than the Steadman adventure.

Some years ago, back when his wife Evelyn was a 2nd-grade teacher at Sneads, some of her students found a Howard College (now Samford) class ring on the playground.

They turned it in to their teacher, and the Daniels couple went to work on the mystery. As it happened, a new music teacher had just started at Sneads, and he’d gone to Howard. The Daniels knew it couldn’t be his, because he was too young; the dates on the ring indicated that they were looking for an older man.

The music teacher took the ring to Howard on a visit to that area and pulled out an annual to study the names. He found the owner, and the ring was returned to him. He had quite a story to tell about how he lost it. The owner was in training at Graham Air Base in Marianna and somehow dropped the ring from the air while flying in a training exercise. It fell on the Sneads school campus, apparently, where it stayed until the children discovered it a few years later, after Graham Air Base had closed.