Two wastewater workers in Sheffield, Alabama, were clearing a clogged sewer main this fall when something glinted in the debris: a tarnished gold class ring. Engraved around its band were the words "Burrell-Slater High School," a school that educated Black students in nearby Florence until it closed in 1969 amid desegregation, according to an account from The Washington Post's Optimist feature, republished this week.
The ring made its way to Junior Riner, an operator at the Sheffield Wastewater Plant, who cleaned decades of grime off the band and found a class year and two faint initials etched inside.
I was able to get that it was the class of 1965. I cleaned the inside and saw there were initials there: OJM.
Junior Riner, Sheffield Wastewater Plant operator
Riner, 54, had a personal reason to chase down the owner: his own grandfather's 1922 class ring had been stolen from his parents' house years earlier, and he knew what it meant to lose that kind of keepsake for good. He posted on Burrell-Slater's alumni Facebook page asking if anyone recognized the initials and messaged former students directly, but the trail went cold for weeks.
The break came when Riner's son-in-law turned up an old photograph of Burrell-Slater's Class of 1965. One face matched the initials: Oscar James Meredith. "We matched the initials with Mr. Oscar," Riner said. A connection through a city council member's family led Riner to Meredith's daughter, April Meredith Moore, who called her 79-year-old father with an unusual question — had he ever lost a high school class ring?
He had. Meredith, who lives in Tuscumbia, about fifteen minutes from Florence, said he'd given the ring to his girlfriend, Anna, who later became his wife — and that she lost it years before they married. He told the paper he was floored to learn it had resurfaced nearly six decades later. He said he still meets regularly with several of his old Burrell-Slater classmates, and that looking at the ring now, he thinks not just of high school and Anna, but of the stranger who spent months trying to track him down.
Workers turning up decades-old class rings in sewer lines isn't unheard of — similar finds, some 50, 60, even 80 years old, surface periodically during pipe-cleaning jobs around the country. What made this one stand out, by Riner's own account, was simply refusing to give up until two scratched letters had a name attached to them again.