Jeffrey Lyon lost his 1980 Elmore High School class ring, above, a few years after he graduated. A few weeks ago, however, Arnie Beckendorf, of Fairmont, discovered the long-lost ring among his wife’s possessions.

Just about 40 years ago, Jeffrey Lyon lost his Elmore High School Class of 1980 class ring. The last class to graduate from Elmore.

Now, miraculously, he has the ring back.

“I was pretty shocked,” he said about getting notified that someone had his class ring and wanted to return it to him. “I really had not thought about it in years.”

Here is the story of the lost – and now found – ring.

A couple of years after he graduated from Elmore High School, Lyon was living in Blue Earth in an apartment that was above what is now the laundromat on West First Street/Leland Parkway.

“I was stupidly fooling around with the ring, like kids do,” Lyon says. “It flew out of my hand, bounced off a wall and went down a heat duct. I looked for it but could not find it. After a while, I pretty much wrote it off and forgot all about it.”

Now, 40 years later, Lyon got notified by Shar (Hulsebus) Stindtman, who works at Blue Earth Area Schools, that his ring had been found. Stindtman, coincidentally, was a member of the Elmore High School Class of ’78.

So who found the ring, and where has it been for the past 40 years?

Enter Arnie Beckendorf, of Fairmont. He found the ring. His wife, Judy Bryan, had passed away two weeks earlier, on Feb. 19.

“I was going through some of my wife Judy’s things,” Beckendorf says. “The ring was in one of her boxes.”

He thought it was probably hers, but she graduated from White Lake, South Dakota High School. Upon closer inspection, Beckendorf noticed it was from Elmore High School, with Class of 1980 on it and the initials JPL.

With no Elmore High School still around, he called Blue Earth Area and got in touch with Stindtman.

“She figured out the initials and who the ring belonged to,” Beckendorf says. “Then on Friday (Feb. 25) I got a call from Mr. Lyon.”

Lyon says he was happy to hear the ring had been found, but then Beckendorf asked him to identify it.

“I really could hardly remember the color of the stone or the size of the ring,” Lyon says with a laugh. “But I identified it well enough, I guess.”

Beckendorf was going to mail it to Lyon, but as it turns out, Lyon’s aunt, Ann Hanna, was in Fairmont at the time and she arranged to pick up the ring and she mailed it to her nephew.

The ring, by the way, is in almost perfect condition, with little to no wear and tear. Almost as if it had not been worn in 40 years.

So how did the class ring get out of the heat duct in Lyon’s Blue Earth apartment and into a box belonging to Judy Bryan of Fairmont?

That question could remain unanswered and a mystery forever.

Bryan was a reporter for the Fairmont Sentinel and the Fairmont Photo Press, among other jobs she had over the years.

“Judy was also a waitress at Shenanigans in Fairmont,” Beckendorf adds. “My best guess is she found it there, but that is only a guess.”

Lyon says he is just happy to get the ring back, but he would not mind finding out where it has been all these years.

As for Beckendorf, he is just happy he was able to get the ring back to its owner, but he does also wonder how it got out of the heat duct and into his home.

And, he is also taking some hope from this story. You see, he also lost his class ring – around 50 years ago.

“Yes, Ceylon High School Class of 1966,” Beckendorf says. “I was going to work and had the ring on the turn signal lever of my 1967 Ford Galaxy 500 convertible.”

He made a turn and was blinded by the morning sun and could not see and hit the ditch.

“I wasn’t hurt, but the ring must have flown off the lever,” he recalls. “I never did find it.”

But now he has a little bit of hope that it still might turn up, somehow, somewhere. Found and returned by someone just like him.