WARRENVILLE — Deryal Franklin plans to bake Pierre Van Fossen, who found the 1961 Leavelle McCampbell High School class ring she lost 55 years ago in Langley Pond, a cake as soon as the heat breaks a little.
"He wouldn't take any money," Franklin said, sitting in the cozy living room of the house her parents built more than 70 years ago and where she lives now. "I plan to make some cakes this week. It's just been so hot. I didn't want to heat up the kitchen."
Van Fossen found the ring the last Saturday in May, but the story begins in May 1960, when Franklin got the gold ring with a capital G, for Graniteville, set in the middle of a ruby-red stone during her junior year at Leavelle McCampbell High. The next month, she went waterskiing in Langley Pond.
"It had started raining. I was going to climb up in the boat, and when I did, the ring slid off," Franklin said. "I knew exactly where it was; but I couldn't dive that far, and I didn't know what was at the bottom."
Van Fossen didn't have to dive to the bottom to find the ring. He was fishing, casting lures from the edge of one of the sandbars that now stretch into the middle of the pond, which has been lowered for ongoing maintenance on the dam after a breach was discovered last fall.
"I was walking the bank with my rod and reel, pitching around the edges," said Van Fossen, who lives by Langley Pond. "The ring was sitting there as clear as day shining back at me. I bent down and picked it up, and it was in prefect condition."
Van Fossen's wife, Kim, was going to a barbecue that night hosted by a friend, Lois Smith, who had Leavelle McCampbell High School yearbooks from the early 1960s. Using the initials engraved inside the ring, she identified Franklin in the yearbook, and her friend's son, Troy, posted the information on a Facebook page for people from Graniteville.
Kim got a response within an hour, and Franklin had her ring back soon after.
Franklin's story had a familiar ring to Van Fossen, whose brother lost his Langley-Bath-Clearwater High School class ring in Langley Pond while cranking a motorboat. Someone with a metal detector found the ring near the boat ramp when the water level had been lowered for the winter, saw his brother's name inside and returned it.
Van Fossen wanted to pay it forward, too. "I thought I'd go ahead and pass it on," he said.
Franklin's ring is the third Van Fossen has found this year in the pond. The other two were wedding bands without any identifyiable marks.
"I've found a lot of stuff. I'm pretty much a local historian," Van Fossen said. "I collect native American artifacts, bottles. Anything 100 years old or older, it tends to find me, I like to think."
Franklin said she didn't fret when she lost the ring, although she figured her parents, who paid between $70 and $90 for it, as she recalls, might be upset.
"I said, 'Oh, heck,' but I didn't worry about it because I knew it was gone, and there wasn't anything I could do about it," she said.
Although Franklin said she had forgotten about it through the years, she's glad to have the ring, which looks as bright and shiny today as it did when she first got it in 1960.
"I don't get excited about anything," Franklin said. "I'm sort of laid back, but I was tickled to get it back and more tickled to find out that there are still honest people."
A native of Aiken, Larry Wood is a general assignment reporter. He joined the Aiken Standard in September 2014.