Kailua High grad will get her ring back
The school keepsake was lost 38 years ago by Marine boyfriend in Vietnam
Associated Press
VENTURA, Calif. >> Kailua High School graduate Juli Marciel is getting her high school ring back -- 38 years after she thought it had been lost in a Vietnam rice paddy.
"All these years I thought it was lost and laying in Vietnam somewhere," Marciel, 55, told the Ventura County Star.
The ring's saga began in Hawaii in 1968, when Marciel gave it to her boyfriend, a young Marine named Dell Stedman, before he shipped out to Vietnam.
Their relationship fizzled and, the one time they saw each other after the war, Stedman told her he had lost the ring, which had a surfer on one side and the initials ëJRL' on the other. The nickname for Kailua High School teams is the Surfriders.
Marciel thought little about the ring or Stedman during the ensuing decades as she raised a family and became an attorney.
However, the ring had been found later in 1968 by a Marine sergeant named Dennis Smith, who spotted it on the ground after hopping out of a helicopter.
Smith slipped it onto the chain that held his dog tags and, many years later, placed it in a small display of his war mementos that he set up in his modest home in the tiny Northern California town of Weed.
A friend from Smith's veterans support group, Jerry Schumacher, asked about the ring two years ago and set out to find its original owner.
He got in touch with a member of the 1968 graduating class of Kailua High School who helped him figure out that it had belonged to Marciel, whose maiden name was Lacalle. But she had married and left the island, and nobody knew where she was.
A disc jockey in Hawaii broadcast the story along with a request that anyone with information call in.
An old acquaintance of Marciel's told her of the broadcast in March, when Marciel visited Oahu for the first time in almost 20 years.
She contacted the disc jockey, who put her on the air and told her about Smith, her ring's long journey and that Stedman had died of cancer in 1983.
Schumacher offered to send Marciel the ring, but she plans to drive to North California on the Memorial Day weekend to pick it up.
"It's dredged up an incredible amount of emotion," Marciel said. "All of these things that have been happening are for a reason, and I don't know what it is."
Smith wonders why he happened to look down at his boots and spot the ring nearly four decades ago.
"What are the odds of this happening?" he said. "Ask the great spirit; I don't know."