When Jan Faircloth graduated from Peabody’s Bishop Fenwick High School in 1971, she ordered a class ring as a keepsake. It was a yellow-golden stone set in a thick gold band, and she gave it to her boyfriend, who looped it onto his key chain.
But shortly after, he lost the set of keys, and with them, her ring.
For 45-plus years, there was no trace of the ring, not behind a couch or stashed in a drawer. The Peabody woman, who now goes by Jan Faircloth Kentros, assumed it was gone forever.
“Never, in my wildest dreams, did I ever think it would turn up,’’ she said.
But then, more than four decades after it was lost, Faircloth Kentros got a call from her alma mater.
They had a class ring from 1971, bearing the engraving of her initials, and they thought it might belong to her.
Last week, she drove to the Catholic high school and saw her long-lost ring for the first time since she was a lovestruck senior.
“I was just shocked,’’ Faircloth Kentros, 63, said. “It’s in really good shape. It was amazing to me that they would find it.’’
Someone had found the ring in the middle of the athletic track behind the school, and turned it in to the lost and found.
Fenwick staffers grabbed a 1971 class yearbook and searched the names of senior girls, hoping to match a name with the initials engraved inside the ring. They found Faircloth Kentros.
She was gobsmacked.
The athletic track where the ring turned up wasn’t even built when she graduated. The area has been dug up and remodeled since her time there. She doesn’t know how it appeared in the middle of the track, detached from the keys, she said. She speculates that a bird or animal may have dug it up and carried it after it was lost on the property.
Faircloth Kentros, who put the ring on her finger for the first time in more than 45 years, wasn’t the only one excited about the find.
“My then-boyfriend was very happy that we found the ring,’’ she said.
That old boyfriend, John, has been her husband for the past 42 years.
Amanda Hoover can be reached at amanda.hoover@globe.com.
