If any readers happen to be graduates of Tech High School in Memphis and have lost a senior class ring over the years, you might want to check out this auction on eBay.
It's not for a recent graduate — after all, that stately old school has been closed for years — and the ring is dated 1943, so whoever owned it may no longer be with us.
Still, it seems a shame that such a personal item ends up for sale, and I'd like to know two things: 1) Who owned it, and 2) How did they (or at least their ring) end up in Wichita, Kansas? Because that's where the seller lives.
The ring is 10 karat cold, and the design is quite fancy, with a rendering of the school facade, an oval spelling out "Memphis Technical High School," and if that wasn't clear enough, below that, "Memphis, TN" with all sorts of other shapes and colors and designs (gears, zig-zags, lightning bolts, and more). It's really fancy, that's for sure, but no stone, though. I guess they didn't have any space for one.
On one side of the main image is "19" and on the other side you have "43" so it doesn't take a Lauderdale — or a Tech High graduate — to figure out the date is 1943.
What does confuse me, though, are the rather large initials "E" and "N" cast into the sides of the ring. Now, in my day (and I'd rather not say what day, or even decade, that was) if you ordered a class ring, they would inscribe your initials inside the ring band. So all the rings were the same for that particular year, but each one had the owner's initials inside.
But these large initials are seemingly cast into the body of the ring, and that just doesn't make sense to me, since it seems it would involve making different rings for different people. I suppose it's possible the initials are somehow applied, in some metallurgical process that even the Lauderdales can't understand. Or heck, maybe they are just glued on.
The real question, of course, is who is (or was), the ring owner, E.N.? It may shock you to learn that the Lauderdale Library, a vast repository of all things related to Memphis, does not have a 1943 Tech High School yearbook. So it's not a simple matter of looking through the senior class photos and finding a student with those initials.
That's why I turn to you, readers, for help. And also because I wanted to show you how fancy school rings used to be. It was a Big Deal to buy one, a great source of pride to wear one, and I wonder if they matter so much these days. Many schools and colleges have stopped publishing yearbooks, because they were too expensive and nobody read them anyway. Have class rings met the same fate?