What’s lost is found

Seminole resident gets back lost class ring 53 years after losing it while stationed in Hawaii

By John Underwood / john@gulfcoastmedia.com
Posted 1/20/21

SEMINOLE, Alabama — Seminole resident Doyle Smith recently got something completely unexpected, but it was something that he had been hoping to find for more than 53 years.

On Dec. 4, he got …

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What’s lost is found

Seminole resident gets back lost class ring 53 years after losing it while stationed in Hawaii

Posted

SEMINOLE, Alabama — Seminole resident Doyle Smith recently got something completely unexpected, but it was something that he had been hoping to find for more than 53 years.

On Dec. 4, he got a call from his daughter, Laura Winkles in Georgia.

“She said, ’You’ll never guess what I’ve got that’s being sent to you,’” said Smith, now 73, a native of Atlanta who retired to the Seminole area with his wife Gladys in 1991. “I made several attempts, but I really had no idea.”

A 1965 graduate of East Atlanta High School, made famous a few years ago after being featured in the movie “Beautiful Minds,” in 1966 Smith received something in the mail that a lot of other 19-year-olds were receiving at the time, a draft card.

After going through basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, Smith anxiously awaited his orders of where he would be stationed.

“I thought sure I would be going to Vietnam,” he said. Instead, his orders were simply to report to APO (Armed Forces Post Office) with a zip code, 96558.

“I had no idea where that was, so I called up a buddy in the Army and he said, ‘Do you know where that is? You’re going to Hawaii!’”

A short time later, Smith shipped out, headed to Ford Island, Oahu, Hawaii, a strategic Army base smack in the middle of Pearl Harbor, the site where in 1941 Japanese planes took out the USS Arizona and propelled the United States into World War II.

More than 25 years later when Smith arrived on the Island, the base was still a strategic location being used by the Army, he said.

“Our job was to provide top-secret mapping locations for Vietnam and around Southeast Asia,” Smith said.

He would end up spending his entire tour of duty on Ford Island, but along the way he lost something precious to him, his 1965 class ring from East Atlanta High School.

“I had no idea at the time when or where I lost it,” he said. “I looked everywhere for it, but never was able to find it.”

Turns out, the ring never left the base’s barracks area and more than 53 years later, Smith received a package in the mail containing his old class ring.

Along with the ring, he received two letters explaining in detail how the ring was found and how it took nearly two decades to return the ring to its rightful owner.

“There were two envelopes in the package, one that said, ‘Open First,’ and one that said, ‘Open Second,” Smith said.

The first letter was from a man named Pat Appleton, a retired U.S. Navy veteran now living in Florida.

From July 2000 through August 2003, Appleton was stationed at Seal Team One, Advanced Seal Delivery Vehicle System, Ford Island, Hawaii.

Seal Team One was a prototype for moving Seals from a submarine to share underwater, Appleton said. During his tour he was promoted to chief master of arms for the whole command, working for the executive officer of Seal Team One Command for the rest of his tour until he retired in 2003.

“During that time, I was in charge of maintenance and cleaning of the buildings that we occupied on Ford Island on the west side of the air strip,” according to the letter.

During one of his clean ups of the grounds or field days, Appleton wrote, in amongst the paper wraps, cigarette butts and other trash, something caught his eye shining in the sun. He picked it up and discovered it was a 1965 class ring from East Atlanta High School.

“I tried to do some research on the internet, but with no luck,” he wrote. “I put it in my desk drawer at home until my retirement.”

He tried a few more times searching the internet for any information, but information was hard to come by since East Atlanta High School closed in 1995.

In 2010, Appleton wrote, he met Debbie Porter at the Tampa Bay Fossil Club in Florida and became close friends with her and her husband over the years.

Ten years later, in the summer of 2020, Appleton said, he found the ring in a drawer and tried to do some more research, but with no luck, so he reached out to his old friend who lives near Atlanta. With her help, he texted pictures of both sides of the ring to her and when he came to Florida for the winter this past year, he gave her the ring to help track down its owner.

Cut to letter No. 2.

“During the summer of 2020, I was recovering from surgery and Pat knows I love a good mystery, so he sent me photos of your ring to see if I could locate its owner,” said Porter in her letter to Smith.

Porter said she received the ring from Appleton in October of 2020 and while it was easy to locate East Atlanta High School, it was not so easy to locate all the students’ names. She did, however, have one thing to go by, the initials CDS on the inside of the ring.

“I started looking for you by accessing a number of (Facebook) pages for lost rings,” she said. “One of those pages lead me to a private investigator.”

She gave the investigator all the information, including the school, the year and the initials inside the ring.

“He was able to isolate several men who we thought it could be and he sent me dozens of phone numbers of relatives of the men,” she said.

One of those numbers was a woman named Helen Farmer, who picked up while Porter was leaving a message on the phone.

Farmer knew all about the ring, where it was lost and what the initials inside the ring stood for, Colin Doyle Smith, her ex-husband. Farmer put Porter in touch with Smith’s daughter, who then called Smith to say that the ring had been found.

“I was just so thrilled and amazed that these two individuals would go to such lengths to find me after all these years,” he said. “When I told her the story, a nurse that came to the house said I needed to play the lottery because I must be the luckiest person alive.”

But, Smith said, he thinks his pastor put it best.

“He said it gives you hope for humanity,” he said. “It restores your faith that there are still good people in this world and I certainly believe that.”