SCUA staff pride ourselves on responding quickly to reference questions.  Usually, our patrons request a simple piece of information, but in September 2024, we were presented with a mystery to solve.

Sue Lamm-Gurley, an Air Force Nurse Corps Vietnam veteran, whose story is part of the Women Veterans Historical Project, contacted Beth Ann Koelsch about a Woman’s College (now UNCG) Class of 1962 school ring. It was found on campus in the 1980s by Carl Norris, a Marine Corps Vietnam veteran who, with Lamm-Gurley, is a member of the VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) Post 10607 in Burlington, North Carolina.

In the mid-1980s, UNCG hired Carl Norris’s company to widen North Drive on the UNCG campus. One of his employees found the ring in a drainage ditch and wanted to give it to his wife. Norris paid this worker $20 for the ring and he intended to find its rightful owner. The side of the ring noted it was from the class of 1962 and there were engraved initials inside the ring, but Norris could not decipher the cursive letters. He placed the ring in his business cash box to deal with another day, eventually forgetting it, and the box was moved to his attic when he retired. 

Recently, Norris rediscovered the cashbox in his attic. Knowing that she did metal-detecting, he told Sue about the ring and asked if she could find the ring’s original owner. In June, Sue contacted Beth Ann and asked if the alumna could be identified. As there were 360 WC graduates in 1962, Beth Ann told her that was not possible without more information. Norris later decided to donate the ring to the SCUA University Artifacts Collection. In September 2024, Sue and Beth Ann met at the Shell gas station in Burlington, N.C. and Sue officially transferred the ring.

On her return to campus, Beth Ann showed the ring to her colleagues who were all determined to decipher the engraved initials. The cursive font is a very elaborate and difficult to read. SCUA staff easily determined the first letter was “H” and the second letter was “C”, but the third letter was difficult to read as the engraving had been scuffed. “G” or, “S”, “T” and “Y” were the best guesses. Beth Ann conducted some preliminary research by reviewing a copy of the 1962 Pine Needles Yearbook from the Archives and looked for a name beginning with “H” and “C.” She found a promising lead with Helen Cordelia Shore of Winston-Salem, N.C. With this information, Beth Ann searched through a copy of the UNCG Alumni Directory and found that Helen’s married name was “Cordell” and that, at least in 2008, she resided in Florida. For her directory listing Helen wrote for her “most impactful course/activity” were “art courses.” Because according to the 1962 yearbook, Cordell earned a B.F.A. in Art, Beth Ann thought she might be on the right track. The last step was an internet search for Helen Shore in Florida, and, voilà, there was a listing with the same address and a phone number. Koelsch made the call and was quite surprised when Helen answered the phone! It was indeed her class ring!

Even though it was 62 years ago, Helen remembers exactly what happened on that fateful day during which she lost her newly purchased class ring for which she paid $26, and had only owned it for a few weeks, presumably forever. She went to “the Corner” on Tate Street to work with a lettering machine. (An example of a lettering machine can be seen HERE)

Helen had difficulty working on the machine with a ring, so she removed it from her finger and stored it in a pocket of the work shirt she had draped over the back of the chair. After she was done, she slung the shirt over her shoulder as she walked back to Ragsdale Hall Dormitory. Only later did she realize that the ring had fallen out of the pocket. Retracing her steps did not prove successful.

Helen next made her way to Elliott Hall Student Center (Now the EUC), where a friend of hers was working at the desk where the “lost and found” was located. She asked her if a 1962 class ring had been turned in. It had! However, this ring was engraved with a different set of initials. It wasn’t her ring. Much to her later shame, Helen claimed that lost and found ring.

She has felt very guilty about the ring in her possession and even took it to her jeweler to see if he could decipher the engraved initials.  He was unsuccessful. However, once reunited with her own ring, Helen sent the ring she had been wearing for decades to SCUA. We are pretty confident that the initials are “PEH”, but this case is proving more difficult to solve. We are not giving up, however, and hopefully that ring will be reunited with the original owner too!

Helen sent us a photograph of her wearing her ring. She also connected with Carl Norris and thanked him for his efforts. During their conversation, Helen learned that both Norris and Helen’s first husband served in the U.S. Marine Corps.