Donna Ford of Williams Lake is hoping to solve a mystery.
Several years ago she found a grad ring while raking the reeds at her Signal Point Road home on Williams Lake.
The ring bears the insignia of the 1962 class of the Boys High School in Brooklyn, N.Y. It is solid gold with a synthetic ruby. The initials J.A.R. are hand engraved on the inside, although the J is pretty worn and could be a G.
“I was up to my ankles raking the weeds so we could swim when I found the ring,” Ford said. “I asked around to see if anyone knew someone who had gone to the school from Williams Lake but no one did.”
Ford even called the school in Brooklyn but wasn’t able to find anything more than the fact the school had merged with a girls school in 1975 and moved to a different location from where it was first erected in 1891.
Eventually she tucked the ring away and forgot about it.
This summer, however, Ford attended her 50th high school reunion and afterwards she became interested in the ring again and decided to make some inquiries.
“I’m hoping someone will know something,” she told the Tribune.
When asked if she’d cleaned the ring recently she said it was exactly as she’d found it.
“It was so clean from being in the lake.”
The Fords built their home in 1975 on land previously owned by Roderick Mackenzie that hadn’t been developed.
“It was basically bush,” she said.
Built from 1891-92 in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, the four-story Boys’ High School could accomodate 782 students in 22 classrooms.
Some of the famous people who graduated from the Boys High School were Isaac Asimov, Howard Cosell, Norman Mailer and Abraham Maslow.