As a child, Barbara Alldredge would leave little bits and pieces of jewelry around the house, misplacing them like young girls often do.

Her mother, a woman with an understated sense of humor - or perhaps discipline - would collect these various pieces of jewelry and put them on a high shelf to show her daughter that it's best to keep things in their proper place or lose them forever.

And so this mother-daughter game went on through the years until 1968 when Alldredge, then with her maiden name Carrigan, was a junior at Odessa High School with a shiny new class ring.

A class ring she soon lost.

And this time it wasn't her mother.

She bought a replacement for about $100, a replacement that sat on her finger until up through the first year or two of college, then, much to Alldredge's chagrin, it simply disappeared.

She searched for it everywhere, including her mother's shelf.

No dice. The ring seemed lost forever.

Or so it seemed.

Forty years later, a box arrived at Alldredge's Odessa home. In it was her ring and on it was a postmark from across the state.

She slipped it on her finger.

The ring had traveled hundreds of miles and took 40 years to come full circle.

"I thought, my goodness, who would return a ring," she said. "He must be a wonderful person."

A 40-YEAR ROAD

That "wonderful person" was Gary Little, a water treatment plant worker who now lives in Cleburne but who graduated from Snyder High School in 1982.

As a senior there 27 years ago, he said, he came across Alldredge's ring one day during a football game at the town's stadium.

"It was barely sticking up out of the dirt," he said. "It wasn't laying there in plain sight. I just spotted a part of it and pulled it out of the dirt."

After picking it up and examining it, Little said, he was surprised to discover that not only was it somebody's class ring, but it was a class ring from Odessa High, not Snyder High - and in excellent condition after about a decade in the mire under the bleachers.

He said it never occurred to him that he could sell the ring and make a quick buck.

"Who would want to buy a senior ring?" Little said. "Something like that belonged to somebody, and it probably meant something to them, so that never really crossed my mind, to tell you the truth."

Instead, he held on to it and called OHS to ask if they would help him find its rightful owner.

School officials told Little to mail them the ring, and they would take care of it, a prospect he didn't much like.

"I didn't feel comfortable doing that," he said, "so I held on to the ring with hopes of eventually contacting the owner of the ring."

As the years went on, Little said, he put the ring away somewhere and pretty much forgot about it, except for a few rare occasions when it would come up in conversations with his wife.

Every time the topic came up, he said, he would look for the ring but couldn't find it.

"Obviously I didn't lose it, because I had it, but I just couldn't remember where I put it," Little said. "We had moved several times, and I just couldn't locate the ring every time I told her the story."

Then, one day during the last month, Little was looking for some lenses for his sunglasses when he came across the ring.

"I went in to my wife and said, ‘Here's that class ring I told you about,'" he recalled. "She tallied up the years and said, ‘Well, that class will be having its 40-year reunion this year.'"

LORD OF THE RINGS

A quick online search by Little's wife for the class reunion put Gary in touch with Carol Medlock with the reunion's organizing committee.

Medlock, herself a 1969 OHS alumna, said she is no stranger to returning lost rings for her classmates.

In the past few months, she said, she has already returned another ring that had been missing for 40 years and is working with another person via e-mail to find Fred Stingley, another member of the class of 1969 who lost his ring the second week he owned it.

"It's been a big joy to be able to give these people back their class rings, because I have lost my own," she said.

She said she has tracked Stingley to Houston, but that's where the rabbit trail ended. She has yet find a phone number for the man who is on the reunion's list of missing persons.

But Medlock said she had barely any trouble at all returning Alldredge's ring.

As it turns out, the initials BPC have been familiar to her for quite some time.

"She and I were babies together, so we've known each other our entire lives," Medlock said. "I looked back on the list to be sure, and those were definitely her initials, nobody else's."

It wasn't long before Medlock arranged a telephone conversation between Little and Alldredge.

"I guess I had her ring for 27 years, and she only had it for one year," Little laughed.

Perhaps with a hint of modesty, he said the ring's 40-year trek back to its rightful owner was not a big deal, just a simple story of lost and found.

But it did feel nice to finally get it back to her, he said.

"It was a nice feeling," Little said. "I was glad to finally be able to reunite the ring with its owner. So it felt good."

Alldredge, looking at her prodigal ring - shiny and intact in her palm - said she's just thankful for Little's efforts and patience.

To this day, she cannot remember how the ring ended up at that stadium in Snyder.

"It's just crazy, isn't it?" she said. "Probably one of the most exciting things that's happened in a long time."

WANT TO HELP

>> Do you know the whereabouts or contact information for the 1969 OHS graduate Fred Stingley? If so, contact Carol Medlock at ohsmedlock69@yahoo.com.