Fifty-Three Years Later, a Class Ring Is Found

Strange object shines from the sands of Wellfleet beach

| By Amy Laskowski

Photo by Robert Katzeff

One warm day in the summer of 1957, Robert Katzeff was horsing around on the beach in Wellfleet, Massachusetts.

“I was with a girl and another couple on vacation,” Katzeff recalls. “I picked up a fistful of seaweed to throw at one of the girls — I was young and stupid — and the ring went with it into the water.”

His BU class ring disappeared in the surf, and the group searched in vain. Katzeff (DGE’52, COM’54,’58) was convinced that the ring was gone forever, and that conviction lived for fifty-three years.

Then in January, Katzeff was reading the latest Bostonia Extra newsletter, when he noticed a short item encouraging anyone who had lost a 1954 BU class ring on a Wellfeet beach to contact the Wellfleet police. “It’s almost by pure chance that I saw the notice,” he says.

The ring, Katzeff learned, had been found in January and turned in. After recovering it, he says, he tried to call the person who found it, but the phone number given to him by police was not in service. Katzeff sent a thank you note by mail.

“You read stories about this kind of thing,” he says. “I always thought they were all baloney, so I just wrote it off. I figured I would never see the ring again. I still can’t believe I have it back.”

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