Pic credit: Lance Ziesch
Kansas student lost his class ring during a snowball fight with his future wife: 53 years later, when campus workers dug it out, the couple happened to be passing through the city Jim Burkhart, a football player at DC3 in the early 1970s, lost the ring somewhere during the autumn of 1973. On August 7, Daemian Serna and Craig Mellecker, members of the DC3 grounds crew, were finishing up excavation work near the Administration Building when Serna spotted something shining in the soil. It had a little coyote on it and 1973. Not an old high school ring from 50 years ago!
Because of a childhood injury on his right, he wore the ring on his left hand.
“I was feeling a little ornery… and I threw a snowball at her with my left hand,” Burkhart said, according to a news release by the college. So, my interest was pretty piqued,” Serna said. “It said Kinsley High School. “Within an hour, he had a name and a story, and he got in contact with Jim right away,” Serna said. “You know, the ironic thing about the whole thing is, over the years, how many times we were in Dodge, and Marilyn would always bring up how we needed to go by the school and see if the ring was in the lost and found,” he said.
He was outside with Marilyn Crockett, the woman who would become his wife, and they were fooling around in the snow. Burkhart threw a snowball at her using his left hand, the same hand he wore his ring on. “She doesn’t remember if I hit her. I probably did. I had pretty good aim. Years passed by: more than half a century, to be precise. Burkhart went on with his life, and the ring remained submerged in layers of dirt. “I thought it was a gold hose clamp, which we don’t have. But once he brushed the soil off, he realised it was a ring. Then, I cleaned it a little more, and I saw two initials, one on each side, J and B. Craig right away looks over, and he goes, ‘Oh, somebody’s going to want that.’” After finishing their work, they called Kinsley High School. The find was quite rare for the workers, too. During their work, they stumble upon lots of things, but not something like this. “Usually, I just find old soda cans or trash in the dirt. Burkhart and his wife, Marilyn Crockett, were driving to Tulsa that same day they got the call.
In fact, they’d just visited Dodge City a week earlier, and during that visit, they’d talked once again about the missing ring.
The couple got married in 1976 while he was still a student. He worked in Kansas for 37 years, in different roles including teacher, coach, and administrator. Burkhart and Marilyn hadn’t initially dated as high school classmates. They’d started seeing each other the summer after graduation, just before enrolling at DC3 together. He studied general studies and played football. She worked towards a secretarial certificate. After his football career ended, Burkhart transferred to Emporia State and had a career in education. His work took them to Meriden, Deerfield, Mulvane, and, ultimately, Goddard. Marilyn worked in secretarial positions at many of the same schools. They raised two daughters and eventually settled in Goddard. They have four grandchildren now.
Jim Burkhart lost his class ring to a snowball fight in 1973, while he was a student at Dodge City Community College (DC3). He wasn’t alone when he lost it. Marilyn Crockett was there, the woman he’d throw a snowball at with his left hand, the hand the ring sat on. She was there when it vanished into the Kansas dirt. Fifty-three years later, when the phone call came, she was there again, sitting next to him in the car, this time as his wife. The irrigation workers unearthed the ring while they were repairing the ground.
