Alum Reunited with Long-Lost Class Ring

by Sala Levin ’10 | Photos courtesy of Wilson Murphy

How and when Charles Grier ’54 was separated from his University of Maryland class ring is … well, not entirely clear. Was it stolen, and stolen again? Was it lost during a move to Texas? Whatever the explanation, it seemed certain that Grier, now 89, would never again see his prized memento.

Until last month, that is, when Grier slipped the ring back on his finger for the first time in decades, thanks to a retired emergency physician who had been holding on to it for years, unable to locate its owner.

In the 1980s, Wilson Murphy was settling into his newly purchased home in the Dallas area when one day, out in the yard, something glimmered from a concrete enclosure for the trash cans. Murphy bent down to discover a 1954 University of Maryland ring, engraved in what he calls “old English script print” with what he thought looked like the letters “CPG.” Without any way to investigate further (the terrors of life pre-Google), Murphy stashed the ring in a drawer and “never thought about it again for years.”

A recent move uncovered the ring again, and this time Murphy decided to try to return it to its rightful owner. “I’m retired now, I’ve got time,” he says. A search of UMD’s online yearbooks turned up a Charles P. Grier who graduated in 1954, and an email to the Alumni Association confirmed Murphy’s sleuthing.

Grier, a member of the Theta Chi fraternity, had long suspected foul play. “One of the fraternity brothers was some kind of a kleptomaniac, and the probability was that he had lifted it from my drawer,” he says. The ring—along with some other stolen goods—was recovered after Grier graduated, and last Grier heard one of his fraternity brothers had taken the ring and given it to his girlfriend.

That’s one version of the story, anyway. In 1960, Grier and his wife moved to Dallas for Grier’s work. So how did the ring coincidentally end up in a Dallas backyard? Well, truth and memory are hazy. Maybe Grier did get the ring back after all, and later on one in a series of local burglaries led to the ring’s theft, and maybe that burglar—in an attempt to get rid of the evidence—tossed the ring into the backyard of a home just a few streets away. Who can say?

Late last month, Grier—along with his wife and daughter—met with Murphy on a rainy Texas afternoon for an emotional handoff of the ring. Over two and a half hours, the group chatted and tried—with little to some success—to pin down the item’s backstory.

What’s certain is that, after years apart, Grier and his ring are back together. “I’m just delighted,” says Grier. “Everything worked out just fine.”