Back in 1977, a guy named Morgan Perigo took a trip to Barbados with wife and two sons. One of the boys got wrecked by a wave and toppled over. So, Morgan reached into the water to grab a hold of him. The boy grabbed his dad’s hand and inadvertently ripped off the class ring he got after graduating from McMaster University, a college located in the Westdale neighborhood of Hamilton, Ontario Canada. It’s at about the halfway point between Toronto and Niagara Falls. Morgan thought he had lost the ring forever. That is until a freediver found it decades later.
Morgan graduated in 1965. As plenty of students tend to do, he got himself a class ring to commemorate the end of his educational journey. When his son accidentally sunk it to the bottom of the sea near Barbados, he figured it was gone forever. And it was, until a professional free diver named Alex Davis took his new underwater metal detector for a spin off the coast of Barbados.
The ring was tarnished and the stag emblem on the ring had been worn down quite a bit but Davis said that the ring was in surprisingly good condition considering it had been banging around with the sand and sea shells for decades. There was just enough detail left behind to make out the university it hailed from.
So, Davis sent an email to McMaster University alumni officer Laura Escalante. The only clues Laura had to work with were a year, 1965, and a set of initials: FMP.
After scouring McMaster University student archives to find a match, she eventually landed on a mathematics major named Frederick Morgan Perigo. It’d been several decades but Perigo was still alive, which she was able to confirm via email, wherein he confirmed it was his ring. Escalante connected Davis to Perigo and the two coordinated a return of the ring. Perigo received it in the mail a day before his 83rd birthday. Speaking with The McMaster University Daily News, Perigo said, “What a wonderful unexpected 83rd birthday present.”
The post Diver Reunites Elderly Man With Ring He Lost at Sea 47 Years Ago appeared first on VICE.
The post Diver Reunites Elderly Man With Ring He Lost at Sea 47 Years Ago appeared first on VICE.
