John Arnett, a chief master sergeant in the Ohio National Guard, was washing his beige 1976 Plymouth Volare station wagon in the driveway of his home in Swanton, Ohio.
Amid the suds and swipes, his wedding band disappeared. He came to believe that it must have fallen somewhere in the front yard.
He bought a replacement ring after losing the original sometime between 1977 and 1982 but the loss was never far from his mind.
“He was at my house a year and a half before he died,” recalled one of Mr. Arnett’s sons, Jeff Arnett.
The younger Mr. Arnett, now 64, remembered laughing and having fun talking with his father at the time when “all of a sudden he changes.”
“He looks at me real seriously,” Mr. Arnett said, “and he says, ‘If you ever get a metal detector, will you go over to our old yard and see if you can find my ring?’”
In the fall of 2013, shortly after his father’s death, Jeff Arnett passed over the yard of his childhood home for the first time with a metal detector he borrowed from a friend.
The ring didn’t turn up.
“I wanted to see if I could find that ring,” he said in a phone interview on Saturday. “I thought I’d just walk out there and this would be a piece of cake. I didn’t realize it was going to be this much effort.”
Mr. Arnett grew to love metal detecting and took it up as a hobby.
He bought his own metal detector in 2023 and returned to check the yard of his childhood home a couple of times that year, especially in the spring and fall, and in the winter if the ground was not frozen.
He learned the conditions for what made a good metal detector search.
Over time, he found roughly 150 items, mostly nails, nuts and bolts, and loose change, in the front yard.
When two of his siblings gave him an upgraded metal detector this year, he took it for a try on Aug. 16 in the yard of his childhood home.
Mr. Arnett’s former pastor owns the home but planned to put it up for sale. For Mr. Arnett, his search this month was a last-ditch effort before new owners possibly restricted his access.
“I asked God, I said, ‘God, will you help me today?’” he recalled in the interview.
He found the ring buried eight inches under the ground, Mr. Arnett wrote in a Facebook post.
“From the time I turned the metal detector on until I found it was five minutes,” he wrote. “I just said, ‘Thank you, God.’”
For Mr. Arnett, the search connected him to his father, who died at 78 from pulmonary fibrosis in 2013.
“When I picked the ring up and I put it on my finger, I realized my dad was the last one to have it on his finger and I’m the first person to put it on my finger,” Mr. Arnett said. “And I realized that’s the closest thing to touching my dad again.”
Mr. Arnett recalled mornings where his father made breakfast for him and his three siblings. His father wore an apron over his miliary fatigues and sang a breakfast song he made up.
Mr. Arnett said he suspected the 14-karat white gold ring was his father’s, but he also thought it might be a piece of costume jewelry.
He brought it to his mother, Carol Arnett, 90, for closer inspection.
“I handed it to her and she said, ‘That’s it.’”
They confirmed the find by retrieving his parents’ photo album from their wedding in 1957 and seeing the ring in pictures.
Mr. Arnett said he will continue his hobby of metal detecting.
As for the ring, he plans to keep it on his desk in a box that still holds one of his father’s watches.
Sheelagh McNeill contributed research
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