When his girlfriend told him she’d lost his Guilford class ring just weeks after he graduated, Terry Bralley ’76 was heartbroken. He’d spent his entire senior year working nights at a tobacco plant in Winston-Salem to save up the $75 for the ring. He even pinched here and scrimped there to have his initials inscribed inside the band.

And less than a month later it was gone. There wasn’t time to dwell on the loss. Terry, a Business Management major, had a career to pursue. Over time, he forgot about the ring. That is, until the phone in his office rang earlier this year.

“It’s kinda funny,” says Terry, who, as president of Davie County (N.C.) Economic Development Commission, recruits businesses to the county just west of Winston-Salem. “All these years later something that meant so much to me is back in my life.”

The story of how, 48 years later, Terry and his ring were reunited starts with a plumber in Virginia. John Fazekas, who now lives in Bryson City, N.C., was refurbishing a second-floor officer’s bathroom at Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base in Virginia Beach in the early 1990s. The job involved pulling out old cast-iron pipes and hauling them away.

One day he picked up a piece of old pipe and heard a piece of metal fall out of the back end. “It looked like a big ball of gunk,” says John. He picked up the ball and rolled it around in his gloved hands. The pipe he found it in came from a urinal so whatever he was holding was covered in years of rust and calcified deposits.

John would have thrown the object away were it not for a speck of shiny metal under the years of buildup. He took it home with him.

That night John spent a few hours chiseling off the buildup trying to figure out what was trapped inside. He could tell it was a ring but not much else.

“I put it in a plastic bag and stored it someplace and then came across a year or two later and chipped away at it some more,” says John. “I just kept repeating that process over and over through the years.”

After a few years he could tell the ring belonged to a Guilford graduate – but who?

It wasn’t until cleaning the inside band that the ring revealed a clue to its owner. The initials TLB were inscribed. John called the College in 2021 and asked if someone could help. He never heard back so he put the ring away.

John forgot about the ring until he came across it in his bedroom a few days after Christmas. He reached out to Guilford and asked if there were any 1976 graduates with matching initials.

It took Allen Rogers, Director of Advancement Operations, 20 minutes to match the initials with Terry. An official from the College called Terry on a Friday afternoon in January. “I hadn’t thought about that ring in so long,” he told the caller. “Amazing, just amazing.”

In February, Terry and his wife met John and his wife outside a service station in Asheville. Stories were shared, pictures were taken and a ring once thought forever lost, was returned. Terry slid it on his finger. It was a little snug but still fit. Terry has no idea how his ring ended up lodged in a urinal’s pipe so many years ago. He doesn’t care. “I’ve got it now and that’s all that matters.”

He says the ring is in a safe place with other valuable possessions in his house. Just as valuable to Terry is the lengths John took to restore it to its original luster and then track down its owner. “It just restores your faith in mankind,” says Terry. “I’m just so thankful.”