Seven years ago, after a business trip to Webster City, Iowa, David Burt discovered his Stanford class ring was missing. "I didn't know I lost it until a few days after I returned to San Diego," he recalls.
Late last year, Burt, PhD '71, received an e-mail from a John McGilligan in Webster City. Seems that McGilligan had found a ring stashed in a cigar box beneath the counter of his family restaurant, McGilligan's. "It was too nice a ring to throw away," McGilligan says, "so I decided to track down the owner through the Internet."
Made of white gold, the ring had the initials DNB engraved on the inside and PhD on the outside. McGilligan sent an e-mail to the webmaster of the Stanford Alumni Association site, who combed through a database and determined that there was only one 1971 PhD graduate with those initials. McGilligan reached Burt by e-mail and then shipped him the ring. "I'm delighted to have it back," says Burt, who assumes the ring fell out of his pocket while he was dining at the 52-year-old restaurant that closed after John McGilligan's father died last fall.
The ring sat behind the bar for at least a year before it was moved to a cigar box beneath the counter. Says McGilligan: "I think everyone who worked there took a turn wearing the ring, hoping that someone would recognize it and claim it someday."
