It was May 1969 when Al DiStefano stood on a dock on Long Island, New York, watching the sunset.
"I was leaning over the railing," DiStefano said, "and the ring just slipped off my finger, and I watched it go down into the darkness. And I said, 'Well, that's gone. I'm never going to get that back.'"
That ring was set with a red garnet and engraved with the seal of Fordham University — from which DiStefano has just graduated — as well as his name and the year.
It rested underwater for over five decades until earlier this summer, when an electrician named David Orlowski took his metal detector to Cedar Beach in Mt. Sinai, New York.
"I was about up to my knees at low tide and got a really strong hit on the metal detector," Orlowski said. "I dug quite a few times, pretty deep, and finally pulled it up. And I was like, 'Wow, look at that thing!' Not realizing what it was."
Back home, Orlowski sat with the ring for a few days. He considered selling it — made of palladium, it would be worth a few thousand dollars as scrap.
But something about that didn't sit right.
"I said to my wife, 'What should I do with this?'" he said. "And she says, 'Well, if you lost your ring, you would want it back, right?'"
You know what? Question answered right there."
Based on the ring's engravings, he searched online and found Karen Manning, who graduated from Fordham the same year.
"He said, 'I found a ring belonging to somebody in your class,'" Manning said. "So I posted a message on our Facebook page and I asked if anybody was in touch with Al DiStefano."
Now 77 years old and over 1,600 miles away in Arlington, Texas, DiStefano calls the discovery a "miracle." He asked his mail carrier to film the moment his ring was returned.
"Fifty-six years. Can you imagine that?" DiStefano says in the video. "And look at it! For being in the water for that long…"
"It looks like it's in pretty good shape!" the mail carrier says.
"It still doesn't fit," DiStefano adds, laughing.
For Manning, who helped connect the dots, the real story isn't about the ring.
"To me, the biggest thing was that somebody took a lot of joy in returning this valuable item that had a lot of memories attached to it," she said. "You just don't see a lot of that happening these days."
David Orlowski doesn't expect a reward — he just hopes the gesture sticks.
"Hopefully it's contagious and people do the right thing," he said.
Copyright 2025 NPR
