Smith: Clear Lake treasure hunter returns long-lost ring

The ring on her hand was brand new when Carolyn Marie Pastore, freshly graduated from San Francisco’s Mercy High School, trekked with her family to Clear Lake for a splash of summer fun.

It was 1960. Carolyn’s now a retired teacher in Santa Rosa and her last name is Preston.

She remembers perfectly well that otherwise carefree vacation day nearly 55 years ago when she stood in the water at Clearlake Oaks and played catch. She wore her class ring.

“I threw the ball and the ring came off,” she said. Of course, she plunged to the lakebed and scoured it. No luck.

Just the other day, Carolyn received a phone call from the school secretary at Mercy High: A fellow named Michael Curl had phoned to report that he’s a metal-detector enthusiast and he’d found a Mercy High Class of 1960 ring inscribed with the initials CMP.

The secretary gave Carolyn the phone number for one Curl, who lives where? Just up the road from her, in Windsor.

They spoke and Michael related that he searches for treasures as a member of two metal detecting clubs, Sonoma County Coin Poppers and Mendocino Lost & Found. He offered to drop by the class ring.

He did so, and took in Carolyn’s joyful amazement as she placed the old but hardly used ring back on her finger. Michael Curl told her it’s great to find precious things, a bonus to find the people who lost them.

A GIRL OF 11 who tells of sexual abuse by her stepfather found her way recently into Legal Aid of Sonoma County. She received help that even a decade ago wasn’t available.

The same is true for an 80-year-old woman desperate for legal help to resist an eviction, and the great-aunt of a boy of 2 seeking lawyerly assistance to remove him from the custody of his violent, mentally ill mother.

On Friday night, members and supporters of Legal Aid will party hard to celebrate what the nonprofit does and raise money so it can do more. We’re all invited.

“Lawyers with Heart,” an evening of oysters, cocktails, fine dining, music and chocolate, happens at Windsor’s Mary Agatha Furth Center. Legal Aid chief Ronit Rubinoff is at rrubinoff@legalaidsc.com and eager to hear from anyone interested in tickets.

HE DID WHAT? If you spot folks walking around shaking their heads, they probably saw “mentalist” Marc Salem’s weekend show in Santa Rosa.

One of the awed and mystified people in the crowd at the Shomrei Torah temple was my friend and former PD colleague Ann Dubay. When she stepped onto the stage, Salem had already caused people’s watches to stop, demonstrated to a doctor that he could halt his own pulse and handed folks books, had them randomly select pages and then accurately called out the words or phrases on which their eyes rested.

He was doubly blindfolded when he had Ann pull out her cellphone. He concentrated, then rattled off the four digits of her security code. By the way, he told Ann, she’d missed a call from Jake.

“My heart almost stopped,” she said. She saw that her 21-year-old son by that name had indeed phoned her.

Salem and the marvels he performs are truly, delightfully boggling. Ann said, “For the life of me, I can’t figure out how he did it.”

Chris Smith is at 707-521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @CJSPD