Chris Smith: Every lost ring should bear your name, high school class and jersey number

What’s this? Hiking with her husband at Santa Rosa’s splendid, above-it-all Taylor Mountain Regional Park, Viviane Isabeau spotted on the trail something shiny.

It was a gold ring, a high school graduation ring. When Viviane contacted me for help to find the owner, she reported that ornamental lettering on the ring provided multiple clues to that person’s identity.

The ring clearly belonged to “Josh”, a 1993 graduate of Benicia High who’d worn number “72” on his football helmet. Too easy!

I figured as I fired up Google that I’d be linked in minutes with this Josh, delivering the happy new of the recovery of his lost ring.

But I found a couple of Joshes who appeared to be candidates, and after a fair of number of phone calls reached a Josh in Georgia who sounded like a heck of a good guy. He said he did attend Benicia High but he had not lost a ring.

A bit later, I dialed what I thought was the number of a Josh in California’s Central Valley. The understandably dubious man who picked up said he was the father of a Josh who is not the Josh I sought.

There ended Round One.

The next day I heard again from Viviane, finder of the ring. She revealed, “Upon further investigation with a magnifying glass I can make out a faint etching ‘Josh Ladd’ inside the ring. According to a brief Google search, a Josh Ladd who was raised in Benicia was the chef in 2018 of Piatti Restaurant in Mill Valley.”

As you can see, Viviane needed my help the way, to borrow a phrase, a fish needs a bicycle.

Pleased to play along, I went again online and found what Viviane had found, a 2018 Marin Magazine profile sharing that Josh Ladd grew up in Benicia and prior to becoming executive chef at Piatti worked in the kitchens of Fog City Diner, the Claremont Hotel & Spa in Berkeley and the Snow King Resort in Jackson, Wyoming.

The magazine piece noted that Josh “lives with his wife and son in Petaluma.”

I messaged Josh on Facebook. I also fired off an email to Mary Ladd, a food writer who’d at some point blogged about the lamb sandwich her brother served up at Jordan's Restaurant at the Claremont. I asked Mary to tell Josh I’d like to speak with him. She did.

Josh phoned me. Sounding tickled that his Benicia High School ring had been found, he told me that he had not in fact lost it.

His 5-year-old son, Jackson, had. Josh said that only days before, Jackson was with him when he opened up a box containing old watches and such.

And there was the class ring. His boy eyed it and said, “Oh, that’s cool.” Josh told him, “You can have it, buddy.”

So maybe the 28-year-old ring was not exactly a personal treasure to Josh, who’s done much since he left Benicia High and is just now turning 46. But it brought joy to give the ring to his son.

“He was loving it,” Josh said.

Jackson hadn’t had the ring very long at all when he and his mom, Gretchen, prepared for a hike at Taylor Mountain park. Of course, the 5-year-old had to take along his new ring.

And, of course, it somehow worked its way out of his pocket.

Josh Ladd said that when he returned home that day after working at Piatti, his son approached and fessed up: “I’m sorry. I lost the ring, Daddy.”

When they discovered it missing, Jackson and his mom had backtracked and looked for the ring, but didn’t find it.

Just days ago, Josh drove from Petaluma to Viviane’s house and picked up the ring. Perhaps now it will be an only-in-the-house keepsake for Jackson, or his folks will find a way to tie it to him.

...

NEWS HAPPENS everywhere, certainly at Twin Hills Middle School in Sebastopol.

When parent Robyn Prusky and principal Shawna Whitestine agreed at the start of the academic year it would be good to invite students to start a monthly newspaper at the school, they hoped maybe four or five kids would volunteer.

Twenty-five stepped up. And every month, those charter school students turn out 12 to 17 pages of news, teacher and administrator interviews, event calendars, book and TV and game reviews, brain twisters, humor and other eminently readable and worthwhile stuff.

I dived into the December and January issues of the Panther Press and found many gems, among them an invitation to seize the pandemic as an opportunity to become a pen pal and exchange paper-and-ink letters with another human being. Be prepared, the story said, to discover “how reading, writing and presentation skills improve” as you pour yourself into the writing of the pen-pal letters.“

There were recipes for healthy smoothies, blueberry corn muffins and taco soup, and some pretty good jokes: Why did the chicken cross the road? Social distancing!

Playing off the satire in the Onion, a column called “The Scallion” promoted the obvious connection between the consumption of string cheese and the development of brains suited for careers in civil engineering.

Parent Prusky said it’s exciting, too, to witness the connections forged among the Twin Hills students who together produce the newspaper.

“It’s a very sweet interaction,” she said. “I can’t tell you how hard these kids work, and it’s for fun.”

You can contact Chris Smith at 707-521-5211 or chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.

....