A Pasco High graduate lost her favorite piece of jewelry in a lake more than three decades ago. She's never taking it off again.
By CHASE SQUIRES
Published June 28, 2004
ZEPHYRHILLS - A wet finger, a summer day 34 years ago, and Linda Geohagen Blardo figured her Pasco High School class ring was gone for good.
Then came the call.
"It's a miracle," Blardo said. "I just never, ever thought I would see it again. It's impossible."
Improbable maybe, but not impossible.
Blardo, a medical scheduler at East Pasco Medical Center in Zephyrhills, graduated from Pasco High in 1968. For two years, she wore her Pasco Pirates class ring everywhere, she said.
The shiny white gold band was topped with a light blue stone. Deep inside the stone, under a "P" for Pirates, was an etched image of a skull and crossbones, Blardo recalled.
Then, in 1970, she was playing with friends in Clear Lake, a nearby swimming hole also known as Lake Jovita.
"I saw it all happen," she said. "It came off my finger, I couldn't grab it, and I saw it go right into the water."
Blardo said she was in only 2 feet of water, but as she grasped for it on the lake bottom, the silt seemed to suck it down.
"The more I grabbed at it, the deeper it went," she said.
That, it seemed, was that.
Blardo moved to Connecticut in 1974. She married and changed her name.
Meanwhile, in 1980, in a Georgia state park 470 miles away, a little boy picked up a ring.
How it got there remains a mystery.
Blardo stayed up North until her mother's illness brought her back to Pasco County last Christmas, and when her mother died in March, she stayed in her mother's Zephyrhills home.
She kept the phone number under her mother's name - Geohagen.
Two weeks ago, she came home to a message on her answering machine.
A Pasco High office worker had gotten a call from a Georgia man.
He had a 1968 class ring. The initials were LDG.
Blardo was the only graduate that year with those initials.
A few e-mails to Georgia, and Blardo learned the Summers family from Cairo, Ga., had found the ring in Fort Yargo State Park, a historic park between Athens and Atlanta.
Robert Summers, by telephone, described how his wife, Wanda, was walking with their young son, Jason, when they found the ring.
"It was just there in a little tuft of grass by the lake," Summers said.
The ring rolled around in the glove box of the family van for a few years.
It was almost lost again when they sold the van, but Summers spotted it at the last minute.
It was stashed in a cupboard.
On trips to Florida, sometimes a license plate from Pasco County would spark conversation.
"I'd say, "We really should find out who owns that ring,' " Summers said.
But there was no Internet, no easy way of tracking down Pasco High School.
"We were cleaning up a few weeks ago, and I came across that ring," Summers said. When he found Blardo, he mailed it off with a note: "You do not need to be concerned with paying the mailing costs," he wrote. "I am more than happy to see that the ring gets to you."
Jason, the little boy who found the ring, is 30 now.
The Balfour ring company, which made the ring, offered to refurbish it, clean the Georgia mud from under the stone, and send it back to Blardo for free.
After that, Blardo said she's never taking it off.
"There was no doubt about it. I saw it go into the water in Clear Lake. I just knew I wouldn't see it again," Blardo said.
Then came the call: "I was just so joyful when they told me about my ring. I just cried."
