Like many graduates in the Henderson County High School class of 2002, Joe Bender purchased a class ring to signify his time as a Colonel.
On the night of his prom, Bender had taken it off before going to bed and remembered seeing it setting in a room of the Super 8 motel (now called Envi) on the U.S. 41-Strip where he and a group of his friends were all staying.
The next morning, the group got up and drove to Kentucky Kingdom, and at some point, he saw that he didn’t have his ring on.
He called back to the motel, but was told it wasn’t in the room.
“It’s gone,” he thought then. “I’m never going to see it.”
Fast forward 22-plus years to Peabody, Kansas, where a few weeks ago Randy Dallke was cleaning out the dirt-floor garage of a property he was rehabbing.
Dallke had just scooped up a bucket-full using excavating equipment and then stepped inside the garage to check on some things before scooping again. He noticed a shiny thing in the dirt and moved closer for a better view.
He picked up a class ring. Cleaning it off, he read the lettering which said Henderson County and saw a “funny looking guy”—the Colonel mascot—on it.
He quickly did a search on his phone for Henderson counties in the country and found one in Texas. He assumed the ring came from a student in Texas, pocketed it and went back to work.
Later that day at home, he showed off the ring to his wife and his daughter, Roxanne. They looked more closely and found a name on the inside.
Curious, Roxanne did a bit more research and found that there was a Henderson County High School with a colonel mascot in Kentucky, Dallke said.
Dallke’s daughter later posted a message looking for Joe Bender to a HCHS football Facebook page, he said.
A friend of Bender saw the message and let him know about it, Bender said. After a bit of back-and-forth between Roxanne and Bender—he was nervous about a scam—the story checked out and soon Dallke put the ring in a package and sent it in the mail.
Along with the package, Dallke said he wrote a message: “I hope you get to keep it a lot more years than the first time.”
The ring is now in Bender’s possession, the local heavy equipment operator said. But it no longer fits.
Both Bender and Dallke wonder how the ring made the trip from Henderson to a dirt-floor garage in Peabody, Kansas, a 937-person town about 45 miles north of Wichita.
“Not a clue,” Dallke said.
Bender, 40, hypothesized that the ring landed in the hands of a trucker, and it was transported that way, but it’s just a guess. He also said he’s never spent time in Kansas and doesn’t know anyone in the Sunflower State.
“I wish I could have followed that ring to see the story because it would be a very interesting story,” Bender said.
