Dispatch: Alabama sewer workers find a 1965 class ring in a vacuum truck, decode the initials and return it to its owner, 60-plus years on.

Dispatch, we have a recovered item, and the chain of custody is unusual. In February, workers at the wastewater plant in Sheffield, Alabama, were cleaning out a vacuum truck, WAFF reports. "I noticed something shiny," said Chance Coates of the distribution crew. He found two rings that day. One was a wedding ring. The other, after operator Junior Riner took it to the lab and cleaned it with chemicals, turned out to be a 1965 class ring from Burrell-Slater High School, which has since closed. "I said, well maybe by chance there will be some initials in it," Riner said. There were: O.J.M. Riner spent months searching until his son-in-law went online and found a page of 1965 class pictures with the names listed. O.J.M. was Oscar James Meredith. Back in 1965 he gave the ring to his sweetheart. "It was sort of customary to give your ring to your girlfriend," he said. "Later years the girlfriend became my wife." Somewhere along the line the ring went missing. When his daughter heard workers were looking for him, she asked whether he had ever lost a class ring. He had. "60 plus years later...I got it on," Meredith said. So a ring missing for six decades came home by way of a sewer truck and a lab bench. The system worked. Just not the way anybody drew it up. Over.