story of a lost ring

[rip]

Woman hunting for ring her grandfather lost in a snowball fight in Missoula - in 1945
By MICHAEL MOORE of the Missoulian
As a little girl growing up in Louisiana, Jill Gayle often sat at her grandfather's knee and soaked up his stories of the old days.

Some of the grandkids were put off by Pawpaw's stutter and didn't take the time to listen to his tales. But not Jill. She loved the sound of his voice, the way the stories took her back through time.
One of those stories involved a ring, a snowball fight and a far-off place called Missoula, Montana. Over the years, she heard the ring story from time to time.

In the last few years, as her grandfather has aged markedly, the story has cropped up more often, always told with a wistful regret.

Finally, Jill decided to become a character in her grandfather's story, to see if there might be some way to rewrite the ending.

It's beyond a long shot. But maybe, just maybe, tucked away in somebody's dresser drawer in Missoula there's a ring with William Henry Johnson's name on it.

First, the story.

Bill Johnson grew up on a dairy farm in Maryland and later served in the Army Air Corps in World War II. He'd met his future wife, Marjorie Cox, three weeks before he headed for war, and asked her to wait for him.

Her answer, Jill said, was blunt: "I won't wait for no son-of-a-bitch."

That wasn't a crude way to say no. It was a challenge for him to be a good man, the man who comes back home to his woman. Bill Johnson proved himself worthy.

He served around the war theater, flying planes out of North Africa and in the Far East. Finally, the war ended and Bill Johnson and the rest of the boys came home.

And in November 1945, Bill wound up on a train that left Seattle with a destination of San Antonio, Texas. The train stopped in Missoula, where an early snow had fallen. Many of the young men on that train had never seen snow, including Bill.

Within minutes, a snowball fight erupted.

"Ten or so were out there, and it was the first time my grandfather had ever made a snowball," Jill said recently. "He got hit with a couple of snowballs and so he started to defend himself a little bit."

Bill's first snowball left his hand cleanly and hit the mark. In that snowball, however, was the ring he got when he graduated from the Army's flight school in 1942.

The men got down on the ground and scuttled about in the snow, but no ring. Minutes later, they were ordered back on the train. Bill Johnson left his prized ring in Missoula's rail yard - he's not sure which one - and climbed aboard the train with his buddies.

He never came back.

After the war, Bill and Marjorie were married and moved to the family's Maryland dairy farm for a while, then lived in Dallas before finally moving to the Lake Charles, La., area.

Bill worked for International Harvester, then went to work on an offshore drill rig for Union 76. He worked for that company for 28 years, working a week on and a week off, a schedule that prompted Marjorie to remark that she'd really been married to Bill for only half of those 28 years, Jill said.

The Johnsons had children, of course, who in turn had children. Jill is one of eight grandchildren, and she's not too proud to say that she is her Pawpaw's favorite.

She's the one who listened to the stories everyone had heard a hundred times before. She asked questions, looking for lessons in her grandfather's tales.

Eventually, the story of the ring became something more than an old man's story about a missing trinket. It became a link, for both her and him, to a long lost time. In the story, Bill was always young and vibrant. In the story, America was a land filled with opportunity for a young man and his bride.

Bill Johnson is 85 today. He knows his granddaughter, the 24-year-old woman he still calls Squirt, is trying to find his ring. He knows it's probably a fool's errand, and so does Jill.

But what's the harm?

Maybe someone picked up the ring decades ago and stuck it in a drawer. Maybe it was somehow covered up and found just last week. Maybe, just maybe.

The ring is a simple gold band, with "1942 K" inscribed on the outside. It may say Army Air Corps, but maybe not. Inside the band, his name is inscribed, but he's not sure if it says William Johnson or William Henry Johnson.

Jill Gayle isn't holding her breath that someone still has her grandpa's ring. And really, her search isn't really about finding the ring.

"I think it means so much to him that we're making the effort to find it," she said. "He and my grandma are the sort of people that people talk about. They've done so much for others, and they always stick up for me. This is just a way that I could do something for them. If people would just look around, think back a little, maybe somebody's got it."

Even if the ring stays lost, something will have been found. It's not just that Jill Gayle found a way into her grandfather's story about a lost ring. By adding a new chapter to the story, she found a way for the story to live on, to link the past to the present and, quite likely, to the future.

And really, this whole thing was never about the actual, physical ring in the first place. The ring, like Bill and Jill, is just another character in a story, a story passed down from grandfather to granddaughter, wedding one generation to the next.

Reporter Michael Moore can be reached at 523-5252 or at mmoore@missoulian.com