Rice alum reunited with long-lost class ring

A familiar ring to it
Rice alum reunited with long-lost class ring

BY ARIE WILSON PASSWATERS
Rice News staff

A phone call that Rice alumnus Greg Marshall received earlier this month on Friday the 13th made him feel like the luckiest person on the planet. But to understand why, you have to turn the clock back a few decades …

The year was 1986. Halley’s Comet streaked across the sky for the first time in 76 years. America wept for the astronauts who perished in the space shuttle Challenger disaster. Wayne Gretzky was emperor of the ice, Chernobyl melted down and Bobby Ewing came back from the dead on the TV show “Dallas.”

For Marshall — a Baker College senior at the time — these events took a backseat to getting his official Rice University class ring.
He remembers finding in his mailbox a notice about his ring’s arrival on campus. All he had to do was go to Rice Memorial Center and pay off the remaining balance to retrieve his ring.

For a year, he had been working odd jobs to save enough for his ring. He gave campus tours. He promoted drinks for beer distributors. He dynamited for oil. He even gave out free ice cream samples at supermarkets with his fellow marketer, a giant electronically animated cow named Elsie.

“I sweated blood for that ring,” Marshall said. “Making the final payment that day truly was a fortune for me. I worked so hard for it.”

STACY CERVANTES
Greg Marshall ’86, director of university relations, displays his original and replacement class rings.

Having relied on grants and financial aid to help pay for his years at Rice, Marshall was accustomed to having to work hard to earn the things he desired. The ring, however, symbolized more than just a lot of time spent working odd jobs.

“Rice changed my life,” he said. “I came from Goliad, Texas, which had only 1,100 people, and it was a very limiting environment. Rice opened my eyes to so much.”

After his four years as an undergraduate concluded, Marshall set off to start his career in marketing and advertising. Six year later, he jumped at the chance to return to his alma mater in a professional capacity.

Following a temporary post consulting for the university, Marshall was finally able to join the permanent staff as director of university relations for Public Affairs. He also became a resident associate at his former college.

During the spring of 1996, Marshall was on a canoe trip with some of the students from Baker College. They were navigating a part of the Guadalupe River known as the “Devil’s Playground” when their canoe became lodged on a large boulder after being trapped by a whirlpool.

“The current was about to turn our canoe broadside and dump us into the cold water, so to avoid that, I put my hand out onto a nearby boulder and tried to shove off,” Marshall said. “I succeeded in freeing the canoe, but my class ring slipped off my finger and was immediately washed into the deep whirlpool.”

Marshall can recall feeling around in the water for the ring and contemplating jumping in to search more carefully, but he realized that another canoe full of rafters would be racing down the river, which would increase the risk of a collision. Deeming the situation too dangerous, Marshall decided he’d come back later with his scuba gear and try searching the riverbed for his ring — a promise he was unable to keep.

“I never was able to get back to search for the ring,” Marshall said. “There was a fairly severe flood, and I thought there would be little hope of recovering it myself.”

Eventually, Marshall purchased a replacement class ring. “I had always held out hope that my ring would make its way back to me, but I really never thought it would actually be possible,” he said.

Thirteen years later — on Friday the 13th — Marshall got a phone call from a free-diver from San Antonio named Ryan Lawrence.

Lawrence had been excavating under 16 inches of gravel and sediment when he came across a large ring in the same part of the Guadalupe River where Marshall had canoed in 1996. Upon closer examination, Lawrence discovered the ring was from Rice University and it had a name engraved on the inside.

With a quick search of the Internet, Lawrence tracked Marshall’s name back to Rice.

In the 18 years that Lawrence has been free-diving and retrieving treasures off the river floor, he has been able to reunite only a handful of items with their original owners.

“About 98 percent of the rings I have found do not have any inscription,” Lawrence said. “Mr. Marshall is only the third owner that I have found.”

If Lawrence can’t identify the owner of a piece of jewelry he finds, he gives it to a family member or sells it to a local jeweler.

As for Marshall, being reunited with his hard-earned class ring has been “the highlight of my year.”

He plans to sell the replacement ring and do something special for Lawrence with the money.

“He is just a really nice guy,” Marshall said. “He didn’t ask for a reward or anything, just wanted to be sure I was who I said I was, then asked where he should send the ring.

“One week later, the envelope arrived.”