During Furman's Homecoming festivities, I heard an amazing story about an alumnus. In 1941 Roy Walters graduated from Furman. The son of a North Carolina cotton broker, he was the first member of his family to receive a college degree.

A few months later, after the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, the biology major and football player joined the Marines as a second lieutenant. In August 1942, his unit, the First Marine Division, was sent more than 9,000 miles to the southwest Pacific Ocean to help dislodge the Japanese from Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands.

The Battle of Guadalcanal was fought amid terrible conditions. The American forces battled oppressive heat and humidity, blood-sucking leeches and debilitating malaria  as well as tenacious Japanese soldiers.

During a lull in the fighting, Walters's platoon was loaded onto trucks and driven to the Lunga River to bathe. The men stripped off their mud-caked boots and soiled uniforms and plunged into the clear water. After an hour or so, they dressed and headed back through the jungle to their entrenchments.

Upon his return, Lt. Walters realized that his Furman class ring was missing. He received permission to look for it, but his search in the pebble-lined river bottom proved fruitless. His prized possession, less than a year old, was gone.

A few months later Lt. Walters boarded ship with his platoon and sailed to Australia, where he met and married an Australian woman. After the war ended, they settled in his hometown of Monroe, N.C. A few years later, Elaine Walters surprised her husband by presenting him with a replacement ring she had ordered through Furman. Lt. Walters eventually retired from the Marines as a lieutenant colonel, and he and Elaine raised two daughters and a son.

In February 2003, more than 60 years after losing his Furman ring in a Guadalcanal river, Roy Walters received a call from the alumni office at Furman. His long-lost ring had been found. Carol Ann Parker, a resident of Maine, had come across the ring and contacted the university.

She explained that her father had operated a large dry cleaning firm near Portland, Maine, a key American military harbor during World War II. The military contracted with her father to clean thousands of uniforms after the servicemen returned to civilian life. Before cleaning the items, he would check the pockets for any personal items. Whatever he found, he placed in boxes in case anyone would claim them. After the dry cleaning company shut down, the boxes of items went into the family attic, where they sat for more than 40 years before Parker decided to look through them. When she found the Furman University ring with Roy Walters' name inscribed in it, she called the alumni office, whereupon a staff member contacted him and mailed the ring.

Walters in turn called Carol Ann Parker to thank her. He was so grateful, she recalls. He kept saying, You don't know what that meant to me.' Apparently, his lost ring had always been in a buttoned trouser pocket.

So Colonel Walters has two class rings. But he wears neither of them around his home at Brighton Gardens in Greenville, where he has recently moved. Now in his 80s, he has lost weight over the years and his fingers are too slender to hold a ring. And he doesn't want to risk losing a ring again.

Instead, he keeps both rings prominently displayed for all to see. He remains a loyal member of one of Furman's most loyal classes  the great class of 1941. As the Marines say, Semper Fi!  always faithful.