LEXINGTON — Tim Clark spent his career investigating crimes, searching for clues and trying to help people.
Having retired in 2013 as a police officer in Mansfield, Ontario and Lexington, Clark quickly found a new outlet for his vocation turned avocation.
Metal detecting.
His most recent success was revealed Tuesday afternoon when he returned a 1979 Lexington High School class ring to its thrilled owner, Christine Schuller, now a school teacher in central Ohio.
“I’ve been metal detecting since retiring in 2013 and I love it,” said Clark, who has found five high school class rings, returning four of them to their owners.
He found Schuller’s ring a few weeks ago on the old football field at Mary Fate park in Plymouth. It had its owner’s name inscribed inside the band — Christine Kenyon.
“Long story short, after some legwork, phone calls and records checks, last week I finally located its owner in Columbus, Christine Schuller,” he said.
Clark made contact with Schuller, in her 40th and final year of teaching, and she jumped at the chance to meet him at the Lexington Police Department to accept the return of her ring.
A wide smile crossed Schuller’s face as she again laid eyes on a ring that her then boyfriend and later husband, Ron Schuller, a Plymouth High School student, had lost in 1980.
He had the ring on a chain around his neck and it was lost, seemingly forever, when the chain broke. The two have since divorced but live just a few miles from each other.
A junior high school teacher at Hamilton Local Schools near Columbus, Schuller slipped the ring back on her finger and the smile grew wider.
“It’s crazy that it still fits,” she said with a laugh. “I can’t believe it. Nothing else I had then fits.”
Schuller said she may have ignored Clark’s phone calls and later text messages as a scam … except he included photos of the ring.
“He sent pictures so I knew right away. I said, yeah, that’s mine,” said Schuller, who began her teaching career with two years at Lincoln Heights Elementary in the Madison Local School District before moving to Hamilton Local.
“If it’s not a number I recognize, I assume it’s some kind of call that I don’t really need to hear. So I just pretty much ignore it,” she said.
The news of the find put a smile on Schuller’s face.
“I was grinning all day and I kept thinking I don’t know why. It’s not like I probably could even put it back on or I probably wouldn’t wear it again. But I was just so tickled. I loved this ring when I bought it.
“(Ron) felt really bad when the chain broke and he lost it. He was very, very happy that I was getting it back,” said Schuller.
It’s just the latest in almost a decade of finds for Clark, the strangest of which was a fully loaded .22-caliber magazine from a handgun in Middle Park in Mansfield.
“It was down probably three to four inches. It had been in the ground so long that the bullets had corroded together, but they were live (round). So I had to be very careful about cleaning it,” he said.
He doesn’t return everything he finds. He once discovered the top of an oil lamp in the woods near the Mohican River. After getting it home and cleaning it up, he found a date on it — Sept. 9, 1862. He still has it.
He has also found lots of coins from more than a dozen countries, including a 1786 silver Spanish real, the currency of the Spanish colonies in America and also the Philippines.
When he retired from police work, Clark’s wife said he could not stay idle.
“My wife made me promise when I retired that I would not sit in a recliner all day and watch TV. My wife’s brother talked me into buying (his first metal detector) and I thought I would give it a shot.
“This has been the perfect foil for me.”
The affable retired cop may be willing to help local residents find something they have lost. If interested, email Clark at oldcop135@gmail.com
