Woman finds wedding rings five years later

Continued...
She met Ambrose — Bruce to family and friends — through a mutual friend. He was from Oregon and in the Army. She was from Ireland and a student nurse at a hospital.

Kathleen wanted to get a good look at Bruce before she agreed to go out with him. One night he came to the hospital, and she went to the front door. But there was a mandatory blackout during that time, and it was too dark to see. Someone shined a flashlight toward Bruce's face.

"All I saw is that he had such pretty teeth," she said with a chuckle. "How silly."

They dated and then corresponded by letter when military responsibilities took Bruce away. He proposed in one of those letters, and she said yes. He had his parents, who lived in Mount Angel at the time, purchase the rings at a Portland jewelry store and shipped them to him. His family also shipped a wedding dress for Kathleen.

The rings arrived in time for their wedding Feb. 3, 1945, at a small church near the hospital. But not the dress.

When the war ended, Bruce had to return to the States. By that time, Kathleen was pregnant with their first child. He didn't want her to be alone so he took her home to her family in Ireland to have the baby. Bruce didn't get to see his daughter until she was 1. That's when Kathleen and the baby finally were able to join him.

They raised three children and lived in Albany before settling in Salem, in the house where Kathleen still lives. Bruce worked for years at Teledyne Wah Chang. She spent some years working as a nursing aide.

After he died, she wore his ring with hers — until that day at Costco, when they vanished.

For Christmas that year, Schaecher opened a special gift that included an antique ring similar to hers and a gold band.Continued...



"My children bought me these rings to fill the void, and they have very much done so," she said.

Sort of. But not really.

And then came one of the happiest days of her life, Oct. 6, 2008. It was a Monday, and she was cleaning the freezer.

She noticed something round and shiny at the bottom of the chest, which is about 3 feet deep. Suddenly, she realized what it was. Her ring.

Her first thought was how sad it was not to see her husband's ring nearby. Then she glanced at the bucket on the floor and there, beside a rag she had been using, was his.

Schaecher cried, and she left the contents of her freezer on the garage floor. She called her daughter-in-law, Nancy Schaecher, who was with her that day five years ago.

"Her voice was all shaky," Nancy said. "I thought somebody must have died."

Woman finds wedding rings five years later

You know that sick feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you lose something you treasure, something irreplaceable? It never really goes away, unless by some miracle you find the item.

Kathleen Schaecher gives us all hope. She recently found her wedding ring and her husband's wedding band after losing them five years ago.

"I never, ever dreamed I would see my rings again," the 84-year-old Salem woman said. "It's hard for me to believe. I'm still shocked."

She found them in the bottom of the 16-cubic-foot Kenmore chest freezer in her garage. And all this time, she thought she'd lost them at Costco.

"I'm glad I found them," she said, "because I hated going to Costco."

She lost the rings Nov. 2, 2003. It was a Sunday, a day Schaecher will never forget.

She had just been to Mass at St. Joseph Catholic Church and was shopping at Costco with her daughter-in-law. She remembers putting a ham in the cart, maybe even hearing a tinkling sound at one point and later discovering her rings were gone. She wore them together on her left ring finger, as she had since her husband died in 1998. The rings had been resized but still were loose on her finger.

Schaecher frantically retraced her steps in the warehouse and in the parking lot. Costco employees joined the search. She went home empty-handed and heartbroken, leaving her name and number in hopes that someone would find the rings and turn them in. But Schaecher just knew they were gone forever.

"It was a most horrible feeling," she said. "I was devastated."

The years passed, and Schaecher often thought about her rings and where they disappeared to. Now and then, her hopes of finding them were renewed, once after reading about a woman who accidentally tossed her wedding ring in the garbage but was able to find it at the dump. How lucky that woman was, Schaecher thought.

The rings weren't insured because they really weren't that valuable. His was a simple gold band. Hers was a modest solitaire diamond set in gold.

"It's tiny, but it's a good little diamond," she said, repeating what a jeweler once told her.

The four Cs (carat, clarity, color and cut) have never been important to Schaecher. The true value of their wedding rings was what they symbolized. The love she and her husband shared for 53 years. Their courtship and wedding in London, during World War II.Continued...

"How sweet is their love story. The value of a something is not measured on its price.It is the memory and the reason it was bought and used."