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Eileen McClelland

A Good Deed Brings Good Karma to Wallach Jewelry Designs

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When a woman showed up a couple of weeks before Christmas, with a 1971 class ring Wallach Jewelry Designs owners Steven and Gina Wallach bought it for scrap.

The seller, a former Larchmont, NY resident, had found the ring tucked under a corner of the carpet in her new apartment in Yonkers. Once she ruled out the former occupants of the apartment as the ring’s owner, she decided to sell it to the Wallachs, whose store is in Larchmont.

A day after the Wallachs bought the ring, they started speculating about who it might belong to. The 10K gold ring was from Herricks High School on Long Island, NY.

“I was louping it,” Gina says, “ and I saw it had initials inside, DRG, and I thought, `You know what? There’s somebody out there with those initials that maybe we could find. They might like to have their ring back.”

Gina took a picture of the ring, and turned to Facebook, joining the Herricks High page so she could post a note for help in her search. She posted the request twice before Christmas.

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The first time, a graduate of the class responded and brought her a yearbook. It turned out that five women in that class had the matching first and last initials of D.G., but middle names or initials were not listed in the yearbook.

The second time Gina posted the photo on Facebook, a Larchmont woman noticed it and thought the owner might be a friend of hers, a friend who isn’t on Facebook at all.

That friend, with the maiden name of Diane R. Geberth, turned out to be the only graduate of the class of 1971 with the correct initials.

The Wallachs reunited owner (now Diane Hall) with her ring, free of charge, much to her surprise and delight.

“It turns out she lives in Larchmont five minutes from our store,” Gina says. “It was truly a Christmas miracle. It was such a great feeling to find the person who had lost that ring.”

The ring was particularly significant to Diane Hall and her husband, Russell, because they had gone steady their senior year of high school, wearing one another’s class rings on chains around their necks, before they got married. After their wedding, they displayed the rings in a shadow box, but the rings mysteriously vanished during a move from Connecticut in 1985. Russell Hall’s ring is still missing. The Halls have no connection to Yonkers, where the ring was discovered.

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Although the Wallachs haven’t noticed an uptick in business as a result of the publicity that ensued locally, they believe their efforts, at the height of the busy holiday season – have won them goodwill and reinforced their reputation as caring and honest business owners.

“It was shown on the Channel 2 CBS News right before Christmas, and it’s been on the radio and the Internet,” Gina says. “It’s just a wonderful feeling, and it’s gotten us a lot of kind comments; people see who we are and what we’re like.

“It’s really good karma, and good karma will always come back to you.”

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