Summer 2011 - University of Massachusetts Lowell

A L U M N I L I F E
u CLOSE-UP CLASS OF 1979
Anthony DuBose
holds the class ring
he lost 31 years ago.
A GIFT, TWICE GIVEN: A STRANGER’S
KINDNESS REKINDLES THE PAST
Two days before Christmas, the phone interrupted
his nap — he was groggy when he
answered. The voice on the other end asked
him his name. Then asked if he’d graduated
from ULowell, and what year. Then if he’d
belonged to a fraternity, and which one. He
answered in a half-stupor. Anthony DuBose.
Yes. 1979. Kappa Delta Phi.
Then the voice – it was a man’s – spoke
again. This time it wasn’t a question.
“Anthony, I have your ring.”
What ring? he wondered. Then he knew.
The next day, Christmas Eve of last year,
at a Dunkin’ Donuts on Middlesex Street in
Lowell, Anthony DuBose got back his ULowell
ring. It had been 31 years since he’d last
taken it off – to help paint the offices of his
first full-time employer, a Lowell nonprofit
called Community Teamwork, in January
1980, when he was 23. He hadn’t seen it
since.
No one will ever know the story of the
ring’s journey: how it got from the offices of
Community Teamwork to a drawer in a tailor
shop on Hurd Street, a mile or so east, where
it was found by the owners 27 years later. “I
was working at the time with a lot of troubled
teens,” Anthony DuBose says today, recently
retired from his job as a probation officer.
“One of them may have picked it up, thought
he would take it, then left it somewhere. I
just have no idea.”
The tailor shop owners put the ring aside,
thinking someone might appear to claim it.
No one did. Four years later, when they
retired – in the spring of last year – they ran
across it again. This time, not knowing what
else to do, they gave it to their daughter in
Peabody, where it might otherwise have remained.
Another six months passed. Then one
day, not long before Christmas, their daughter’s
daughter, 15 year-old Eleni, got to looking
at the ring, and noticed that there was an
inscription inside. She couldn’t read it – the
writing was tiny, and had faded over the
years – but the magnifying-glass app on her
father’s cellphone could: Anthony DuBose,
1979, ULowell, Kappa Delta Phi.
The next stop was the Web. It was there,
on Whitepages.com, that Eleni’s father, Steve
Stefanopoulos, found what he was looking
for: the right name, with the right age for a
‘79 graduate, living on Shaw Street in Lowell.
And that was how the phone call happened.
And a day later, on Christmas Eve, the meeting
of the two men at Dunkin’ Donuts.
“I told him he didn't have to say anything,”
Stefanopoulos told a reporter not long after.
“That’s what the Christmas season is all
about. It was a great life-lesson for me to
be able to teach my kids about doing the
right thing.”
As for Dubose, the message was more
poignant. The ring had been a gift from his
mother, who had died of cancer in August,
five months before he got it back. It was to
be his first Christmas without her. And now,
here again – in her place – was her gift.
When he found it would no longer fit on his
finger, he put it on a chain around his neck
– and has worn it there ever since.
“Amazing, all of it. Just amazing,” he says
today over the phone. “A Christmas blessing,
it truly was. It brings back all those memories.
And for [Steve] to find me, to go to all that
trouble, then meet me and give back the
ring. After all those years. That’s just a wonderful
thing.”
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