The man on the other end of the line asked David Zawrotny if his father’s name was Walter, a question that triggered a flood of suspicion for Zawrotny.
“I’m like, whoa, who is this, and what do you want? I thought I had a telemarketer on the phone trying to scam me out of something,” David Zawrotny said.
The caller, David Westman of Denver, explained that his mother had dated Walter J. Zawrotny, and that she had a high school class ring he had given her before leaving Massachusetts to serve in the Marines.
“Now I’m wondering if I have a long-lost brother. I wasn’t sure where this was going,” David Zawrotny said.
What Westman wanted to do was send Zawrotny his father’s ring, a personal treasure that could be passed through generations as an heirloom.
“David gave me his address, and the next day I sent the ring off,” Westman said.
The gold ring with its purple stone came to Westman’s attention on Thanksgiving Day, when his mother, Huguette, was picking through her jewelry box for pieces to pass on to her children and grandchildren.
The ring, memorializing Zawrotny’s 1959 graduation from Roman Catholic Cathedral High School in Springfield, Mass., had the initials WJZ engraved inside.
Huguette remembered that a classmate she was dating asked her to hold on to the ring and keep it safe until he came home from the service.
She remembered that his first name was Walter, and said that he had never come back for the ring.
Westman and his brother, Mark, wondered what had happened to Walter. Had he died in Vietnam?
They decided to use the Internet to track him down.
They came across a website for the 50th reunion of Cathedral High School’s 1959 graduating class, held in 2009. On a page listing deceased members of the class of ’59, they came across Walter J. Zawrotny.
With a match for the initials engraved in the ring, they found the elder Zawrotny’s obituary. He had married, had three children and died at age 61.
They found a phone number for his second son, David, in Enfield, Conn.
It took a few minutes for Westman to overcome David Zawrotny’s skepticism. But once Zawrotny let his guard down, he remembered that after his father died, his brother asked: “Hey, didn’t Dad have a class ring?”
“My mom knew of the ring. She knew that he had given it away to some girl in high school,” David said.
Westman shipped the ring to Connecticut.
Walter Zawrotny would have been grateful, his wife Jean said.
“I’m sure he would have liked having it back. Not everybody would have taken the time to do something like that.”
It was a thrill to open the package and see the ring, said David Zawrotny.
“It was an amazing feeling when I opened it up,” Zawrotny said. “I said, ‘I am the first Zawrotny to hold this thing since 1959.’ ”
Walter served four years of active duty as a Marine.
“He went in during the Vietnam era but never went to Vietnam,” Jean said.
“He was absolutely the best father you could ever want,” David said.
