Sweetheart’s Wartime Gift of Ring Comes Full Circle

When Arthur Diehl was about to go off to war in 1944, his sweetheart gave him her Union City, N.J., high school ring as a keepsake. Jean Carney, now 67, always believed that Diehl had the ring with him when he died in battle several months later. But the ring was recently returned to her by a Pennsylvania veteran, who had found it on the frozen body of a German soldier during the Battle of the Bulge. Although Steve Datko said he had vowed to return the ring to its rightful owner, he didn’t begin his search until 1978 when he retired. Friends of Carney’s saw an ad Datko placed in Veterans of Foreign Wars Magazine describing the ring’s inscription, “Emerson High School, 1936,” and some initials, and asked Carney, who was involved with her class reunion committee, to help find the owner. She realized immediately that it was hers. “I have the feeling (Diehl) hasn’t rested knowing that the ring was taken from him,” Carney said, “and I hope he’s resting now that the ring is back.”

--Michael Drummond says it will be strange to visit the Smithsonian Institution and see on display the Jarvik artificial heart that once kept him alive. But the 27-year-old Phoenix grocery clerk said he was happy that something so dear to him will take its place in history. At 25, Drummond was the youngest person to receive a Jarvik heart and the first to have one implanted as a temporary bridge in August, 1985. He received a human heart transplant nine days later. He was given the artificial heart when he left University Medical Center in Tucson and kept it on a table in his bedroom. He returned the heart to the hospital so it can be presented to the Smithsonian in Washington next month. Drummond, who said he has regained 100% of his strength, swims daily, plays basketball and does “pretty much anything I want to do.”

--Sixty years ago today, Charles Lindbergh saw the lights of Le Bourget airfield in Paris and became the first person to fly non-stop across the Atlantic alone. Hundreds of Lindbergh buffs have descended on Paris for a week of anniversary festivities to be capped by a re-enactment of his landing at Le Bourget by a replica of his plane, the Spirit of St. Louis. Unlike the original, however, the replica has hydraulic brakes and a more reliable engine, and pilot Verne Jobst will not have to peer out through a periscope, as Lindbergh did because the extra fuel tanks blocked his view.