Lost and Found in a Small World
By Felicia Russel (MA '07)

Pete Baumgartner ('90) is a devoted CU football fan. As a sophomore, he volunteered in the recruiting department.

Even after moving to Prague, Czech Republic, where he is the senior online media editor for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Baumgartner said he still flies back to the States whenever the Buffs are in a bowl game. So he was pretty bummed when he lost his CU class ring while swimming with his new wife off the coast of the Greek island of Santorini in September.

"I had worn the rather clunky ring virtually every day since I got it a few months before graduating in May 1990, and I was very sad to have lost it in such a silly fashion," he said. "It was really dumb of me not to have taken it off, as I did my wedding band."

He spent the rest of the day diving in the shallows, hoping to find the ring. When he couldn't find it in the black sand, he assumed the currents had carried it deeper. He left Santorini without his ring.

Then, a few weeks later, Dean Paul Voakes received an odd e-mail. "I am trying to find mr. Peter Baumgartner in a internet but couldnt find him. I hope that you could help me a litle bit. He is propobly been a student there in a journalism and graduted year 1990. I just found something that belongs to him, so I am trying to find and contact him," wrote Antti Kekalainen, a Finnish firefighter.

Kekalainen's son, Alex, had discovered the ring two weeks later while snorkeling at the beach. Baumgartner's degree and year were marked on the ring, and he'd had his name engraved on the inside of the band. "When we came back, I Google your name first," Kekalainen wrote to Baumgartner, "but there was so many Baumgartners that it felt inbossible to find you there." Then he searched for a list of graduates on the SJMC Web site. When that didn't work, he e-mailed Voakes. Within days, Kekalainen was making plans to get Baumgartner's ring back to him.

Alex Kekalainen hands the ring off to Tiia on its journey back to Prague and its owner.

"Because of internet its quite easy to find people or things, and in internet world is realy smole. You can quickly go another side of the world. There is lot of bad things in the internet, but this time it was VERY usefull," Kekalainen wrote.

Kekalainen and his son, Alex, entrusted the ring to Tiia, a college student who was traveling to Prague on holiday. Baumgartner met Tiia at the Prague airport to be reunited with his "beloved CU class ring."

"It's amazing that he went to such lengths to find me and that (Beth Gaeddert) and Dean Voakes also followed through, even having to contact my mom," Baumgartner said. He wrote that this story "shows that the ocean is not too deep, the world not too big and that CU is the greatest university on Earth (I mean, could this have happened to a Nebraska alum? Never!)."