Steve Hawkins was chasing a spider with a blow torch when he found a ring.

It was sometime between 1982 and 1984, and Hawkins, then in his early 20s, was convinced he saw a black widow under the porch.

“There was a pipe sticking out from under the stairs by the house,” Hawkins said. “I was crawling around one day and we found a nest for a black widow, so my brother and I were down there, chasing it out with a torch.”

For two years in the 1980s, Hawkins lived with his brother and a roommate in a rental house on Southeast 17th Avenue in Portland. The young men would do improvements around the old house and the owner “would cut us some slack on the rent,” Hawkins said.

So that’s why they were traversing under the rickety front steps, chasing out spiders.

“In the process of just scrambling around down there, I kicked up some dirt, and there it was,” Hawkins said.

The man’s gold wedding band didn’t fit Hawkins, but he kept it anyway, tucked inside a film canister.

“You find a ring, what do you do with it? Who knows what to do with things like that at that time,” he said. “Most people would take it to a hock shop."

So, why didn’t he?

“Well, it was somebody’s ring. I suppose, maybe, I thought some day I would figure out" the owner, he said.

Four decades later, he would.

He read a story by The Oregonian/OregonLive about a hundred-year-old wedding ring returned to a family after it had been lost in the back of an office desk drawer. It reminded Hawkins he had a ring of his own, somewhere in his Beaverton home.

“I’m a pack rat. I’m approaching hoarder. I’ve got stuff, stuff, stuff. So when I saw that story," he said, "I started digging. And it took me about three days of digging through boxes of junk, and I found that ring. I put a magnifying glass to it and I thought, wow, this could be something.”

He’d never thought to look before, but the ring had an inscription inside with two first names and a date: “Lillian to Albin, Oct. 1, 1943.”

And he emailed me.

A first-name search of marriage records on Ancestry.com found a single match in Oregon from 1943: Albin Puodziunas, who married Lillian Opal Seeley. But at first, I couldn’t find him. Searches for “Puodziunas” were a dead end.

The Oregonian’s archives had an obituary for Lillian, who died in 2011 at age 92. It listed her husband’s name as Albin Pajunas.

Perhaps, the Ancestry records were wrong.

Albin Pajunas had a varied career in sales, media and construction. He was a salesman for Pan American Airlines, an editor for Portland’s Daily Journal of Commerce and a staff member for The Columbian newspaper, according to archives of The Oregonian. In 1965, he wrote a full-page article in this newspaper on epoxy grout. He later owned a tile-contracting business.

And he, too, had passed away, in 2000 at age 87.

Both obituaries listed a survivor: a son named Michael.

“How about that?” Hawkins said when called about the news. “That’s pretty cool. We just need to get him his ring.”

From his front porch in North Portland, a mask covering his face, Mike Pajunas read the fine inscription inside his father’s ring. He brought out a few photos of his father, as well as a portrait of his smiling parents.

Pajunas remembers his family renting that white house on 17th Avenue, where he walked to school at Cleveland High, in the early-1970s. He doesn’t remember his father ever mentioning losing a ring.

Pajunas also explained that his father changed the spelling of his Lithuanian surname to make it easier to pronounce. It was why, after his marriage, there was no longer any trace in public records of Mr. Puodziunas.

Albin was born in Connecticut, left home at age 14, and moved around the East Coast. He served his country during World War II, and met Lillian in a night club in Florida. Albin wanted to start a new life on the West Coast and decided, for reasons his son isn’t entirely sure about, to move from Florida to Portland.

His method of proposal? He sent Lillian a letter and money for train fare. Come to Portland, he wrote, and I’ll marry you.

Pajunas isn’t sure what he’ll do with the ring now, but holding it brought back a rush of memories of fishing and camping trips with his father, of life as a teenager in that small rental house, and of his proposal to his own wife. We talked, in person and on the phone, for probably an hour and a half.

“It’s funny (Hawkins) didn’t just automatically take it to some gold buyer or something,” Pajunas said.

There’s something about a wedding ring that turns us sentimental. It can make us hold out hope for a happy ending, even as the decades pass.

***

This is the fifth story we’ve written about reuniting someone with a lost ring (and actually the seventh ring I’ve helped return to its owner.) Have you found a ring and want to find the owner? Email me at sswindler@oregonian.com.

-- Samantha Swindler; sswindler@oregonian.com; @editorswindler

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