Quoted Text

Find rings no bell for Tinker  
  
By JIMMY VIELKIND and BOB GARDINIER, Staff writers
First published: Thursday, October 18, 2007

ROTTERDAM -- A bus driver nicknamed Tinker originally from Cohoes was floored when he found out his missing 1975 high school class ring might have surfaced, but had no idea how it ended up in the pocket of a retired Rensselaer police detective.
  
A.J. "Butch" Primero, who retired from the force in 1990, was going through his uniforms Wednesday -- sorting out what he wanted to keep -- when a Cohoes High School class of 1975 gold ring with a green stone fell from the pocket of his old police jacket.

Inside the band was inscribed "Tinker." That's the longtime nickname of William J. Young, 51, who graduated from Cohoes in 1975 and now lives in Rotterdam. Earlier Wednesday he read an article on timesunion.com about the missing ring and contacted Primero.

"I thought, I'm the only Tinker that I knew," he said, adding that the ring has been missing since he enlisted in the Marine Corps after high school. He will meet Primero today to examine the ring and see if it is indeed his.

"I'm not 100 percent sure, and the reason being is that I can almost guarantee that I lost that ring when I was in Okinawa, Japan, in 1976," Tinker said. "You know, you worry about it a few weeks or months but that's it. And now, 32 years later, it pops up in the pocket of some retired police detective's jacket."

Which strikes him as a long shot, because the only reason Tinker could think of for being in Rensselaer was his occasional visits to a bar called Hullabaloo.

"I just talked to my brother and asked him, 'Hey! Did we ever do anything bad in Rensselaer about 30 years ago?' " Tinker said. "I don't think I did anything, and if I did I would think the statute of limitations would have run out by now, unless I killed someone but I never heard anything about that."

Primero said he couldn't remember the specifics surrounding how he obtained the ring, but said it must have occurred "on the job during an investigation or something." The ring band was wrapped in tape, which he thought might indicate it was given to a girl.

Tinker remembers seeing a few girls during high school, but they were from Cohoes and he did not remember giving anyone the ring. And so it remains shrouded in mystery.

"I don't remember; it was so long ago," Tinker said. "I'm anxious to see it."