Not long ago, the phone rang at the house in the East Texas pine forests where Frank M. Wroblewski was spending a quiet retirement.

The caller, a woman from the Naval Academy, told him that photographs of a gold Class of 1963 ring had just arrived at the school, inside an envelope with a Vietnam postmark. The ring appeared to be inscribed with the name Wroblewski. Had Wroblewski, the woman inquired, perchance lost his ring?

Wroblewski's memory rewound more than three decades to a sweltering day in Vietnam. He had been racing across a rice paddy, bullets tearing past him, when his ring slid off his finger and, seemingly, into oblivion.

"I figured it was gone forever," says Wroblewski, 61. "The farthest thing from my mind was that some lady would call me up and tell me that somebody had my ring."

That lady is Timothy Elizabeth Woodbury, ring sleuth.

From a small office on the second floor of the academy's alumni association, Woodbury, 32, spends part of every day hunting for lost rings and soothing the tattered nerves of bereft graduates.

The heavy hulks of gold are a precious symbol of Annapolis pedigree, dipped in water from the Seven Seas and conferred only on those who survive four punishing years at the officer-training college.

Their value as status symbols is such that graduates - sometimes called ring knockers - have been known to flaunt their Annapolis laurels to lesser mortals by tapping their rings against a table so all can hear. One graduate, astronaut Alan B. Shepard, took his to the moon.

"When I have people reporting rings lost, missing or stolen, they're absolutely sick about it," Woodbury says. "They're just devastated. They don't want a replacement. They want their ring back, and no other ring is going to do."

Woodbury had been hired by the alumni association as a part-time magazine editor in 1998 but pounced on a job, formally called ring bank coordinator, when it opened a year later. "It had fascinated me - the stories of how the rings show up and of getting them home," she says.

No story is quite the same. One ring was lost while snorkeling in Hawaii, another while gardening in Annapolis. One was stolen at a beach party on Malta, another left in a jacket taken to the cleaners in Tucson, Ariz.

There is no formula for predicting where they will turn up. Rings have been found amid several hundred tons of recycled newspapers, on beaches in the Virgin Islands and beneath suburban lawns being dug up to install decks.

Woodbury compiles lost-ring reports from alumni. She fields calls from across the globe from people claiming to have found rings.

And she searches on the Internet. Academy rings auctioned on eBay have fetched as much as $2,000. So Woodbury fires off silver-tongued e-mails to sellers, asking them to cancel the auction and let the original owner negotiate a return of the ring.

She has even sought a hand from the diplomatic community. When the letter from Vietnam arrived, she asked the Vietnamese Embassy in Washington to translate it. She mailed the results to Wroblewski, who began a correspondence with the letter's author, a Vietnamese gold dealer.

When a lost ring surfaces, Woodbury determines its class year by studying photos in a pair of large albums that catalog the design of every class ring since 1869. Ship wheels, anchors and mermaids are common design motifs, but none is alike. Then she scours computer databases for the addresses of original owners or their descendants.

The rate of return is low: Although 500 rings are currently reported missing with her office, just 10 or 20 turn up each year.

Those finds are of such interest to graduates that the alumni magazine runs a regular column called "Ring Story."

To outsiders, the idea of a college having a ring detective defies easy explanation.

"I was pretty shocked to hear they kind of had a department that handles that - I actually just expected a blowoff," says Jared Richardson, a pawnshop owner in Albuquerque, N.M., who bought a Class of 1926 ring from a customer and then worked with Woodbury to return it to the children of its late owner. "Who's to think that the Naval Academy would have a budget for that?"

The academy's alumni association has had a ring bank office since 1982. But Woodbury is the first coordinator to actively look for rings, taking the hunt to the Internet and doubling or tripling the number of recoveries each year.

"eBay is great because it brings sellers out of hiding," she says. But the sellers know the rings' value on the open market, and more often than not they ignore Woodbury's appeals. "Each one is a race: Can I get to a seller before the collectors make their mark? Can I locate the owner before it's too late?"

There is nothing illegal about most of these sales, Woodbury says, because most sellers acquire the rings legitimately. In some cases, rings enter the marketplace when the descendants of graduates auction them as part of an estate sale.

Auction canceled

Woodbury does not mind describing some finds as "coups" - such as the ring that vanished during the attack on Pearl Harbor, only to reappear 60 years later.

The trail warmed last year, when an eBay seller agreed to Woodbury's request to cancel an auction of a 1936 academy ring. He told Woodbury that he wanted $1,000 for it. He would give her a little time to track down the original owner.

The ring bore the name Capt. Harry Boger Stark. The name was in alumni records, but Stark had died two years earlier. Woodbury found his obituary and, in it, the name of Stark's daughter. Woodbury found the daughter's phone number in an Internet directory and called.

Did she know whether her father had ever lost his ring?

Stark's daughter didn't think so. The one he had worn most of his life was accounted for - it had been left to a nephew.

But then she remembered: Her father had told a story of being aboard the West Virginia, docked in Pearl Harbor, on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, when Japanese bombs and torpedoes struck. He dashed onto the deck, leaving his ring behind in his cabin as the ship began to take on water.

Stark survived, and the West Virginia was later refloated. The next year, Stark bought a replacement ring he wore the rest of his life. He had assumed that the original was a goner.

Tempers flared when Stark's daughter first got in touch with the seller. She accused him of dealing in stolen property and demanded that he return the ring for free. The seller recoiled and broke off negotiations.

Then Stark's nephew, Alan Mills, stepped in. He took a cooler tone and simply paid the seller's asking price.

"To me it's a treasured memento of my uncle. It represents a lot of service and honor and heroism," Mills says from his home in California. "The last thing I wanted to do was have the ring go away. It's something that just never comes along a second time."

Despite several e-mails from Mills, the seller would not say how he had acquired the ring or provide clues to its journey since Pearl Harbor. "I'd love to know the actual story," Mills says. But like many of those who recover long-lost rings, he lives with the mystery.

'Crazy obsession'

A committee of midshipmen, working with an artist, designs a class ring during freshman year. Midshipmen buy the finished product from a jewelry maker for about $1,000 each, and the rings make their debut at a ring dance during junior year, when midshipmen and their dates dip them into a binnacle of sea water before slipping them on.

Students who leave or are expelled before graduation must give the rings back. The rules are much the same at other military academies.

The trouble a graduate goes through to earn a ring accounts for a big part of their allure for collectors.

Christopher G. Wright, a New Jersey psychologist who served briefly in the Army, owns 58 Naval Academy rings. The class years range from 1900 to 1994. He has spent about $20,000 on what he calls his "crazy obsession." He has bought replicas from the original jewelry manufacturers and "owned rings" - the most cherished kind, those that once belonged to Annapolis graduates - from antiques shops and eBay.

He displays the collection on a custom-made, black-velvet-and-cherry-wood case in his study. He says he'll leave it to the academy upon his death.

Wright, 53, never went to the academy. But his grandfather, Vice Adm. Carlton Bryant, Class of 1914, did.

Wright has a crisp memory of the day an academy ring first cast its spell. He was 10. He was sitting on a porch on a summer day as his grandfather spun stories of the Navy. The mark of an Annapolis man, Bryant said, was his ring. And then he dropped his lump of gold into his grandson's hands.

"It was relatively worn, and it was filled with symbols that were enchanting," Wright recalls. "I remember it was heavy and sacred. I held it with both hands. I didn't even put it on."

As an adult, he indulged his obsession by spending hours in the dimly lighted die rooms of the original jewelry makers. The result was the historical photo catalog of rings that Woodbury keeps by her side in her office.

Wroblewski, the man who lost his ring dodging bullets in Vietnam, has exchanged several letters with the gold dealer in Vietnam. Each time a letter arrives, Wroblewski drives about an hour to have it translated by a Vietnamese-born Catholic priest in a neighboring parish.

The dealer at first wanted $10,000 but has since lowered his asking price to $5,000. That's still too high for Wroblewski. He lives on a military pension and has worn a replacement ring since his return from Vietnam. But he believes the dealer will lower his price again.

"He correctly assumed it was worth more to me than anyone else in the world, and he correctly assumed I would like to have it back," Wroblewski says. "He incorrectly assumed my degree of attachment."

Later, he grows more sentimental. "To lose it and get it back after 30-some years would be a hell of a story," he says. "I'd be so delighted just to hold it again."

Woodbury wants Wroblewski to get his ring back, too, for the glory of it. "It would be quite an accomplishment to get that home," she says. "It would be a coup, for sure."