As I mentioned in an earlier post, my father liked Southwestern jewelry, and that extended to rings. These are all the Indian rings we could find when we went through his and my mother’s stuff while preparing their house for sale.
The ring on the left has mother of pearl. I’m not sure what the green stones are. The next to the right is turquoise. The next one on the right is a coral hummingbird design similar to the watch band design in the earlier post. The last ring is another turquoise design. I can remember my father wearing all of these.
We also found several other rings. Most, or all of these rings were souvenirs that he brought back from Germany after the end of World War II.
My father never wore any of these war souvenirs.
I have no idea what the two on the left are. The second from the left looks like glass, but I don’t know. The third from the left is a lion head design, which apparently was a fairly popular design not necessarily associated with Nazis or the German army. It looks like it might have had a stone or jewel in the lion’s mouth.
The final ring, a totenkopf or death’s head ring, is definitely German military. The sides are decorated with oak leaves and the inscription “west wall.” In this case, the German and English are identical, referring to the German defense of their western front.
I usually associate the death’s head symbol with the German SS, but it was used earlier than the Nazi era, for other units in the WW II German military, and even in the modern US military (showing extraordinarily poor judgment in my view). Unfortunately, some people are attracted to the mystique of the German military that was promoted by Nazi propaganda. Here is a quote from a Web site selling Nazi and WW II German military memorabilia regarding a West Wall death’s head ring: “Here is a ring that can be worn without serious reproach from fools, yet, it bespeaks the valiant struggle of Germany’s best in the crusade that has come to be known as WWII.” You can never tell what sick and sickening thing you can end up finding if you Google something.
The one ring I can’t show is the ring my father wore the most. In fact, he wore it continuously from November 1943 until the day he died in 2000 – his wedding ring. Someone at Floyd Medical Center stole it after he died there.
(On the night I posted about my father’s watch bands, I would his two old Hamilton watches, including his old WW II Army watch. They have to be wound daily, but they’re still running now, although not keeping particularly accurate time.)
These are very interesting and beautiful rings. I especially like the red coral hummingbird one. Lovely design. How outrageous that someone stole your father’s wedding bad. That’s beyond venal. And the website touting Germany’s “valiant struggle” in WWII, well I guess ignorance knows no bounds.
Robin Andrea — The salt in the wound of my father’s stolen wedding ring, was the way the hospital administrator acted when my mother and I went to tell him about it. First you should know that my parents volunteered for a couple of decades at that hospital prior to this. Then, when we went to inform him that someone stole my father’s ring, the administrator acted suspicious of us, as if we had some ulterior motives in telling him. We thought maybe he would apologize and promise to make sure nothing like that ever happened again, which was all we wanted, but no, nothing like that. We don’t use that hospital now.