Buried treasure: How a long lost ring reconnected the family of EWU Hall of Famer Bink Wall with their late father

Through 55 summers, falls, springs and winters, a ring sat on the Tekoa (Washington) Elementary School grounds, relatively undisturbed, just a couple of inches below the surface of the ground.

During that time, Linda Wall grieved the man to whom that ring belonged, gave birth to his second daughter, remarried, bore two more children, moved across the state and raised all those kids into adulthood.

But throughout those years, Linda Wall-Sullivan found that William “Bink” Wall, her first husband, would periodically come rushing back into her life after he was killed during the Vietnam War.

“My main thing was, don’t forget these guys,” Wall-Sullivan said of Wall and others who died serving their country. “They made quite a sacrifice, the ultimate sacrifice. Even though life goes on, we don’t forget.

“And with Bink, every time I don’t think about that any more, he pops up again.”

When Wall-Sullivan, now 78, got a text from a relative explaining that a man named James Murphy had found Bink’s ring, she was eager to talk to him.

“When he told me, his voice was so emotional. He was talking to me about being in the military, and he considered doing this for a fallen military man,” Wall-Sullivan said. “He really wanted to give me the ring back.”

Wall-Sullivan told him she was happy to give him a reward, but Murphy refused.

“A lot of people in our hobby really like reaching out and helping people,” Murphy said. “We like getting out and detecting, and you never know what you’re going to find.

“Being able to return something like this to a family, especially with a story like that, it tugged at my heartstrings.”

‘Big, honking ring’

Originally from Tekoa, Bink went to Eastern Washington State College to play football in 1964. It was there he met Linda.

During his sophomore year, they met at a dance, she a year younger . A year later, they were married.

“He had already committed to the ROTC,” Wall-Sullivan said. “I often think my fate was sealed when I met him, but a lot of our friends were in the same boat.”

Wearing No. 57, Wall was an All-Evergreen Conference linebacker in 1967, the year Eastern finished 11-1 and advanced to the NAIA championship game in West Virginia.

After he was done playing football, Wall stayed on as a graduate assistant at Eastern in 1968, receiving an deferral from the military to do so. Laura, their first daughter, was born that September .

Meanwhile, the Walls also completed their student teaching in Tekoa, which is how, Linda figured, the ring ended up on that playfield.

“I’m not sure he even actually wore it very often,” she said. “It would be just like him to stick it in his pocket.”

James Murphy, now 39, wasn’t around when Wall dropped that ring. But a couple of months ago, in May, Murphy found himself on that same field, digging in a plug.

“I pulled the plug up, and saw a ring,” Murphy said. “I thought it was gold, and I could see it was a class ring.”

Fellow treasure hunter Tom Traffas, 65, was with Murphy.

“It was a big, honking ring,” Murphy said. “This guy had monster-sized fingers.”

Murphy and Traffas belong to a local group called the Northwest Medal Hunters. Their hobby leads them to various small towns, seeing “if we can’t save history,” Murphy said.

“I hate to see things rot away in the ground,” he said.

But this ring puzzled Murphy. On the inside of the ring he could see clearly the letters “MBM,” and it was also evidently connected to Eastern Washington. Murphy found a digital copy of a college yearbook, but he struck out as he investigated anyone with those initials.

Then someone pointed out to him that the initials might be upside down, and quickly his search, which by then had spanned three or four days, bore fruit.

“I came across Bink’s obituary, and that about brought me to tears,” Murphy said. “It said he was from Tekoa, and I knew this had to be him.”

‘Shock to everyone’

After student teaching, Wall was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army and was sent to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where he and Linda stayed until November 1969. They came back to Spokane in mid-January, and then Wall left for Vietnam. Linda was pregnant.

Wall never came home. He was killed in action on April 1, 1970. His funeral was held on April 12, and two days later, Stephanie was born.

“The day after Stephanie was born, there was a photo of me and the baby in the paper,” Linda said. “Eastern was one of the better teams in the Evergreen Conference. When he was killed, it was a shock for everyone.”

A couple of months later, a reporter from The Spokesman-Review asked Linda if he could interview her. She agreed, and the story that followed led Linda to network with a few other widows.

“The interesting thing about that story is it really touched a lot of people, and my mother got a call from another young woman’s mother whose husband also had been killed, and she was really struggling,” Linda said. “Her mother wanted to know if I’d be willing to talk to her daughter, and of course I was, and that led to us reaching out to others, about five of us, whose husbands were officers who had died. We were able to form a little support group. We all had young children.”

Laura Wall was 18 months old when her father was killed, so any memories she has of her father have been passed on to her from others. But when she found out that Wall’s ring had been found, it was just another example of how her father “keeps popping up,” she said.

“I’ve always had a connection to him, much more so than Stephanie,” Laura said of her younger sister. “It’s interesting that that little bit of time gives you this (different) feeling of family.”

And yet, when the two daughters heard about the ring’s discovery, they both cried, Laura said, as their emotional bond with their father came rushing back.

For Laura, too, the recollection of her father’s life and death cannot help but be connected to the death of her own husband, Vance. He died two years ago, on April 1, the same day Wall was killed in Vietnam.

“I’ve said that grief recognizes grief,” Laura said. “When you lose someone in your inner circle, you grieve a little differently, and the future that you envisioned that you were going to have with this person – child, spouse, brother, sister – is ripped away, your heart and soul recognizes that in another human being going through it.

“When Vance died, it was awful. And I cried a ton with my parents and my mom, who said, ‘I thought this wouldn’t happen because I lost your dad.’ A soul knows when another has this sense of loss.”

Murphy knows that feeling. He lost a child two years ago.

“Being on the other side of the spectrum, I know what his parents went through when they lost Bink,” Murphy said. “(Wall’s story) hit me even harder because he had two daughters who didn’t get to know their dad.”

Murphy was eager to return the ring to Wall’s family. Conveniently, a reunion was scheduled in June for any Tekoa High School graduates from the 1960s. Wall’s family would be there.

Murphy came out on stage and presented the ring to the family. Linda was there, as well as three of Wall’s sisters, his last living brother, and Laura, his oldest daughter.

“It was really a big relief,” Murphy said. “I was worried I’d get a little emotional. I had to give a little speech. It worked out OK. It felt like the journey from ‘Lord of the Rings.’ ”

Eastern Washington’s athletic department got involved and nested the ring in a special box, which Laura and Stephanie have.

“That ring is huge,” Laura said. “I couldn’t believe it was that big.”

Linda was struck by the lengths to which Murphy went to discover the ring’s origins.

“It was his quest that brought it back to (us),” Linda said.

Same personality

Wall’s ring is just one of the ways in which the former football player’s legacy lives on at EWU.

The Eastern strength and conditioning center is named in Wall’s honor, and he was also selected as a member of Eastern’s “100 for 100” all-time football team. His biography page on Eastern’s Hall of Fame website says that Wall, whose full name was William Penn Wall III, got his nickname from his aunt, who called him that because he liked his binky.

Jordan Purvis knows that strength and conditioning center well. Purvis is the son of Wall’s daughter, Stephanie, and after playing football at Napavine (Washington) High School, Purvis spent one season (2019) playing football in the same program in which his grandfather earned such renown.

“My nana has always told me we have the same personality,” Purvis said. “We’ve even joked that I am a reincarnated version of Bink, because if you look at side-by-side pictures, we have distinct characteristics: wide ears, a deviated septum. His pinky bent out like mine.”

When Purvis heard that his grandfather’s ring had been found, he felt real, raw emotion, he said. Like his mother and aunt, the 25-year-old Purvis – one year older than Wall was when he was killed – has to rely on others’ memories to stand in for his own. This ring provides him with another connection to the past.

Chalk it up as just another way Wall keeps popping up.

“Anything that’s related to him, it’s like taking a step closer to him in a way,” Purvis said. “It’s one more thing that represents who he was.”