DAVENPORT, Iowa (AP) — At 92, Walter Dray says he has never been happier in his life. His Notre Dame class ring is back on the third finger of his left hand.

It has been missing for 52 years under 20 feet of water in Lake Ripley, near Appleton, Wis., and after all these years it is still a perfect fit.

A diver found the gold ring and it came back to Dray this week after some detective work.

"You just can't imagine how excited I am. I have been looking forward to this since the day I lost it in 1957," Dray says.

The Davenport man graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1940, a time when class rings were precious reminders of student days on the tree-lined Indiana campus.

While swimming with his family, the ring slipped from Dray's finger.

"What a terrible loss that was to me," he says. "Every time I looked at my finger, my treasured ring wasn't there."

It took John MacDonald, a Wisconsin history buff, to find the long-lost ring. He took up underwater diving after retirement, finding dozens of lost rings on lake bottoms. When he died, all the rings went to his son, Drew MacDonald, an attorney in Appleton.

"It's a hobby for me to trace owners of the lost rings through initials, class graduation years and schools," says MacDonald. "One ring was from Notre Dame, but an initial inside was obscure. Still, I checked with the university's alumni office and we figured it was Walter Dray's ring. I called him, and you can't believe how overjoyed he was.

"He was so excited that he called me several times. I told him it would be mailed to him, and he could hardly wait. We developed a telephone friendship, and if it wasn't so far from Appleton to Davenport (300 miles) I would have driven the ring down to him," MacDonald says.

Though it was in the water for decades, the ring is in remarkably good condition.

"I look at the gold and blue sapphire setting (Notre Dame colors) and it shines like new to me," says Dray, who retired as director of engineering at Davenport's Bendix Corp., now Cobham. "My father bought me the ring when I graduated in mechanical engineering."

It likely cost several hundred dollars.

Dray was so proud of the Notre Dame ring that his wife, Peggy, understood when he wore it instead of a wedding ring. The couple was married 66 years.

"I talked about my missing ring all the years that we were married. Strange, but I always knew that some day I'd find it. Peggy died two years ago. She felt the same devotion that I had to the ring. Right up to her death, she told me, 'Walter, some day you'll get your ring back.' "

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Information from: Quad-City Times, http://www.qctimes.com