They met, pre-arranged, at the Wal-Mart parking lot in Vernon. Wayne Aasen climbed out of his beater truck clutching the letter and ring.

He handed it over to Bill Warwick, who had driven in from his home in Edmonton, where he works in the petroleum business. The rightful owner now had the letter and ring, some 39 years later.

The happy ending came about more than a year after The Morning Star published a story revealing how Aasen had been given a 1941 Allan Cup ring by Grant (Knobby) Warwick while on a summer vacation with his folks.

“Somebody in Salmon Arm read the article in the newspaper and got me his number,” said Aasen. “I think he thought I was going to charge him because he sent me a letter saying, ‘I hope you do the right thing.’ He was glad he got the ring and the letter his dad wrote, back.”

Aasen was 12 when he met future NHL star Grant Warwick. The Regina-born right winger, in an over-the-top gesture, gave Aasen his Allan Cup ring, jewelry presented annually to the top senior hockey team in Canada.

Warwick had earned six goals and 15 points with the Allan Cup champion Regina Rangers before joining the NHL New York Rangers the next season, receiving the Calder Cup as the league’s top rookie.

“We were on a family vacation in 1971,” recalled Aasen. “My dad (Gord) was a truck driver and he always wanted to drive the Alaska Highway. So he and my mom (Kaye) loaded up us three kids in a ‘67 Dodge Monaco and we headed to the Yukon on the unpaved Alaskan Highway.

“It was shale and we had lots of flat tires along the way. We stopped to go camping near the Yukon-B.C. border and this guy came over and sat down at our picnic table and started talking to us. He gave me a pair of muck lucks, and just out of the blue, he was showing me this ring and asked me if I wanted it.”

Aasen said his parents received a letter from Warwick asking for the ring back.

“He wanted his son, who I believe was living in Kamloops at the time, to have it,” said Aasen, whose parents misplaced the letter and ring in their Richmond home.

Aasen was sifting through some of his mother’s belongings shortly after she died last November, and found the letter.

“Unfortunately, she never got to see that we got the ring and letter back to the Warwick family,” said Wayne, a 50-year-old employed by the North Okanagan Youth Soccer Association. “She would have been really happy about that.”

The ring, which bears, in script writing, the name Grant Warwick inside the base, is in excellent condition.

As a player-coach, Warwick helped the Penticton Vees beat the Soviet Union and win the 1955 world hockey championship. Two years earlier, volunteers from the Penticton fan club raised $1,300 by passing the hat at a game to help pay for Warwick’s release from the American Hockey League Buffalo Bisons.

Often in the doghouse in Boston for taking too many penalties, Warwick was welcomed with open arms in Montreal, where he played on a line with Billy Reay. He played 395 NHL games, pocketing 147 goals and 289 points.

Warwick, whose brother Bill also played professional hockey, died in 1999 at age 77.