A childhood prank floated back into Allison Spencer’s life 53 years later, and with it came a reminder of the sister she still misses.
Spencer says her mother sent her and her younger sister Laurie to the beach in Ocean City, New Jersey, in 1973 with a simple task: write a message in a bottle and throw it into the ocean.
“She was always looking for ways to get us outside, out of the house,” Spencer told As It Happens guest host Loren McInnis.
Laurie was nine. Allison was 16. Spencer said Laurie invented a story about being kidnapped by “ruthless sponge fishermen,” and Spencer wrote it down before they sealed it in a Coca-Cola bottle and set it adrift.
“I’m sure we expected it to be found pretty quickly,” Spencer told As It Happens guest host Loren McInnis. “When it wasn’t, I never gave it another thought for 53 years.”
Last month, John Kauterman found the bottle while cleaning up wetlands in New Jersey.
“When John showed me a picture of the note, it shocked me into remembrance,” Spencer said. “My sister passed away nine years ago. She had breast cancer, and she died only in her 50s and I really miss her a lot. So it’s really a wonderful, special thing to me that the note came back.”
Kauterman is co-founder of the non-profit Tidelands Initiative and said he has been picking up trash in the state’s wetlands for several years. He said he finds messages in bottles regularly.
“I can come across possibly one a week, or one a month,” he said.
But he said this one caught his attention straight away.
“I was like, ‘wow … the bottle’s old,’” he said. “I peeked into it and I could see the first line that said, ‘This was set adrift on August 20th, 1973.’ And I was like, oh my gosh, yeah, we got a good one here.”
He removed the note and posted a photo of it on a local Facebook page. Spencer, who now lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, soon saw it.
The letter reads: “This bottle was set adrift on August 20th, 1973, on Second Street Beach, Ocean City, as my captors were transporting me to an island offshore in the Atlantic. Please notify my family that a band of ruthless sponge fishermen are forcing me to dive for them in shark-infested waters. Please return this note to my home.”
It is signed: “You may have saved my life! Thank you! Laurie Blair.”
“It was classic Laurie,” Spencer said. “Laurie’s the one with the imagination and always coming up with crazy stories. It seems very miraculous to me that this note came back to me.”
Spencer, a lifelong biology teacher, said she has since struck up a friendship with Kauterman and hopes to visit him the next time she is in New Jersey.
“I believe that the series of events that result in a miracle are first set into when people with good hearts are doing good works. And that is John,” she said. “Anyone who’s taking care of the environment is tops in my book, and then the fact that he cared enough to try and reach out and find me is just very special.”
Kauterman said he gets “a little choked up” hearing Spencer speak that way about him.
“She’s really well spoken and just a wonderful lady and, you know, just being able to give her something that she was really grateful for makes all the work a little bit more meaningful,” he said.
Spencer said her sister would have loved the ending.
“She had the best sense of humour,” Spencer said. “She never opened her mouth that a wisecrack didn’t come out, so I think that she would be wildly entertained by these events.”
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