In August 1973, a mother in New Jersey sent her two daughters, Laurie and Allison, to the beach at Ocean City with something to do. She was always looking for ways to get them out of the house, and that day the assignment was to write a message, put it in a bottle, and throw it in the ocean.
Laurie was nine. Allison was sixteen. Speaking to CBC’s As It Happens more than five decades later, Allison recalled that Laurie came up with the story, and it was not a simple one.
“This bottle was set adrift August 20th, 1973 on Second Street Beach, Ocean City, as my captors were transporting me to an island offshore in the Atlantic,” the note read. “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. You may have saved my life.”
A five-decade journey
Allison did the writing because Laurie was nine and not a strong speller. Laurie signed it and added the family’s full home address in Bernardsville. Then they threw it in.
In June of this year, John Kauterman was cleaning wetlands in Cape May County. He and a friend started a nonprofit called The Tidelands Initiative to clear trash out of the South Jersey marshes, and he pulls bottles out of them regularly. This one was old glass, and he could see the first line through it.
“I was like, wow, the bottle’s old,” he told CBC. “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.”
Making the connection
He correctly assumed the contents were a kid’s joke, and posted photos to a local Ocean City Facebook page. People pointed out there aren’t many sponge divers in the northeastern United States. Within twelve hours, others had tracked down Allison Spencer, now living in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Laurie died of cancer in 2017. She was 52.
Allison recognized her own teenage handwriting immediately, carrying her sister’s words. “My sister, who was a very creative and quirky person, had a really great sense of humor,” she said. “She immediately latched onto this idea, and she came up with the crazy story.”
“I told you so.”
The bottle spent 53 years somewhere before turning up in a marsh, and it came back nine years after the girl who dreamed up its contents had died. Allison thinks Laurie would have been unbearable about it. “She was really confident at the time we wrote it that it was going to be found, so I think she would say, ‘I told you so.’”
One more thing turned up in the sorting out: Kauterman and Laurie share a birthday. Talk about serendipity.
Allison is putting the note in a shadow box as a keepsake.
