Rewind the time to 1926. Imagine that you are a teenager with a full life of opportunity before you. Your birthday is today.
You throw a message in a bottle into the nearby river as a gift to yourself, watching it float away
from view without knowing if or when the bright-eyed youngster you are now will reunite with the man you’ll someday become.
Even if the circumstances may not have been exactly the same, 95 years later the message, if not the bottle, has at last returned home.
From her boat, the Yankee Sunshine, captain Jennifer Dowker of Michigan-based Nautical North Family Adventures spends her summers scuba diving and leading shipwreck tours.
She was maintaining the glass-bottom window underwater when she discovered an intriguing curio on the riverbank. She was a passionate collector.
Dowker was initially drawn to the bottle because of its odd antique shape and green glass, but upon closer investigation she realized the item was more.
She and her crew discovered the note inside the bottle had endured an incredible nine plus decades in the water, despite being dented and slightly water-logged.
It stated: ‘November 1926’
Will the finder of this bottle deliver this paper to George Morrow Cheboygan, Michigan and provide the location information?
After someone uploaded a photo of the long-missing letter to Facebook, information quickly spread.
After more than 100,000 likes and 6,000 comments, a curious reader tracked out Morrow’s daughter Michele Primeau
(who ‘doesn’t do Facebook’) to share the news with her and provide Dowker’s contact information.
Although Morrow passed away in 1995, Primeau was able to identify her father’s writing. She claimed that delivering a message in a bottle
was perfectly in keeping with his sentimental nature because he had a habit of hiding small notes in unexpected places.
‘I can just see him going out and doing that because it was his birthday,’ Primeau said to CNN. ‘I can’t say with certainty. But he simply sounds like he would have done it.
Dowker first promised to mail Primeau the souvenirs, but after giving the matter some thought, Primeau decided a ‘finders keepers’ policy would best honor her father’s legacy.
According to Primeau, giving it to her was the ‘right thing to do.’ Primeau told CNN. ‘She found it, and that would preserve the memory of my dad.’
In fact, Dowker intends to keep Morrow’s legacy alive by displaying the mementos prominently and sharing
the tale behind them. Primeau has scheduled a trip to see the family heirlooms in person in September.
Now, this entire incident took place over Father’s Day weekend, so it may have just been a coincidence.
She claims it brought back a ton of beautiful memories, even if it wasn’t George Morrow’s way of showing his young child that he was still looking out for her all these years later.