The news these days is often depressing at worst and frustrating at best. It’s easy to get caught up in the spin cycle and let it get us down. Never fear… The News Blender has you covered. Once a week we feature Something Good and, in return, all you have to do is tell us something good that has happened to you this week, something you are thankful for, a joke, a cute animal story, an inspiring tale of heroics, a Random Act of Kindness… SOMETHING good.
Today’s something good is a message in a bottle and a belated Father’s Day story.
Captain Jennifer Dowker, owner of Nautical North Family Adventures, took a dive into the Cheboygan River last Friday to clean the bottom of Yankee Sunshine, her glass-bottomed boat, last Friday evening. The windows needed cleaning in preparation for her upcoming summer ship wreck tours. She often has found interesting items on the river bottom and her latest dive was no exception, according to CNN.
On top of a fish bed, she saw an old green bottle. When Jennifer noticed a paper in it, she excitedly realized she had found a message in a bottle. The cork was deteriorated and, with the seal broken, the bottle was 2/3 filled with water but the paper and message on it were intact.
The 95 year old note was written in November 1926 by George Morrow.
“Will the person who finds this bottle return this paper to George Morrow Cheboygan, Michigan and tell where it was found?”
The Captain put pictures of the note on her Facebook page before she went to bed that night, hoping she could find someone related to George and give them the letter. By the next morning her post had blown up, in the way these sorts of stories do, and news of the discovery spread.
On Saturday, a complete stranger who had seen Jennifer’s Facebook post, tracked down and called Michele Primeau, George’s daughter, out of the blue to tell her about the note. On Father’s Day, Michele called Jennifer.
Michele recognized her father’s writing and said he would have been 17 or 18 in November 1926. His birthday is in November and Michele speculates that he might have braved the cold to throw the bottle into the river on his birthday. She says it’s the kind of thing he did: he once left a note in their basement wall when they were remodeling and on a family camping trip, he threw another message in a bottle into Lake Huron.
George died in 1995 and Jennifer’s discovery has brought back good memories for Michele. “So he’s been gone a long time, but it was kind of cool because all this happened on Father’s Day weekend,” she said.
Jennifer wanted to give Michele the bottle and note and, initially, Michele wanted it. But she thought about it and changed her mind. She decided she wants Jennifer to keep it instead. She said, “I thought the right thing to do would be to give it to her. She found it and that would keep my dad’s name living on.”
Michele plans on traveling to Cheboygan in September to meet with Jennifer to see the note her father wrote 95 years ago. Jennifer will have the note and bottle displayed in a shadowbox and hung in either the boat or the Nautical North Family Adventures’ gift shop for all to see.
And she says Michele has a lifetime pass on Yankee Sunshine.
A message in a bottle is something good. Now it’s your turn… tell me something good!
