A father’s words in a note is read by his daughter 50 years later.
A long-lost message thrown into the Atlantic inside a bottle almost 50 years ago has finally reached the daughter of its sender who now lives 1,500 miles away in New Hampshire.
According to The Washington Post, the bottled message was discovered by a man named Clint Buffington, a musician and writing teacher from Utah, who went on a vacation in Turks and Caicos, from where he found the message.
Buffington said during an interview, “(I found) this coke bottle half buried in the sand — looked like it had been there since the beginning of time.”
“On the paper, there was something written in pencil — like handwriting — it said, ‘Look inside,’” he added.
When Buffington opened the old bottle, he found a drenched rolled note inside. When he opened it, all that he could understand was “Return to 419 Ocean Boulevard and receive a reward of $150 from Tina, the owner of Beachcomber,” Buffington said.
A determined Buffington wrote an article about finding the bottle in 2011 and also the note that he found rolled inside it. He also opened an opinion poll to find what “Beachcomber” exactly is.
After a lot of research, both online and offline, Buffington found that Beachcomber was a motel located in Hampton. He went there to give the note to Paula Pierce, the daughter of the motel owner who died a few years back. According to Pierce, she was shocked to find something that her father wrote as a joke 50 years back before he threw it to the Atlantic, coming back to her.
“And it just hit me, it was my father’s writing,” Pierce said. “And I was shocked.”
According to Pierce, her parents bought the Beachcomber Motel in Hampton in 1960 and two years back it was sold.
“This is special because it brings back a piece of him, a piece of her, a piece of my childhood, a piece of the Beachcomber,” Pierce said. “All of these things are very hard to lose.”
She insisted on living up to her father’s promise, giving Buffington the reward.