Mystery solved.
The source of a letter — written in 1945 by a serviceman stationed in Hampton Roads and found last month in Florida — has been identified.
Mike Meyer, 65, lives in Safety Harbor, Florida, and said he put the letter in the bottle and sent it out to sea earlier this year.
Meyer’s father was born in 1929 and was too young to join the military until the end of World War II but often wrote and received letters from older friends who’d left their Illinois hometown to enlist. One buddy, Jim Peters, wrote to Meyer’s father, Leroy, on March 4, 1945. The message was jotted in cursive underneath the letterhead “United States Navy, Amphibious Training Base, Little Creek, Virginia.”
That letter and bottle were found on the side of a Safety Harbor road last month by Suzanne Flament-Smith amid storm debris after Hurricane Debby. It had been washed back ashore not far from where it was let go.
The bottle also contained some sand, a bullet casing and a circular hunk of metal that Flament-Smith described as “about the size of a Whopper candy.” She quickly took to social media to share her discovery and a question: Where had it come from?
The Virginian-Pilot and Daily Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post and dozens of other news outlets wrote or carried stories about the curiosity.
“I didn’t think it was that big a deal,” Meyer told The Pilot about the fuss over his dad’s old letter.
“I guess the first thing is …” he said, and then he unraveled the mystery. Leroy Meyer stored many of his wartime correspondences in a box that was passed down to his children after he died in 2001. The letters were stored at his daughter’s home until Mike got them several years ago.
Mike Meyer read and reread his father’s letters. Some had been sent from soldiers overseas. One was from a girlfriend working in a factory that made Lockheed P-38 Lightning airplanes. He came to consider them historical documents and a friend’s recent retirement sparked an idea of how to share them with the world.
“She had sold her business and was throwing away some rare inventory,” he said. “She had all these Message-in-a-Bottle kits.”
Keeping his 10 favorites, he put 40 of his dad’s letters into the kits — one letter per bottle — and this spring began launching them, a few at a time, several times a week, watching through a pair of binoculars as they floated out on the tide.
“I usually put something shiny in there so they were more likely to be seen.”
He put a shell casing and a ball bearing in a bottle on April 16 along with the March 4, 1945 letter.
“I just turned it loose.”
Colin Warren-Hicks, 919-818-8138, colin.warrenhicks@virginiamedia.com
