SAFETY HARBOR, Fla. — While cleaning up debris left by Hurricane Debby in Safety Harbor, an Odessa woman uncovered a WWII-era message in a bottle, sparking national interest into its authenticity and how it got there.
Now weeks later, 10 Tampa Bay has uncovered the keys to unlock the mystery. Here’s what we know:
Suzanne Flament-Smith found the bottle filled with sand and other trinkets like a shell casing, along with the letter dated March 4, 1945.
The cursive writing was etched on a worn piece of paper, next to a U.S. Navy letterhead from the Amphibious Training Base in Little Creek, Virginia:
Dear Lee,
Received your letter yesterday was glad to hear from you. So you got a little lit up the other day. Well that is an every day thing around here, they have a bar and they have pretty good beer. Bud + Schlitz…
They are all pretty good, I get happy every night I’m on the base.
I’m going to school again. Radio School, it seems to be a lot of fun.
Who is your dream girl now.
Well Lee, I have to fall out for school now, but I’ll write again tomorrow, and tell you how I made out in Norfolk.
Your pal,
Jim.
Most of the words were hard to make out. Who were Lee and Jim? And how did their conversation end up in Safety Harbor 80 years later?
“There is a sense of excitement, and also like a story, a story that hopefully we can find its home,” Flament-Smith said.
10 Tampa Bay reached out to the U.S. Navy History and Heritage Command as well as the Little Creek Virginia Base, leaving no stone unturned.
The Navy said the letter appeared legitimate, but they had their doubts it was in the bottle for that long, adding it would be hard to determine who exactly sent the letter without last names.
Now weeks later there was a breakthrough when a viewer sent us a Facebook post from March.
"About to drop this 80-year-old letter in a bottle," a woman wrote alongside pictures of a different letter from the same time and to the same recipient, Lee.
10 Tampa Bay found her address and number, trying to see if she held the clues we needed.
She didn’t respond but hours later we got a text message from a different number.
“Hi Aaron, I heard you want to know more about this,” it read, following up with a picture of the original letter Suzanne found.
Yes, I did.
“I was just going to remain anonymous,” said Mike Meyer, who sat down with us at a bar in downtown Safety Harbor to talk about his dad, late Army veteran Lee Meyer.
“My father died in 2001, and I had this box of letters for 23 years, and I’ve read them hundreds of times,” Meyer explained.
His dad was 16 during WWII. His buddies, all a couple of years older from the same small town of Evansville, Illinois, enlisted during the war.
“They were in every theatre,” Meyer said. “In Italy, they were in France, they were in the Pacific, and they just told the story of World War Two, what it was like for them."
Stories ranged from what it was like living in France after Hitler’s surrender, wants of deployment to fight Japan in the Pacific and even the more mundane, like which drinks they were enjoying, girls they were chasing and conversation like any group of guys would have today. Albeit handwritten in cursive in stamped envelopes and sent to towns before zip codes.
“They kept in touch that way. And I know they all wrote a lot of letters, I could tell, because I'd see the same guys writing over and over again, just like two weeks apart,” Meyer said.
“My dad kept them for a reason,” adding he didn’t know about them till after he passed.
“I felt like, if you can hold history in your hands, you can understand it a whole lot better, and you'll get a much, much better feel for it,” Meyer said.
Being a history buff himself, Meyer wanted others to get the same unique experience he did.
“I wanted to preserve them, but at the same time, I wanted to share them, and I could have given them to a museum or anything like that, but people like surprises,” he explained.
So earlier this year, Meyer filled up some bottles with the treasured stories of American history, launching them into Old Tampa Bay, hoping one day someone, somewhere might stumble across them.
“I wanted to spread the joy pretty much. And I knew people get excited when they find things like this, because it's history, and that was just my only thought,” Meyer said, noting he kept some of the letters for himself.
The irony is the bottle didn’t travel too far when it was discovered months later, but in the end, his dad’s letter brought joy and excitement to a local family and now has been seen by many others across the nation.
Mission accomplished.
Mike says the original letter was sent by a man named Jim Peters, he’s hoping he can still find some of his relatives who may be in the area of Evansville, Illinois.
If you come across other bottles he sent out, email us at tips@10tampabay.com