SAFETY HARBOR, Fla. — In communities like Safety Harbor, storm surge from Hurricane Debby washed debris and litter ashore. Among that trash, a local woman found what could be a piece of history nearly 80 years old.
Suzanne Flament-Smith says she was walking on Bayshore Boulevard on Wednesday when she noticed just how much trash there was.
“There was so much plastic. I'm like, Okay, this is driving me crazy,” Flament-Smith said. “I usually keep a trash bag and gloves in my car.”
She jokes, “I decided to make myself useful.”
“On my third bag, as I was filling it up, I noticed a glass bottle, and you could see the writing, the note and the scripture, I was like, oh my goodness, I think I just found a message in a bottle,” she explained.
Not any ordinary litter, she kept it safe and took it home to crack open with her family.
“There were contents in the bottle, there was sand, a few shells, a bullet casing, and like a mini cannon ball,” Flament-Smith explained.
But the real prize was the note inside, cursive ink etched on an old piece of paper, most of the words faded by the sun and time.
“Dear Lee, received your letter yesterday was glad to hear from you,” Suzanne read.
What she can make out seems like a message from someone named Chris to a friend named Lee.
“I’m going to school again, radio school,” it reads.
What’s unmistakable is the date, “3/4/45” etched next to a U.S. Navy letterhead from the Amphibious Training Base in Little Creek, Virginia.
“It appeared to be a navy military to a friend of some sort, because it mentioned how he wants to see him soon, and things like that,” Flament-Smith explained.
More than 800 miles away from Safety Harbor, Florida, that same naval base still stands, albeit with a slightly different name: Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story.
“We were established because with World War II going on, they needed a place to train amphibious forces like the folks who landed on D-Day on Normandy 80 years ago,” said April Phillips, a Navy public affairs officer.
10 Tampa Bay told Phillips about Suzanne’s incredible discovery. She says they are looking into the letter to see if they can determine the authenticity and the author.
“We’re going to some sleuthing and see what we can track down and I can’t wait for this journey to discover what we are going to learn,” said Phillips, adding that the letter could be a first-person account dating back to when the base first opened in the 1940s.
In an update Friday afternoon, the Navy told 10 Tampa Bay while it can't authenticate the letter without last names, the letterhead appears legitimate and from that time period.
"Unfortunately, we will be unable to accurately authenticate this letter. Since we don’t have any last names, we don’t have a way to find out information about Lee or James(?) or able to confirm that James(?) worked at the base. However, based on what we could find it is possible for a letter head such as this to have existed in March of 1945," it said.
Suzanne’s good deed of cleaning up may have unearthed a unique piece of history, one she hopes can be shared with those close to the mystery.
“Well, I try to tell my kids if you do good, good things happen," she said. “There is a sense of excitement, and also like a story, a story that hopefully we can find its home."