A letter written in 1945 from a naval base in Virginia wound up in a glass bottle more than 800 miles away in Florida, where it was found last week — nearly eight decades later — after Hurricane Debby swept a swath of the state.
The letter was addressed to someone named Lee from someone named Chris. But it was Suzanne Flament-Smith, 46, of Tampa, Florida, who found it Wednesday.
By then, the storm had passed Florida, leaving a trail of debris in its path. In an interview Monday, Flament-Smith said she was in Safety Harbor, Florida, just west of Tampa, on Wednesday when she saw how much litter the storm had left behind.
“There was so much trash,” she said, “water bottles, sunscreen bottles, Crocs, a lot of random articles, too.”
Flament-Smith, who keeps trash bags in her car, said she had extra time Wednesday while her daughter was at volleyball practice, so she decided to clean up. She was filling up a third bag when she came across a bottle with a letter inside. She decided to wait until she got home to open the bottle.
“I didn’t want to open it there,” she said. “I wanted to be respectful of what was in it. I didn’t know what specifically was in it, so I wanted to make sure when I opened it, I was somewhere where I could keep all its contents.”
What she found was the letter from Chris to Lee, dated March 4, 1945. Atop the message was a letterhead from the United States Navy Amphibious Training Base in Little Creek, Virginia.
“We didn’t really know what we had stumbled across,” Flament-Smith said. “I never in my wildest dreams thought it would be a message from 80 years ago.”
Also found inside the bottle were a bullet casing and a miniature cannonball, Flament-Smith said.
“We were kind of beside ourselves,” she said.
The letter, which was written in cursive, is worn, creased and browned in spots, making parts of it difficult to read. Chris starts the letter to Lee by writing, “Received your letter yesterday, was glad to hear from you.”
Chris went on to write, “I’m going to school again, radio school.”
For now, little is known about who Chris and Lee were or how the bottle ended up in Florida. If the bottle floated there on its own, it would have had to travel down the Atlantic Ocean along the East Coast before making its way up the western coast of Florida and then into Old Tampa Bay along the shores of Safety Harbor.
Flament-Smith said that she had contacted the Navy in hope of learning more about who the letter was from, or returning it to the family of Chris or Lee.
The base in Little Creek was built during World World II, and it was commissioned Aug. 10, 1945, according to the Navy. During the war, more than 200,000 Naval workers along with 160,000 Army and Marine Corps trained at the base, which is known today as Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story.
Flament-Smith said she’s hopeful that the letter can find its proper home, and that she was glad she had taken some time to pick up trash.
“There’s always little treasures in life,” she said. “Sometimes you just have to make an effort to look for them.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
