Editor’s note: Jim Watson is the author of “Mysterious Island: Catalina”
On July 4, 1976, as Bicentennial celebrations were held around the nation, a contingent of two hundred or so Catalina Islanders and friends stood on the stern of a Catalina Cruises ship, ceremoniously tossing bottles into the San Pedro Channel.
Editor’s note: Jim Watson is the author of “Mysterious Island: Catalina”
On July 4, 1976, as Bicentennial celebrations were held around the nation, a contingent of two hundred or so Catalina Islanders and friends stood on the stern of a Catalina Cruises ship, ceremoniously tossing bottles into the San Pedro Channel.
These were no ordinary bottles for each contained within them a message aimed at whomever might find them upon a distant shore, upon a distant sea. Each of the 201 bottles represented each of the years between 1776 and 1976 and each was sponsored by a local business or individual.
In addition to greetings in both English and Spanish, the finder was requested to forward information to an address on Catalina Island, USA, as to just how, when and where the bottle was discovered. The whole point of the effort was to determine how far these bottles might go and how long they might take to get there.
In last week’s column we looked at our story’s protagonist, the Catalina Islander’s own Chuck Liddell, his similar 1958 message-in-a-bottle launch, as well as his motives for organizing the great Bicentennial message-in-a-bottle event. This week we conclude with the results of that effort.
There are a number of interesting “aw shucks” stories and other human interest stories that backdrop the Bicentennial event. I will relate three of them here, not necessarily in chronological order, but rather in order of “weirdness,” finishing with the most astonishing tale of them all.
Unlike the 1958 event where several bottles and their messages were discovered (and reported back to Chuck) almost immediately, the Bicentennial bottle drop started out with an eerie silence that lasted nearly three months. Chuck and his cohorts grew more despairing as the weeks went by, wondering if perhaps any of the bottles would ever turn up.
Finally, the first report came back of a bottle being discovered on a desolate beach about midway down the Baja peninsula.
In the ensuing weeks and months, more and more of the bottles would be found, mostly along beaches in Mexico.
Then a period of about three years went by with no further discoveries until a handful of reports began to trickle in from the South Pacific.
In all, about 75 of the original 201 bottles were found. Ironically, not a single one was discovered (or at least reported) in the United States.
The first interesting anecdote related to the Bicentennial bottles occurred in the early 1990s as Chuck was sitting along the serpentine wall on Front Street. A gentleman approached from nowhere and inquired as to whether or not Chuck was indeed Chuck Liddell.
The man, it seems, was from the U.S. Geological Survey and he was interested in reviewing Chuck’s notes on the discoveries of the bottles in the years since they were launched in 1976. The government man told him that a fire had destroyed nearly all of the government’s tidal records from the late 1970s and that he had tracked Chuck all the way from Washington, D.C., to see if Chuck’s records could fill in any blanks. Chuck was only too happy to oblige.
The next little vignette involves former Avalon Mayor Ray Rydell and his ailing mother. His mother, one of the sponsors of Chuck’s bottles, was literally on her deathbed when she heard the news that her bottle had been discovered on a distant shore.
She had actually been in a coma for some time when her son told her “Mother, they found your Bicentennial bottle.” Despite his mother’s condition, Ray noted a glimpse of a smile on her face.
Literally within hours, she had passed away and Ray was happy to think that one of the last conscious thoughts in her life was that her little bottle had been found.
But the most fascinating message-in-a-bottle story involves former Islander Dorothee Hochberg and an amazing twist of fate that puts her story truly into the Mysterious Island Hall of Fame.
Dorothee and her husband Fred owned property in downtown Avalon for many years. Known locally as the “lady in white” and bearing something of a resemblance to movie star Ingrid Bergman, Dorothee was the sponsor of one of Chuck’s bottles.
The story begins in the middle 1960s when Dorothee and her granddaughter were sitting on a beach in the Santa Barbara area.
“They were sitting there when they noticed a baby seal come up on the beach,” said Chuck. “It appeared to be somewhat sickly or in some kind of distress.”
A group of young boys came upon the seal and, as young boys are wont to do, began teasing and harassing the poor creature.
In short order, the granddaughter brought back some officials from the State Department of Fish and Game and the animal was rescued from this cruelty of nature in the form of small boys.
The spine-tingling conclusion to our tale transpired nearly 15 years later, five years after the bicentennial bottles were launched into the sea.
In 1981, on a distant island in the South Pacific, a fisherman was walking along the beach when he spied a dead seal high above the waterline. Going to investigate, he noticed something interesting under one of the seal’s flippers, as if it the animal was protecting it even in death. It was Dorothee Hochberg’s bottle.
