NOTE: Jim Watson is the author of “Mysterious Island: Catalina.”
Just about every kid at one time or another has dreamed of stuffing a secret message into an empty bottle and tossing it into the sea for the winds to carry hither and yon.
Funny I should mention that, because just such an idea occurred to just such a kid one day back during the Fourth of July weekend of 1958. That “kid” was our own Chuck Liddell of this very newspaper’s Time Capsule column.
NOTE: Jim Watson is the author of “Mysterious Island: Catalina.”
Just about every kid at one time or another has dreamed of stuffing a secret message into an empty bottle and tossing it into the sea for the winds to carry hither and yon.
Funny I should mention that, because just such an idea occurred to just such a kid one day back during the Fourth of July weekend of 1958. That “kid” was our own Chuck Liddell of this very newspaper’s Time Capsule column.
His idea eventually led to two separate campaigns of sending messages in bottles from Catalina Island into the vast Pacific Ocean. In turn, those two events spawned a number of fascinating human interest stories, including one in particular that puts this tale truly into the realm of the mysterious.
As was their usual custom, the Liddells—including father Orval, brother Bill and, of course, Chuck—would head up to the Isthmus on the Fourth of July in the family boat “Kapu.”
Evidently in those pre-eco days it was the custom of partiers to simply toss their empty booze bottles overboard once those bottles had served their purpose. It was that armada of floating empties through which the Kapu had to sail that gave Chuck his idea.
“There were so many bottles in the water that I had to sit on the bow to make sure we didn’t hit any of them,” said Chuck. “That’s when Dad said they must have really been partying at the Isthmus last night, but I asked myself ‘How do we know they all came from the party?’” It was this question that got Chuck scheming up a plan: just exactly where and how far would a bottle dumped into the Pacific Ocean at Catalina Island travel and how long would it take to get there?
Within two months, Chuck and his cohorts were busy preparing 50 bottles for deployment in the waters around the Island. Each bottle contained a greeting of sorts, a form for the finder to fill out that included time, date and location information, as well as a self-addressed stamped envelope.
The first 35 bottles went off the stern of the Kapu in mid-channel that August. The balance of 15 bottles was subsequently secreted by Chuck over the stern rail of the S.S. Catalina. In took two trips on the Catalina to accomplish this without raising the suspicions of the crew.
Almost immediately, return letters started coming in from Southern California locales, including letters from several boaters who had actually fished the bottles out of the channel not far from where they had been deposited.
Within a week or so, five or six forms had been returned. “My father thought these people must have been right behind our boat when we dumped the bottles in,” said Chuck, noting that the time and date on the return forms was almost exactly the same time that bottles were released.
As time wore on, however, discoveries became less and less frequent. However, they also started coming from more and more distant locations, including a handful from the Pacific Coast of Mexico.
Then, there was a period of two or three years where nothing at all was heard until a fisherman in the Philippines pulled up his net and, lo and behold, found one of Chuck’s bottles!
One of the most interesting returns came from the state of Oregon of all places. Based on the prevailing currents of the North Pacific, and assuming that a prank was not involved, the only way this bottle could have travelled from Southern California to Oregon would have been a grand circuit down the North Equatorial Current perhaps as far as Japan, then north along the North Pacific Current to the Oregon coast, a distance of perhaps 10,000 miles. This bottle was found about four years after launch.
The final discovery was made in 1964 by a U.S. Navy lieutenant who found one of Chuck’s bottles on the South Pacific island of Palau where he was stationed. A photograph of this officer holding Chuck’s bottle on an exotic beach survives in the collections of the Catalina Island Museum.
A total of 10 bottles from the 1958 batch were ultimately reported back to Chuck. As of this writing, no other bottle from the “Class of ‘58” has ever been found, or at least reported.
Fast forward now to the mid-1970s when a committee of islanders, including Malcolm and Virginia Renton, were planning how Catalina Island could best celebrate the nation’s bicentennial in 1976.
Chuck inadvertently walked into the meeting and noticed the group was apparently frustrated by what they seemed to think was a lack of original ideas for the planned celebration. So Chuck resurrected his old message-in-a-bottle idea. His suggestion went over well with the group and the game was on.
That game would consist of filling 201 empty bottles (representing the years 1776 through 1976) with a message asking that the finder mail in information such as date, time and, of course, location of the find. The finder’s reward would be one of those crisp, brand new $2 bills that the Treasury was putting out in those days. Each bottle and its message (written in both English and Spanish) would be sponsored by a local business or individual.
In order to get enough empty bottles, Chuck enlisted the assistance of a small army of local youngsters to round them up from local bars. “It was hysterical,” said Chuck, “because I had to get permission from the parents for their kids to go into these liquor stores and bars to get the bottles.”
Learning from the 1958 attempt, Chuck decided to use bottles with colored glass rather than clear glass to minimize the sun’s damage to the messages inside. He also filled the bottom of each bottle with an inch or two of sand to keep the bottle floating upright. This would not only further limit the sun’s wrath on its contents, the vertical attitude of the bottle it would also make it much more visible to potential discoverers.
Finally, each bottle was sealed with red sealing wax.
On the appointed day, the Fourth of July of 1976, while celebrations were being held all around the nation, Chuck and his contingent of 201 sponsors stood on the stern of a Catalina Cruises boat in the middle of the channel and ceremoniously tossed their individual bottles into the sea one by one.
As Chuck called off each year in sequential order from 1776 to 1976, the appropriate bottle-wielding sponsor would step forward and hurl their bottle and its message into the channel.
One by one the bottles were thrown over the stern. And one by one, the tiny messages in their tiny glass vessels drifted into the vast unknown.
NEXT WEEK: MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE, PART 2
