Suzanne Flament-Smith dropped off her daughter at a Florida high school volleyball practice and went for a walk, waiting for the team to finish.
For her stroll, she picked Bayshore Boulevard. The road runs along the water in Safety Harbor, about 5 miles outside of Tampa, Florida. Typically a scenic spot, it was littered with debris brought ashore by Hurricane Debby. Discarded cans, old sunscreen and waterlogged gunk lay in heaps.
Flament-Smith began filling trash bags, then spotted a peculiarity: An old-timey and weatherworn but clear and corked bottle amid the garbage.
She leaned in and looked through the glass.
Oh wow, she thought, I think I’ve found something special!
She had. It was a message in a bottle, handwritten under the letterhead “United States Navy, Amphibious Training Base, Little Creek, Virginia.” The date on the letter: “3/4/1945.”
But Flament-Smith didn’t open it immediately. She waited, picked up her daughter, drove home for her husband to see and FaceTimed her son at Furman University before pulling the cork.
“Surprisingly, there was no smell,” she recalled in an interview.
Inside the bottle, the piece of paper was folded in thirds. With it were three other objects.
There was an empty bullet casing with no identifying markings or an engraved caliber.
A circular hunk of metal, the size of a bubblegum ball, rolled around the bottom.
And a thin piece of wood, similar to a coffee stirrer, leaned against the neck of the bottle.
Flament-Smith and her family tried to use the piece of wood to remove the letter from the bottle, gave up, broke the bottle and, reading the letter, were shocked by its date: March 1945.
In photos, the letter appears to have been written with a fountain pen. Fading, the uneven scrawl and occasional misspellings make parts of it hard to read.
But it began, “Dear Lee,”
“Recieved your letter yesterday, was glad to hear from you. So you got a little lit up the other day. Well that is a every day thing around here they have a bar and they have pretty good beer.”
“Bud,” the serviceman writes. Schlitz, perhaps. And “old fiful, Pale Ail.”
“I get happy every night I’m on the base.”
The base — now known as Little Creek — was new, established in the early 1940s on the southern shore of the Chesapeake Bay as a training ground for amphibious craft and assault tactics. Sailors, soldiers and Marines trained there, a few hundred thousand of them, the Navy says, some ending up at Normandy.
The letter writer explains he’s now “in Radio School” before asking his friend about a liaison and, then, “Who is your dream girl now.”
“Well Lee,” he continues, “I have to fall out for school now but will write again to morrow, and tell you how I made out in Norfolk tonigh.”
He explains: “Boy I got a little Red haid boy she is all right.”
He closes: “Your pal, …”
The signature is difficult to discern.
“Jim,” perhaps.
Whether the letter has been afloat for nearly 80 years or was placed in the bottle long after it was written, the message reveals: Some topics of conversation, between old friends, are eternal.
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