The message on Jerry Doyle's answering machine Thursday afternoon was from her son
"Mother," it said. "This is Steve. We found the medallion. I'll talk to you later."
When they were kids, Steve Doyle and his sister, Maureen Hursey, hated looking for the Winter Carnival medallion with their parents, who dragged them all over St. Paul hunting for it. But as the brother and sister became adults, they actually started to enjoy it. This year, especially.
Doyle, 32, found the medallion Thursday afternoon in Cherokee Park, buried between two trees that sprout out of a square he had mapped out between Winona, Wyoming, Cherokee, and Chippewa streets. He and Hursey had been digging in Cherokee since Saturday. Doyle, from Vadnais Heights, a self-described "local scrapper" who makes his living finding and selling scrap metal to service stations, used a spade and a shovel to dig. He arrived at the park at 9 a.m. Wednesday, and was joined by his older sister shortly after. By noon, Doyle was getting tired. By 1:30 p.m., he was talking to himself.
"When I first got there, I was very sure about the location I'd figured out," he said. "I could see all the clues from where I was standing. But just before I found it, I was starting to lose faith in my theory. I was kind of pondering some other areas. Then Maureen looked at the trees, which had the letters 'C' and 'R' inscribed, which to her referred to the clue that says, "crack the code.
Doyle committed himself again to his spot, and started digging. At 1:40 p.m., he burrowed into the snow three or four times. And hit something.
"I knew it wasn't snow," he said. "When I hit it, I was gonna take another swipe at it, because shoveling just becomes a habit. And I thought, 'There it is, man.' It wasn't round in shape. It was in something like a baby's stocking."
Meanwhile, Hursey, a mother of three from White Bear Lake, was digging a few yards away. She was "putting her time in" before picking up her kids from school at 2:30 p.m., and dreaming about the hot tub she would treat herself to if she found the medallion and won the $4,000.
Then her brother sidled up to her.
"We gotta go," he said.
She didn't believe him.
"We gotta go. Now," he repeated, and flashed a clump of cotton at her.
The two made their way to Hursey's 20-year-old white suburban truck and sat in the cab. There, Doyle cut open the frozen stocking with a knife pulled out the 2 1/4-inch translucent blue plastic disk.
"I still didn't believe him," said Hursey. "You know how brothers kid their sisters. I finally believed him when I saw the blue plastic. He wanted to go back into the park and tell someone, but I wouldn't let him. Then he wanted to call his girlfriend, so we went to the Super America. I locked the door and sat in there with it while he called."
When they were kids, Maureen Hursey and Steve Doyle once sat on a rock that the medallion sat under. Until Wednesday, that's as close as they had ever come to it. Now they join the elite club of 46 previous winners, dating back to 1952.
When the hunt resumes next year, will the brother-sister team rest on their newfound laurels, or will they hunt?
"We'll hunt, definitely," said Hursey. "It'll be even more fun next year. We can say we won, and be that much more into it."
"Absolutely," said Doyle. "It's been a tradition. It's in my blood. I won't stop now. There's been someone else who found it twice."
Copyright 1998 Pioneer Press.
