A St. Paul park filled with childhood memories for Mary Kay Hamilton turned out to hold something more Friday, as she and her family stumbled across the Pioneer Press Treasure Hunt medallion to claim a $5,000 prize.
The discovery came shortly after 11 a.m. in Merriam Park as the Woodbury woman, her husband, Tom, and their 16-year-old son Sean combed the grounds between two baseball fields. On an impulse, Sean kicked at what he thought was a piece of waste paper.
"I was just messing around and saying, 'The diamond in the rough' must be right here," the teen said, referring to Friday's Treasure Hunt clue. "I jumped and landed and kicked my foot. I felt something hard and I picked it up and I couldn't believe what it was."
What it was—taped to the underside of a tortilla chip can liner—was the translucent blue plastic disk that becomes the object of an obsession for treasure hunters across the Twin Cities metro area.
This year's discovery tied for the second-fastest, coming after only six of 12 possible clues had been revealed, one each day since Sunday. The hunt, a Winter Carnival tradition for the past 51 years, has twice ended after five clues. In a typical year, the medallion turns up after the 10th clue appears.
Mary Kay Hamilton's impulse was to start jumping and screaming. But with 20 or 30 other hunters in the park, her husband and son quietly escorted her to the truck and then drove downtown, where Pioneer Press Publisher Harold Higgins later introduced mother and son to a bank of TV cameras during a news conference in the newspaper's lobby.
The Hamiltons would have doubled the $5,000 prize if they had had a registered Winter Carnival button. Their winnings include $1,200 in groceries from Cub Foods. Mary Kay Hamilton said the family would set the money aside, possibly putting some down on a car for Sean.
Hard-core treasure hunters, who pride themselves on working round-the-clock through bone-chilling cold and knee-deep snow, may wince when they learn that the Hamiltons' success came literally on a stroll through the park on a sunny, unseasonably balmy day. That Friday was the first day they had searched this year. That they had left maps, shovels, heavy boots and other typical Treasure Hunt gear at home, setting out for what they thought was a scouting mission for future sleuthing. That they spent only 20 or 25 minutes poking around before they found the treasure, in pretty much the first spot they looked. That their primary obstacle was oak leaves—oak leaves!
"This year it was so beautiful," Mary Kay Hamilton said. "We were at Merriam Park and I was just thinking, 'This is so beautiful, this is just wonderful.' There were lots of oak leaves. It was hard. There were just tons of them."
"It was easier than deep snow," her son reminded her
What they had going for them, it turns out, was Mary Kay Hamilton's memories of days spent climbing trees and sliding down hills at Merriam Park, just a couple of blocks from her family's home while she was in third through eighth grades. As her son went on the Internet at midnight to read each new clue, images began to form in Hamilton's mind, summoning up visions of the hills, the baseball diamonds, a broadcast antenna tower visible from the park.
"We'd go over the clues and then I'd visualize stuff," said the 51-year-old, who schools her son at home. "Something just told me Merriam Park was a possibility. It said there were hills to slide on. I slid on 'em when I was little, winter and summer."
Still, the Hamiltons' victory came after years of paying their dues on the Treasure Hunt circuit. Mary Kay Hamilton said her mother, Ramona Dougherty, began looking for the medallion the year the contest began.
Her mother and seven of her nine children appeared in a front-page photo in the Pioneer Press in the 1970s, everyone shoveling away in Phalen Park, Mary Kay Hamilton said. She even took part in the hunt in years the family was not eligible to win, she said, because her father-in-law worked for the Pioneer Press.
"We've been right on top of it for years," Mary Kay Hamilton said, citing near misses last year at Como Park and earlier years at Cherokee Park and Conway Park. "This is so exciting. Everything just worked out right this morning. You don't expect to be this lucky this early."
Copyright 2002 Pioneer Press.
