I was walking through the park one day, in the merry, merry month of … January?
Actually, I was out there in the middle of the night, and with no one around, I stealthily reached into my pocket, drew out a small, tightly wrapped package, casually threw $5,000 into a snow bank and disappeared like vapor into the evening.
The deed was done.
After almost a lifetime of admiring this clandestine operation from the safety of the sidelines, I suddenly found myself smack dab in the middle of all the cloak-and-dagger midnight shenanigans. Once in this elite outfit, though, there’s no going back. I’d been recruited to hide the Pioneer Press treasure medallion.
Earlier, as a reporter and columnist for the Dispatch and the Pioneer Press, I’d been writing for years about the zany characters who hid the newspaper’s Winter Carnival treasure and about those who wrote the clues to the hunt since it all started in 1952. And then in 1994, it was my turn.
For all but the first years of the hunt’s half-century-plus, the treasure itself has been a mightily coveted coin of some kind, metal at first, but now in an age of metal detectors, it has become a benign $10,000 hunk of crystal-like plastic.
Over the years, the coin has been frozen in a sea of milk, disguised as an Oreo cookie, taped to a phonograph record, embedded in a flatiron, stuck in the bottom of an old galosh, stashed in a Coke can and hidden inside everything from a White Castle carton to a Bull Durham sack and attached to a tricycle wheel.
The coins have come back burned, bulldozed, smacked with hatchets, fought over, almost lost and, on more than one occasion, counterfeited (that never worked).
SOME PUT UP A FIGHT
The most famous hunt, perhaps, was in 1955, when traffic became hopelessly tied up in Como Park during the last days of the search when all clues pointed to the site of the old Ramsey County Workhouse where the swimming pool is now.
But two women, following the clues in a different way, found the treasure attached to the underside of a U.S. Postal Service mailbox at Seventh and Robert in downtown St. Paul. Three bad guys even tried to wrest the treasure away from them, but one of the women was carrying a lug wrench, and they fought their way to the newspaper office on Fourth Street.
U.S. Postal Service officials got their shorts all up in a bundle on that one, complaining that this was a gross misuse of government property. The Pioneer Press treasure also has been kicked out of two towns — West St. Paul and Maplewood — both of which were monumentally mortified when treasure hunters invaded their borders. One of my predecessors, retired Pioneer Press promotion director Bill Schneider, even had to show up in Maplewood with his checkbook to pay for damage to a park.
Even though the clue writers are always careful to advise treasure seekers that they don’t have to dig, chop, dismantle or destroy, someone always manages to dig, chop, dismantle and destroy.
One year, some hunters flirted with death by breaking into a high-voltage box in Rice Park, and another year, when we hid the thing on Harriet Island, I saw a guy with a flashlight 20 feet up in a tree in the middle of the night despite our warnings that the treasure was not hidden higher than one could easily reach.
My co-conspirator for eight memorable treasure hunts was retired Pioneer Press architecture critic and author Larry Millett, who is a masterful clue writer. We began hiding the treasure and writing clues, and by 1995, our second year, we had become so full of our own talent that we decided to get cute and hide a clue within a clue.
The first letter of every clue would eventually spell out the name of the park in which the treasure was hidden, something we would all laugh about when the thing got found 12 clues later.
Five or six clues into the hunt, a pair of women found our treasure at Battle Creek. Impossible, we thought.
Not so, the women said later. One of them had been reading clues for years, just waiting for someone to pull that old trick.
ADVENTURE OF THE HUNT
One year, the clue writers “hid” the treasure on a part of Harriet Island that they didn’t know would become a Winter Carnival bocce ball court. The narrowing of the hunt coincided with the finals of a huge bocce ball match and the island nearly sank under the weight of all those Italians and treasure seekers.
Mayhem in such a setting could not have been avoided for too long, and it erupted like a volcano when a non-Sicilian treasure-hunter picked up for inspection the just-lobbed bocce ball of the famously mercurial and bombastic Tony “Todo” Crea. Fortunately, the treasure was finally located without serious loss of life.
That wasn’t the first or the last time that extra adventure attached itself to the hunt. One year, the treasure medallion was merely plopped into a snow bank along Shepard Road, and was nearly incinerated in a bonfire set by three hobos.
“We buried it in the snow one year on the Midway at the State Fairgrounds,” recalls Bob Momsen, retired Pioneer Press advertsing executive who hid the medallion for many years. “We came back during the hunt and the carnival had an automobile race going on right over it. Somehow it got found anyhow.”
The art of hiding the treasure is knowing just when to do the deed, but more than one hider nearly has been caught in the act. Momsen and his partner Marsh Genshow, and their wives had to feign a snowball fight in the middle of the night once to cover their nefarious activity when a cop showed up.
Millett and I were sure we’d been spotted one deep, dark night in Cherokee Park. We’d just made the drop when we spotted a lone skier gliding across the park in the night. Surely he’d seen us, but the hunt went the full 12 days — all we could ask from a hunt.
“That was a special one for me,” recalls Larry, who lives near Cherokee Park. “I knew when the evening clue became available at the newspaper, and toward the end of the hunt, I could almost predict when the cars would begin streaming over the High Bridge toward the park. That was fun.”
I was lurking on the edges of Highland Park just as the medallion was found in 1994 near Montreal Avenue and Edgcumbe Road. I watched as the guy picked up the white package and then almost went goofy unwrapping the yards of hockey tape we added just as a final little torment to the finder (in subsequent years, my wife, Kathy, knitted a little baggie that we slipped the treasure into.)
When he finally got to the prize, the lucky guy jumped about two feet in the air and everyone who by then had gathered around threw down their rakes and shovels and moped away.
SERIOUS BUSINESS
This treasure-hunting gig is serious business, complicated mightily because you have to stay a step ahead of such black-belt hunters as the Camo Crue and the Cooler Crew, highly organized groups who go at their work with almost frightening zeal.
“There are five categories of hunters, I’ve decided,” says Momsen. “The armchair hunter reads the clues, swears he knows where it is but doesn’t leave the house. Then there is the guy who has one site he looks at each year and then goes home if he doesn’t find it. The party hunter turns it into a festive event with his buddies. The serious hunter goes at it with real purpose, and the fifth category is the desperate hunter.
“The desperate hunter is counting on finding that thing so that he can eat.”
Many years before I became involved in the hiding of the treasure, I reported the finding of it and came upon a huge snowfield full of the last two categories of hunters.
The searched zeroed in on the State Fairgrounds and I went there with a photographer, old Teddy Strasser. When we pulled in, our photo car — clearly marked with the newspaper’s name — was mobbed by crowds demanding to know where we’d hidden the prize. So, we abandoned the car and melted into the throng.
I furiously took notes of the mayhem, and then hurried back to the newsroom to write, on deadline, the breaking story of my career, about the carnage of the hunt. I described how grown people were swearing at each other and pushing, shoving, shouting, spitting and gouging, swinging their shovels and throwing snow. Kids were crying, and dogs were barking, and it was awful, just terrible.
My executive editor, the late, the dear Fred Heaberlin, looked at my copy and said in a fatherly way, “Ehhhh, Don. That’s OUR treasure. This is OUR hunt. You suppose you could tone this down a little bit?”
My story the next day began: “King Boreas’s Winter Carnival treasure was finally found Saturday at the State Fairgrounds as thousands frolicked in the snow.”
Copyright 2006 Pioneer Press.
