Forty years ago, a 12-year-old got to go back to school on Monday as the winner of the Pioneer Press Treasure Hunt.
She got her picture in the paper with her mom and her mom’s best friend. She got to lunch with Winter Carnival royalty. She won $2,500, and the two St. Paul families got to fly in an airplane and go to Disney World and the beach.
For Diane Houle, now of Woodbury, who even at that tender age had been on a decade’s worth of hunts with her mom and her best friend’s family, it was a big deal.
“We were pretty seasoned hunters,” she said, “so it made finding it that much more incredible.”
“We used to make it a fun day for the kids,” said Gerber, now of Amery, Wis. “They looked forward to it. We’d pack up hot chocolate and some cookies, or stop and get some doughnuts. We were all bundled up and had our tools, our hoe and our rakes and a shovel in the car. They looked forward to it.”
Houle and Gerber vividly remember the exact moment they found the medallion. It was the final day of the hunt, and the lack of deep snow intensified the search at St. Paul’s Harriet Island Park.
“That final clue pinpointed the location,” Houle said. They bundled up, called the friend, Rita Taylor, and rushed to the park, already filled with frenzied hunters. There were so many people that they couldn’t dig where they thought they should.
“Where it pinpointed where it was — you couldn’t even get to that spot, there were so many people. So we just kind of looked around, and my mom pulled us over to an area where snow plows had accumulated more snow,” Houle said. “So my mom and I were truly searching side by side, she had a hoe and I had a shovel.”
Gerber takes it from here: “There were people standing 5, 6 feet away from us, and I said, ‘I hope they leave’ because we had a pathway we were trying to shovel through. … And then the people who were in our way, they walked away — and I think they were probably standing just about where, when I pulled with my hoe right, it came tumbling down.”
Houle jumps back in: “She grabbed it and we just turned to each other and didn’t say a word. So many people were there, you felt you had to keep it under wraps. … We’re starting to shake already — we walked over to Rita, we were trying to act nonchalant.”
The late Pioneer Press columnist Don Boxmeyer, who went public as a clue writer years later, said a hunter must have kicked the medallion from its original spot. “So, quite often the treasure can be uncovered and it’s not uncovered,” he said on “No Time for Cold Feet,” a 2008 documentary about the Treasure Hunt.
For the three victors, a whirlwind day followed. After confirmation and a quick trip home to change out of their long underwear and “fluff their hair” flattened by stocking caps, they attended a luncheon with Winter Carnival royalty. They were knighted by King Boreas and got their big check. Later, they appeared on a local talk show to tell their tale about finding the treasure and rode on Pioneer Press floats for the Winter Carnival parade, Houle said.
Gerber and Taylor had always vowed they would split the $2,500 if they found the medallion and take a trip somewhere. One month to the day after they found the medallion, the two families flew to Florida, where they visited Disney World and Houle put her toes in the ocean for the first time.
“It was a ton of fun,” Houle said. “It’s been a great topic of conversation, and it still comes up to this day.”
They had joined an elite few who would be revered over the years. “Former winners are royalty,” said Ed Brodie of White Bear Lake, a member of the Cooler Crew, a community of rabid Treasure Hunt clue noodlers and hunters.
So Houle and her family were deeply moved when, after Houle’s 22-year-old daughter died suddenly in 2015, the Cooler Crew donated to a memorial scholarship in Jennifer Houle’s name at the University of Minnesota. The young woman, a Stillwater Area High School graduate, had been near graduation from the U.
As for Gerber and Taylor, they continued treasure hunting and came close a few times, getting to the right area in the right park. “But you have to get the right spot,” Gerber said.
The two still follow the clues in the newspaper and discuss them. “And I’m always happy when people find it,” she said.
The Treasure Hunt now offers up to a $10,000 prize, courtesy of Fury Jeep.
Copyright 2018 Pioneer Press.
