A woman from Florida found a message in a bottle: the letter was written 79 years ago

Susan Flament-Smith collected debris washed up by Tropical Storm Debbie on the coast near Tampa. She has already filled two bags. She came across bottles of water, sunscreen, beer cans and old shoes... And suddenly she noticed a glass bottle sticking out of a trash heap, she writes The Washington Post.

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At first, Flament-Smith was worried that the bottle thrown into the ocean might contain cremated human ashes. But behind the grains of sand that dotted the inside of the glass, she noticed dark blue handwritten letters.

It was a letter.

Flament-Smith and her family opened the bottle on August 7 and found a thin piece of paper with the date "3/4/45" addressed to one "Lee." The form letter was from the U.S. Naval Training Station in Virginia Beach, about 730 miles away. It was founded in 1942 and is still in operation today.

On the subject: Tropical Storm Debbie reaches the southeastern United States: five people killed

Much of the writing had faded in the sun and was difficult to read. But Flament-Smith was able to decipher enough to suggest it was a friendly correspondence. In one part of the letter, the author apparently mentioned a bar near the base that served "pretty good beer."

“I didn’t expect to find something like this,” she said.

Susan Flament-Smith, 46, posted a photo of the letter on Facebook in hopes of tracking down the families of the letter's author and intended recipient.

Christina Higgins, a spokeswoman for Naval History and Heritage Command, the U.S. Navy division responsible for preserving and studying the history of the United States Navy, said the letterhead appears to be genuine, but she doesn't know who wrote it or why it was placed there. bottle.

When Tropical Storm Debbie hit Florida last week, killing at least five people in the state, Flament-Smith said roads near her home in Odessa flooded. The area around the trail she likes to walk on to Safety Harbor on the Gulf Coast was also flooded.

Susan returned to the trail on Aug. 7 for the first time since the storm hit, after taking her 15-year-old daughter Abby to volleyball practice. After walking a short distance along the trail, she realized that the trash bags and gloves she kept in the trunk of her Tesla would come in handy: piles of trash had washed up on the shore.

Opening her third trash bag, Susan noticed a glass bottle that was sealed with an old cap. Thinking the bottle might contain cremated human remains, she worried about damaging it, but then saw dark blue ink. Susan put the find in the trunk and continued collecting trash for about another hour.

That evening, Susan, her husband Daryl and daughter Abby gathered around the kitchen table at home, on which they placed the found bottle. They also invited Riley's 18-year-old son, who is studying at college, and he came to look at the strange find.

Flament-Smith opened the cork, but the letter was impossible to get out. So she had to break the bottle on the brick porch. The bottle contained not only a letter, but also a shell casing, an iron ball the size of a Whoppers milk candy, and sand. The paper was thin and worn and had to be handled carefully so as not to accidentally tear it.

“Dear Lee,” the letter begins. — I received your letter yesterday, I was glad to hear news from you. You seemed to be having a little fun the other day. Well, that's common here. They have a bar and their beer is pretty good.”

Susan wondered if the “rocked out” referred to partying or something more violent, since the letter was dated March 1945—two months before Germany’s surrender in World War II.

Below the author writes that they are going to “radio school.” Towards the end of the message, the author of the letter promises his addressee to write the next day.

The U.S. Naval Amphibious Training Facility at Little Creek in Virginia Beach, where the form is from, trained more than 200 U.S. Navy personnel and 000 U.S. Army and Marine Corps personnel during World War II, according to the Navy. In 160, the base's name was changed from "training" to simply Naval Amphibious Base.

Flament-Smith shared the message on Facebook in hopes that others will help her answer her many questions. One of them was why the letter ended up in the ocean if it was intended for a specific person.

"Were they friends?" “Was he on the ship? “They dropped him off the Navy base?”

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The woman who found the bottle lost her father, Gregory Flament, to throat cancer in 2009. She said she would be happy if someone found a relic from his past. So Susan hopes to give the letter, which she keeps in a plastic bag for now, to family members of the author or recipient.

She said she has compiled a list of more than two dozen people who have contacted her on social media and plans to keep in touch with them in hopes they can help her find the letter's author and intended recipient.

“It’s so cool to see living history brought to life in a real, tangible form,” said Susan Flament-Smith.

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