“I thought, ‘A message in a bottle?
Cool!” Dowker.
She then called out to her part-time employee, Rob Hemmer, who also works at a nearby local history museum.
“Rob picked the broken cork out of the bottle with his jackknife and dumped out the water, then we carefully got the note out,” she said. “It was wet, and we were surprised to find that we could still read it.”
The note read: “Will the person who finds this bottle return this paper to George Morrow, Cheboygan, Michigan, and tell where it was found?”
It was dated November 1926.
Dowker told The Post that she immediately posted about the bottle on her company’s Facebook page in hopes of finding someone who knew George.
“So look what I found when I was washing windows and cruising along with the fish,” she wrote. “Any Morrows out there know a George Morrow that would’ve written this circa 1926?”
A helpful internet stranger, René Szatkowski, found a way to get in contact with George’s daughter, Michele Primeau, whom she found through George’s online obituary.
So, when she called Primeau, she said: “You don’t know me and this may be really strange, but there are people looking for you on the
internet.”
As it turns out, George sent the message off right around his 18th birthday.
“My dad was born in November, and I can just picture him going down to the river on his 18th birthday and tossing the bottle in,” Primeau told The Pos
George died in 1995 of causes related to dementia, his daughter said.
Although Dowker wanted to return the note to George’s loved ones, Primeau said she decided that the note should stay with the person who discovered it.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if Jenn could keep it in her office so everyone who came in could see it?” she said. “It will be a way for my dad to live on. I really like the idea of sharing it.”
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