New Jersey message in a bottle found after 53 years in wetlands
A wetlands cleanup turned up a 1973 bottle note by 9-year-old Laurie Blair, leading to a bittersweet reunion with her family.
By Bianca Rossi · Entertainment Editor
2 min read
A New Jersey message in a bottle has resurfaced after 53 years, turning a routine wetlands cleanup into a family keepsake with a wonderfully strange backstory.
UPI reported that John Kauterman, co-founder of The Tidelands Initiative, found the sealed bottle while cleaning wetlands in Upper Township. Inside was a note dated Aug. 20, 1973, written as a joke by a 9-year-old girl named Laurie Blair.
The message said the bottle had been set adrift from 2nd Street beach in Ocean City while the writer was supposedly being taken to an offshore island in the Atlantic. In the note, Blair spun a comic tale about “ruthless sponge fisherman” forcing her to dive in shark-infested water and asked whoever found it to contact her family at a listed home address.
Kauterman posted a photo of the find on social media hoping to track down Blair, according to UPI. The online hunt eventually reached her sister, Allison Spencer.
Who wrote the New Jersey message in a bottle?
The note was created by Laurie Blair when she was 9, but Spencer told NJ.com she was the one who physically wrote it down. Spencer said she was 16 at the time and had neater handwriting, so Laurie dictated the story to her before they sent the bottle out from an Ocean City beach.
Spencer described her sister to NJ.com as creative, quirky and funny, saying Laurie quickly embraced the bottle-note idea and invented the wild rescue-me scenario herself.
The rediscovery came with a sad turn. Kauterman learned that Blair died of cancer in 2019, UPI reported. He also found out that he and Blair shared the same birthday.
After making contact with the family, Kauterman mailed the old letter to Spencer. She told UPI she plans to preserve it in a shadow box and display it at home.
The bottle’s survival is the kind of small mystery that keeps shoreline stories alive: a child’s joke launched in 1973, sealed away for decades, then pulled from the wetlands by a cleanup volunteer more than half a century later.
For Spencer, the note appears to have landed exactly where it needed to, even if it took 53 years. She told NJ.com that Laurie had been confident at the time that someone would eventually find it, and said her sister’s reaction would likely have been, “I told you so.”
This story draws on original reporting from UPI.