John Kauterman discovered he and the girl who wrote a 53-year-old message in a bottle share the same birthday.
John Kauterman, co-founder of The Tidelands Initiative, was conducting a routine cleaning in the Upper Township wetlands when he came across a sealed bottle containing a 9-year-old’s joke.
The note reads: “This bottle was adrift on August 20, 1973 on 2nd Street beach Ocean City as my captors were transporting me to an island off shore in the Atlantic. Please notify my family that a band of ruthless sponge fisherman are forcing me to dive for them in shark infested waters! You may have saved my life! Laurie Blair.”
“I was like, ‘wow … the bottle’s old,'” Kauterman said on CBC’s As It Happens. “I peeked into it and I could see the first line that said, ‘This was set adrift on August 20th, 1973.’ And I was like, oh my gosh, yeah, we got a good one here.”
He posted a photo on Facebook immediately.
Kauterman shared a photo of the message to social media in the hopes of locating Blair, and the post eventually reached her sister, Allison Spencer.
“When John showed me a picture of the note, it shocked me into remembrance,” Spencer said. “My sister passed away nine years ago. She had breast cancer, and she died only in her 50s and I really miss her a lot. So it’s really a wonderful, special thing to me that the note came back.”
Spencer explained that Blair had dictated the letter to her, as she was 16 at the time and had the better handwriting.
“I offered to write the letter for her because she wasn’t sure how to spell all the words correctly. The story was entirely hers, and I was just the scribe,” Spencer explained.
Laurie, then nine, concocted a dramatic story about being kidnapped by “ruthless sponge fishermen,” while Allison, 16, faithfully transcribed the fanciful tale.
They rolled it up into a Coca-Cola bottle and set it adrift.
“I’m sure we expected it to be found pretty quickly,” Spencer told As It Happens guest host Loren McInnis. “When it wasn’t, I never gave it another thought for 53 years.”
Kauterman learned Blair had died from cancer in 2019, and was also surprised to discover he and Blair shared the same birthday.
“It was classic Laurie,” Spencer said. “Laurie’s the one with the imagination and always coming up with crazy stories.”
“I believe that the series of events that result in a miracle are first set into when people with good hearts are doing good works. And that is John,” she said. “Anyone who’s taking care of the environment is tops in my book, and then the fact that he cared enough to try and reach out and find me is just very special.”
Laurie Blair Brown later studied theater at Susquehanna University.
Kauterman mailed the letter to Spencer, who said she plans to frame it in a shadow box for display in her home.
Spencer, a lifelong biology teacher has since struck up a friendship with Kauterman, and hopes to visit him the next time she’s in New Jersey.
In the viral moment that grabbed national attention, a message in a bottle tossed into the Atlantic from Ocean City’s 2nd Street beach on August 20, 1973 remained sealed underwater for more than half a century.
The story begins in 1973, when Laurie and her sister, Allie, were on the beach in Ocean City. Their mother encouraged them to write a message in a bottle as a fun activity.
The playful note concocted by Laurie, then just nine years old, spun an elaborate fictional tale about sponge fishermen forcing her to dive in shark-infested waters—a creative prank that somehow survived the ocean’s currents and tides for five decades.
Sadly, Laurie had passed away from cancer in 2017.