In Search of Buried Booty

Even if you weren’t one of the four winners in California’s record-breaking lottery last month, there’s still hope for riches beyond your wildest dreams.

Within months, or even weeks, you could be up to your ankles in gold and silver bracelets, chains, rings, watches and rare coins.

All you need is a little instinct, intuition and intellect, and one metal detector.

Last year, Bob Guthrie, the 50-year-old owner and operator of the Prospector’s Shop in Helena, Mont., found a $20,000 gold nugget in the Arizona desert with his metal detector. He keeps 3,000 other nuggets, all recovered with a metal detector, in a safe deposit box.

In 1983, Jim Owens, a Santa Barbara collector, discovered a $5 “Schultz” coin while searching the beach near Monterey after a rough storm. The 1851 gold piece later sold for $45,000 at auction.

But you don’t have to go to Montana or even Monterey to begin collecting treasure with a metal detector.

In 1984, Leona and Marilyn Yost, a mother-and-daughter treasure-hunting team from San Diego, detected a $12,000 platinum ring studded with sapphires and a two-carat diamond while combing their local beach.

In January, Glen Ison, a former radar officer with the U.S. Army, found a $1,250 gold nugget ring near Huntington Beach Pier to add to the other 26,000 coins and scores of rings, medallions, knives and necklaces he has collected in less than four years of treasure hunting.

The reasons for metal detecting are almost as varied as the treasures that lie below one’s feet.

James Straight, author of “Follow the Dry Washers,” a metal detecting book published by Mountain Publications in Crestline, claims treasure hunting is his direct link to a bygone era.

“If I find an 1888 Indian head penny, I start thinking about the last person who might have held that coin,” says the Rialto-based writer and part-time metals shop instructor. “You kind of touch the hand of the past.”

For Evelyn Karr of La Palma, who found one penny and a worm during her first 10 minutes of metal detecting on a recent rain-soaked outing at Griffith Park, treasure hunting offers the explorer new worlds to conquer.

“It gives me a whole new perspective on life,” says Karr. “I used to drive down the street and admire a pretty yard; now I look for old houses, torn-up streets and construction sites in search of rare coins.”

Jesse Owings, a 14-year-old student at Antelope Valley High School in Lancaster, also waxes philosophical about his weekend pursuit.

“It’s relaxing,” says Owings, who recently joined his grandfather, Sam Duncan, for a day of metal detecting at Zuma Beach. “It gets me out of the rat race. Most of my friends don’t even know I do this.”

Vickie Wyatt, a member of the Antelope Valley Treasure Hunters Society in Lancaster, compares her hobby to fishing.

“Sometimes you get skunked, and sometimes you strike it rich,” says Wyatt. “I just know that I’d rather have a pouch full of coins instead of a net full of fish.”

Walt Stewart, a member of the West Coast Prospectors and Treasure Hunters Assn. (West Coasters) who operates a street sweeper when he isn’t metal detecting, likens his pastime to compulsive gambling.

“It’s like a disease that you can’t get rid of,” says Stewart. “I just have to look; that’s all there is to it.”

Actually, the odds may be more in Stewart’s favor than he thinks. The Fisher World Treasure News, a publication of Fisher Research Laboratory in Los Banos, Calif., the oldest maker of metal detectors, reported in its 1987 fall issue that government accountants say Americans lost 200 million pounds of silver coins between 1900 and 1950.

In the same article, it was calculated that 65 billion bottle caps, the bane of all metal detectors, are also thrown out in the United States every year.

“The treasure is definitely out there,” says Fisher president Jim Lewellen. “All you’ve got to do is get out there and look for it.”

According to Sue Thompson, president of the Western chapter of the Federation of Metal Detectors and Archeological Clubs (FMDAC) in Menlo Park, there are 8,000 members and 200 clubs in the federation actively searching for treasure nationwide.

“You won’t believe some of the places they look,” says Thompson. “Besides the usual beaches and parks, they search out ghost towns, old row houses, abandoned school yards, deserted ski resorts, a popular lover’s lane in town, old swimming holes, or just about wherever they think people might have been.”

For Bill Meers of San Gabriel, a member of the Prospector’s Club of Southern California, a trip to an abandoned outhouse often yields rare coins.

Fellow club member Kirk VanSooy prefers to explore squirrel and gopher mounds in old parks that are supposedly worked out.

“If you want to squirrel away some of those older coins, gopher it,” VanSooy wrote in the 1988 March issue of “Western & Eastern Treasures,” a popular metal detecting magazine.

The number of treasure-laden sites you can explore with a metal detector is limited only by your imagination.

“Go to the library, read old newspapers, and talk to some of the old-timers in retirement homes,” says Keith Cathey, club president. “They know about places you won’t find on any map.”

Of course, the plunder doesn’t come without the peril. Bring together a passel of prospectors and you’ll more than likely hear about some harrowing discoveries. Reports of eager prospectors thrusting a hand into a waiting bear trap, disturbing a hibernating tarantula, or uncovering a live hand grenade are almost commonplace.

“Whatever you do, get permission and read the signs before you start prospecting,” says Bob Glick, a Prospector’s Club member who lives in Torrance. “People generally aren’t too fond of claim jumpers or somebody poking around an old still that nobody’s supposed to know about.”

Bill Smillie, editor of Treasure News, the club’s monthly newsletter, recalled his own brush with danger when coin-shooting along the beach.

“I was checking a signal on the beach when a huge wave hit me in the back,” Smillie said. “Next thing I knew, I was lying face down, covered with water and clutching rocks with my fingernails.”

Fortunately, Smillie was able to reel in himself and his metal detector after discovering that his headphones were still connected to his machine.

Physical hardships aren’t all that treasure hunters face. They are regarded by some as misers or, worse, poor souls sifting through the sand for meal money.

“A small boy came up to me once and offered me a quarter,” Ison says. “Another time, a kid tried to give one of our members half of his baloney sandwich.”

Another misconception dogging detectorists is that they are fortune hunters with little regard for historical sites or the environment.

“We’re not grave robbers or looters,” says Straight. “There may be a few bad apples out there, but most of us are concerned, conscientious people who care deeply about preserving the future as well as the past.”

Straight noted that treasure hunters are public servants who often volunteer their metal-detecting skills to local police and fire departments.

“We’ll go down to the fire station on Halloween night to examine candy the kids bring in,” Straight says. “Or we’ll help police locate a gun or knife used in a crime.”

Straight and fellow treasure hunters also work with archeological and historical groups to identify relics and artifacts that might lie in the path of bulldozers clearing the way for a new housing development.

Detectorists also pick up much of the junk beach-goers and sunbathers leave behind.

“We take pride in leaving the beach cleaner than we found it,” says Sandy Crawford, president of the West Coasters.

At Sam Duncan’s recent Zuma Beach outing, he scooped up 50 bottle caps and only one penny in his first hour.

“If you find a nail or a pull tab, you might as well pick it up,” says Duncan. “That way you’ll keep somebody else in your club from the same garbage.”

But when they do find something valuable, they don’t immediately pocket the loot.

On five occasions, Ison has returned class rings to their original owners. His most recent triumph came last summer when he found an Edison High School class ring at Huntington Beach.

He called the school and officials pored over a yearbook to trace the ring to 1988 graduate Chris Galligher, now a student at Cal Poly Pomona.

“I made it clear to him that I’d accept no reward,” says Ison. “When you can do good for somebody, that’s reward enough.”

Whenever they can, Vickie Wyatt and her husband, Rick, return rings free, but sometimes it’s not possible. After the prospecting pair helped a Massachusetts man recover his diamond ring in the sand with their metal detector, the relieved owner was so ecstatic that he wrote out a $50 check on the spot.

“We refused several times to accept it,” Vickie Wyatt recalled, “but it didn’t do any good. He said it was worth many, many times more than that.”

Stories of metal detector hobbyists coming to the rescue of people losing their car keys in surf, sand or snow are almost as common as, well, people losing their car keys.

“I remember this woman who thought she had lost her keys in the snow,” says Wyatt, who always keeps a spare metal detector in her car trunk for just such emergencies. “It was getting late and she was crying because all the food and warm clothes for her kids were locked in the car. She ended up finding the keys in her purse, of all things, but if they had been on the ground we would have found them.”

Besides making people happy, detectorists are making history and at times even helping to rewrite it.

In 1984 and 1985 at Custer Battlefield National Cemetery in Montana, 55 volunteers with metal detectors located more than 3,000 artifacts that have helped historians and archeologists explain some of the mystery surrounding events at Little Big Horn, where Gen. George A. Custer and 220 other men died in 1876.

Some of the bullets and cartridges discovered by metal detectors revealed trails of unknown battle lines and evidence of massive fire power used by the Sioux warriors. Their finds also cast doubt on the popular historical account that Custer was the last to fall in battle.

“He may not have been the first to die, but he was certainly not the last,” according to the Fisher World Treasure News cover story on the dig in its 1985 fall issue.

Last year, detectorists again were literally picking up the pieces, this time in the wake of two air disasters less than three months apart.

After United’s DC-10, Flight 232, crashed near Storm Lake, Iowa, on July 19, 1989, 110 volunteers with metal detectors searched 690 acres over four days and recovered 22 airplane parts. Six of the parts were significant to the National Transportation Safety Board’s (NTSB) investigation of the crash.

“When we contacted the National Transportation Safety Board, they were tickled pink that we even existed,” said the FMDAC’s Thompson, who helped organize the search. “They had no idea how they were going to cover such a large area.”

Then on Oct. 10, a helicopter carrying three Trump casino executives crashed about 40 miles north of Atlantic City, where the FMDAC was holding its annual convention.

Said Thompson: “We went in there and recovered all the parts. Most of the pieces were scattered in bushes and trees along parkways.”

From their findings, the NTSB was able to determine that metal fatigue and not sabotage caused the crash, according to Thompson.

“We were at the right place at the right time,” Thompson added.

Timing, it turns out, is critical to treasure-hunting success.

Nancy Waters of Sylmar goes to the beach only when conditions are favorable, which for her means nasty. She revels in reports of rough weather and 14-foot-high breakers carving up the California coast. Before she turns to the editorials or comics in her morning newspaper, she studies the weather page and clicks on her marine radio to hear the surf forecast.

“I even keep a tide chart on my desk,” says Waters.

The veteran beachcomber looks for large swells and increased surf to erode the beach or “cut” the sand. The freshly cut vertical cliffs can expose treasures that have lain buried for decades.

Says Walt Stewart, a prospecting pal of Waters: “We pray for storms, pure and simple.”

Stewart also noted that Pacific storms that churn the ocean floor can occasionally wash antique coins ashore.

“You know, this coast along here has more shipwrecks than probably any other place in the world,” Stewart says. “When they talk about the Barbary Coast, I don’t think most people realize that it ran from San Francisco to La Paz. There were so many pirates along here that ship captains were even afraid to go to sea, because they knew probably one in every three ships were going to be sunk.”

In drier places, timing often translates as luck. In the case of Stewart, it was all bad. For two years, he examined old police records, court documents, letters and newspapers in his search for 300 gold coins supposedly buried in a man’s front yard.

He found the cache, but not the cash.

“I dug up a mason jar with a note that said, ‘Sorry pal, I was here first,’ ” recalls Stewart.

For Joe Keeley Jr. of Canyon Country, however, luck was much kinder. On his day off, the PCSC member drove to Keene Engineering in Northridge to pick up his paycheck when a customer asked him if he could look for some coins buried in the back yard of his Beverly Hills home. The man explained that markers he had posted a dozen years earlier to pinpoint the treasure had been accidentally stripped away by the county’s weed abatement workers.

Working on his hands and knees with the owner right behind him, Keeley recovered 100 pounds of silver coins about 300 feet down the side of a hill. The owner then asked him to return the next day with his metal detector to hunt for 27 ounces of gold coins.

After searching the hillside for three hours, Keeley dug up the golden horde even though his sophisticated metal detector initially indicated that only a pull tab lay in the ground.

“You can’t always believe your machine,” says Keeley. “Sometimes you have to rely on your own intuition.”

Ironically, the invention of the metal detector came about after aircraft pilots found that errors occurred in their radio direction finders whenever they flew over highly conductive mineralized areas.

German expatriate Gerhard Fisher, who invented the direction finder in the late 1920s, theorized that a portable electronic prospecting instrument could be developed on the same principle as his earlier invention to detect the presence of small buried objects and ore deposits.

Albert Einstein, who had correctly predicted the worldwide use of Fisher’s radio direction finders, didn’t have the same enthusiasm for his colleague’s “Metalascope” metal detector.

“He didn’t think it was very useful,” Fisher recalled before he died in 1988 at the age of 89.

Fortunately for Fisher, who received the first metal detector patent in 1937, he was able to demonstrate his gadget’s utility when a water main broke in his hometown of Palo Alto. When he easily found the busted pipe that had eluded city workers, word of his invention and its industrial applications quickly spread.

Metal detectors were used by utilities to locate sewer lines and by lumber companies to find metal inclusions in logs. They enabled geologists to find minerals and law-enforcement agencies to track down abandoned or hidden weapons.

And, of course, prospectors began looking for treasure.

Today, Southern Californians are waving their magic wands just about everywhere in hopes of finding pay dirt. Those who join treasure hunting clubs may have the upper hand, however.

Ralph Crowther, who coordinates the “Find of the Month Club” for the West Coasters, says it doesn’t pay to be a loner.

“I played with metal detecting for three or four years without finding much until I joined the club and saw how everybody else was doing,” Crowther said. “I probably only found a few hundred coins a year by myself, and now I find a thousand.

Yearly dues generally run about $40 for single members and $50 for a family, which helps defray the cost of newsletters, monthly outings and the purchase of coins for awards and treasure hunts.

The prices of new metal detectors range from $200 to $800. The more sophisticated machines are supposed to pass over the junk and pinpoint only the good stuff. Of course, you can eliminate the guesswork of buying a new metal detector by renting one for about $15 a day at several Southern California prospecting shops.

Buying a detector really depends on how much time you’re going to put into it, says Ivan Goyette, owner of Fortyniner Mining Supply in Bellflower. “If you’re only going to get out there once a week, I’d say you’re crazy to buy an $800 detector. But, if you’re going to retire, and that’s your main hobby, then I’d get the big one.”

Says Orville Shaw, owner of California Prospecting Co. in Buena Park: “Regardless of what metal detector you end up buying, when you pick up your first dime or quarter, it’ll feel like a million bucks.”