He Found No Treasure, but the Quest Was Well Worth It

The Discovery Channel aired two programs this week about famous sunken ships, and that got me thinking about Al Enderle. To many Orange Countians, his is the family name behind the Enderle Center retail outlet in Tustin, but that makes him sound a lot more boring than he really is.

This guy has searched for buried treasure. You could call him a retired adventurer.

He took me along nine years ago when he went to Owens Lake in east-central California to see if he could verify the presence of silver ingots buried on a steamer that may or may not lay at the bottom of the lake. That’s the beauty of the adventure business--you’re never quite sure if you’re pursuing myth or reality, but not knowing doesn’t always stop you.

Enderle came up empty on his Owens Lake trip (the locals tried to tell him he was nuts), but he understands why people love to hear about cargoes lost at sea.

“My childhood hero was a man by the name of Richard Halliburton,” Enderle says. “He had a house in Laguna and had traveled all over the world and seen most of the exciting sights. I thought that was real neat.”

By the late ‘60s, little more than 20 years out of high school, Enderle had already lost a small fortune from various business enterprises. Broke, he pulled a Halliburton and decided to become a “professional adventurer.” He left for Micronesia, where his first job was a two-month stint as chief mate on a copra trading ship.

“I thought, ‘Here’s an opportunity. I’ve lost everything, here’s an opportunity to do something that most people don’t have the opportunity to do.’ And I also wanted to see if I could live inexpensively. I wanted to get back to the basics.”

He stayed three years. He made $200 a month on the copra ship but never needed to spend it. “I thought it would be everything I dreamt about as a youth--the tropics. I remember the writers of romantic novels about the tropics, and I felt I was born for that. It turned out it wasn’t what I dreamed it would be, but it was still good.”

Enderle came back to Orange County and made his second fortune with the shopping center. But he never shed his adventurer’s cloak and by the late 1980s, around the time that another treasure hunter had found millions in Spanish treasure off the Florida Keys, Enderle set out again.

Owens Lake was basically dry, but legend had it that the Molly Stevens had sunk in 1878 and taken tons of silver with it. Local historians dismissed the idea, but Enderle figured, what the heck, and took a crew with him, hoping that infrared photography would signal the presence of the buried steamer. But after drilling a number of 60-foot-deep holes through mud and salt, and hitting nothing but what he thought was probably a barrel, Enderle gave up.

“I wasn’t sure it worked,” he says of his detection method. “But I’m not sure it didn’t, either.” But after sinking about $100,000 into the operation at Owens Lake and another unsuccessful venture at an abandoned silver mine in Arizona, he quit.

“We had a ball,” he says. “We had all the excitement of a major adventure, only closer to home.”

Just as adventurers found when they searched the wreckage of the Titanic and the Lusitania (the Discovery Channel subjects), Enderle experienced the thrill of the hunt.

“I’m a curious person by nature,” he says. “Just to find anything that’s different, unique or buried for a long period of time, it’s exciting. Even a 100-year-old dime, when you dig it up, it’s a bit of history, in touch with the past.”

For nearly 30 years, he’s belonged to the Adventurers Club of Los Angeles, whose members have an eclectic range of interests that runs the gamut from bugs of the world to big game. Of the world’s adventurers, Enderle says, “Some do it for profit, some for the thrill of finding something no one has found, like in Egypt, the tombs and treasures of pharaohs. Some do it to escape. I must admit a lot of adventurers are escaping life and some have never grown up. Some are being kids at older ages.”

On our trip to Owens Lake, Enderle never came across as a crackpot. He had heard the stories that there was no boat beneath Owens Lake but simply wanted to find out for himself. Even today, he can’t bring himself to say for sure that the Molly Stevens and its silver bounty isn’t down there somewhere.

It doesn’t really matter, though. What matters is the fun he and his crew had, and that they tried.

I asked him if, at 68, he still has the adventurer’s spirit.

“I don’t think I’ll ever have it totally out of my system,” he says. “I’ll have always have that Shangri-La syndrome.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.