"I knew it was his handwriting," said Dimpy Skinner. "It’s an eerie feeling."
They arrived in ones and twos and threes, by plane, by car, from Utah, from Oregon, from Santa Rosa, from other neighborhoods in Hemet. Crawfords, Kennedys, Kaelins, Hulls and Wilhelms, some carrying plates of food as if they were offerings.
All came to see the note.
Seventy-two years ago, Jack Crawford and Watson Gilmore Jr. wrote and left the message in a corked bottle in the rocky hills above western Hemet in Riverside County, near where Tahquitz High School now stands. In January, four middle school boys and a father found it. The discovery prompted an overdue reunion of Jack Crawford's relatives, including his daughter and widow.
Monday, they gathered at the home of Jack's niece, Gail Wolny, and her husband, Dennis, in anticipation of the boys handing over their discovery. Chairs were arranged in a circle in the living room of a small, older single-story house on the wide-open land dotted with horse ranches east of Diamond Valley Lake. Some of the 20 people had to stand in the dining room or kitchen.
Finally, the moment arrived. Nick DiCarlo, 12, presented the bottle to Evelyn "Dimpy" Crawford Skinner, 82, of Vernal, Utah. She had apologized for not standing to greet another visitor, citing her frailty, but when Nick held out the bottle, she rose quickly to accept it.
Phil Rico, father of one of the boys, gently unrolled the note that Skinner's husband had written as a 17-year-old and placed it in her hands. She read it silently and stoically:
Hemet, Calif.
Jan. 22, 1938
Watson Gilmore Jr. and I (Jack Crawford) on the night of Jan. 21, and 22 of 1938, at midnight climbed this hill, to dispose of "good luck charms." On the night of Jan. 22, 1938, at this same hour, we retrieved our "Good Luck Charms."
Sighned (sic) by
Jack Crawford
Watson Gilmore Jr.
P.S. Blame Foolishness!!!!
Foo + Goo
"I knew it was his handwriting," said Skinner, who remarried after Jack's death in 1973. "It's an eerie feeling."
"It's my dad's signature -- I knew that," Laurie Crawford said, noting a double-looped capital J.
Family members gave the note celebrity status, photographing if from several angles, and they snapped pictures of Nick, his brother Victor, 13, and brothers Dominic Rico, 14, and Alex Rico, 12, with Skinner.
"I think it's pretty cool that we were able to find this," Nick said.
The note in the bottle will stay in the family for a couple of months, going on the show-and-tell circuit with the family's school-age grandchildren, until it is presented to the Hemet Museum.
Crawford had driven her mother two days through rain, hail and snow for this moment, to see the note and to visit relatives they hadn't seen in 10 years. Since Crawford and her mother arrived Thursday, the days have been filled with brunches where family members caught up on each others' lives and retold old family stories, such as when Sullivan first met Jack on a train in 1944, and he offered her a seat next to him so she wouldn't have to sit on a suitcase in the aisle.
"We've been nonstop," Laurie Crawford said.
Irene Komopasek, a cousin of Jack Crawford, flew in from Salem, Ore. "I hadn't seen Dimpy in 30 years," she said. "I thought 'I have to go there. I owe it to her to be there.' "
Monday, family members pulled out albums of photos showing them and Hemet in their youth, pointing out Jack Crawford and Gilmore, who is 89 and still living in Hemet. He declined to attend Monday's gathering.
Surveying the bustle, Laurie Crawford waved her hand toward her reunited relatives.
"It (the note) did all this," she said.
The arc of her hand continued to her face, where it wiped away a tear.
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