In the summer of 1975 John McCoy was a carpenter building a house on Schenectaky Street. The house which had been there had burned down in 1970 and, after insurance and title work had been completed and permits had been issued, the Mazzelliti family was awaiting construction of a new house.

One day while working there, McCoy noticed a metal box about seven inches long by four inches wide and two inches deep sitting partially buried among the debris. Out of curiosity, he picked up the dirty and rusty box and tossed it in his pickup truck, thinking he would look at it later.

He forgot about the box rode as it rode around with him between his Maplewood home and the Saint Paul work site. A few days later, on a Saturday morning he was taking his eleven-year old son Tommy to baseball practice when the child saw the box and asked what it was. The elder McCoy mentioned that it was something he had found and had been going to look at but had not gotten around to yet. When Tommy asked if he could look at it after practice, his father agreed, accepting a chance to keep his son occupied for part of the weekend.

That afternoon, Tommy and his friend Billy Barnes, took out the box and cleaned it off. They found it appeared to be advertising a brand of cigars. Dirt and corrosion [or the process of cleaning the box] had removed some of the exterior, but the boys could make out the letters "Sn" at the beginning and the letters "een" at the end of what appeared to be a two-word name, and "-ua--ity cig---" in smaller type below the name. The words in larger type seemed to be spaced in way which indicated that there might be five or six letters in either or both of two words. There was also a partial picture of what appeared to be a Native American drawn according to the stereotype of the era. The name of the brand was never determined for certain. While his father and Billy wondered why anybody would put the word "snow" into a brand name for a cigar, Tommy speculated that it might be "Snow Queen." Billy suggested "Show Queen," thinking the second letter of the first word might have been cut off by rust, but Tommy felt that the "h" would not look like the kind of letter which would fit in with the other letters1.

They discovered that the box were more intriguing than the its exterior. The first things they found was a note written in a childish hand on folded piece of lined paper and a photograph of three children. Both the note and the picture were dirty and had suffered water damage. There were also three sets of tableware -- spoons, forks, and knives, and a fragile, deteriorated piece of newspaper. The photograph contained the picture of three children dressed in Sunday outfits. The note seemed to explain it all:2

The newspaper was quite damaged and fell apart when the boys pulled it out, but the date was detectable and it appears that it must have been an article about the Bohmeister mystery, which certainly must have had all of the children of Jefferson Hill and the rest of the city talking.

When the boys excitedly ran to John McCoy with what they found, he suggested that they show their discovery to Donald Barnes, Billy's father, a social studies teacher at Central High School. The elder Barnes told the boys that they had quite a find indeed and talked with them about what they wanted to do with the find. The boys said that they would like to give the box to the kids who buried the box. The fathers agreed, but added that it would take some work to find the Charles children after all these years.

Donald Barnes started to do some research, but decided that he was too busy. After prodding by the boys, he did call George McCall, a columnist for the Saint Paul Clarion-Chronicle, thinking that McCall might find some human interest factor in the story and give it some publicity.

McCall ran a nice article which ran in the paper of Sunday, July 25, 1976. In the article McCall asked if anybody knew the whereabouts of the Charles family, suggesting that if any of them were around the area, that he would like to talk to them. The only help he got was a couple of calls from old-timers on the Hill who said they thought the family moved to California during the Depression.

The boys decided that it would only be right to see if Mueller's Restaurant wanted its tableware back. They went to Todd Miller who owned the restaurant at the time. He told the boys that he appreciated their honesty in returning the knives, spoons, and forks, but that since they no longer matched anything he was using that they were free to keep them. The boys decided that if they could not find the Charles children that Tommy would keep the tableware and the box and Billy would keep the letter and photograph.

They did make one more effort to locate the Charles children. On the first day of autumn of the next year, they placed signs on trees and utility poles in the neighborhood of the house on Schenectaky Street telling any of the Charles family who might come by for the scheduled day of retrieval how to contact them. They heard nothing.

Tommy McCoy now lives in Fargo where he is a banker. In a phone call in the summer of 1997, he told me that he still has the tableware, but didn't know where it was at the time, but that he thought it was in his garage somewhere. Billy Barnes still lives in Maplewood, a few blocks from where he grew up and teaches school in the White Bear Lake School District. Except for the peripheral contact with the metal box and its contents, neither of the boys ever had a connection with Jefferson Hill.

The Charles children may still be living. It seems likely that one or all of them was living in 1975 when the box was discovered. Whatever happened to them is unknown. Since George McCall figured that the boys would be draft age during World War II, he attempted to find out from contacts he had in the Veterans' Administration if either of the boys has a file there, but was unable to learn anything. It seems likely that Mike, Amy, and Billy Charles were part of the great internal Diaspora of the Depression, driven from their childhood home and spending their adult lives elsewhere.

1 The concept of "font" was probably not in the vernacular of the eleven-year-olds of that era.

2 Parts of the letter were indecipherable and the vocabulary and syntax are shaky, but we are attempting to reproduce it as well as we can. We are grateful to Billy, now known as William Barnes of Maplewood, to whom has come possession of the letter, for letting us view the original. Texts in brackets is not readily discernible, and is our best guess of what was written.

3 While we are trying to reproduce the letter as close the reports of the era indicated the boys found it, they wrote "and one half" the traditional way, as the number one above and the number two below a horizontal line. This is hard to do with modern typing equipment.

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