I Think Of Gregg

I Think of Gregg

I met Gregg on a hazy summer afternoon back in the late '80's while I was coin-shooting a schoolyard a block or two from my home. Coin-shooting, you say? What's that? Perhaps I should give you an idea about what I mean by “coin-shooting” before I get on with the story about my friend Gregg.

While serving in the U.S. Air Force, I was stationed for almost two years at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma. It's a long story to explain why I, an Air Force Weather Observer, was serving his country in one of the largest Army Posts in the world. Too long to go into at the moment. The short answer was: the Army, at that time, had no weather observers and the Air Force supplied them when they were needed. So there I was, sitting in southwest Oklahoma on the lands where Geronimo used to ride and outlaws used to rob the 5 o'clock train – the land of the Old West out any window. I watched the clouds and sent in reports about them every hour to anyone with a weather teletype. And while performing those duties, my eye was often directed to a small mountain range to my north, the Wichita Mountains. I normally paid them little mind other than to use them as a mileage marker for my observations when the visibility was limited.

But one day I ran across a story in a magazine about the notorious James Gang and their leader Jesse James. This particular story concerned his brother, Frank James, and how, before he had died, he had returned to a campsite in the Wichita Mountains and had recovered some outlaw loot buried in an old coffee pot. The story also talked about another treasure the James Gang had buried in the Wichitas supposedly containing over $180,000. Frank had been looking for that one but hadn't quite remembered exactly where it was located before he passed on. I recall one of the last sentences in the story about the loot. It stated: “Yet treasure seekers still dig in lonely canyons, scan out of the way pinnacles and explore musty smelling caves in quest of Jesse James's two million dollar treasure, secreted in the Wichita Mountains at a time when those hills harbored some of the deadliest outlaws of the West.” As you can see, the dollar amount of the lost robbery money varied as to who told the tale. But the fact remained that Frank James made a recovery of some of the loot back around 1910. Near Saddleback Mountain in the Wichitas.

And the site of the recovery was visible from where I sat day after day watching the clouds. I could look at the mountain range, count one, two, three mountain-tops to the left from the big one, Mt. Scott, and that was the place it was found.

I began dreaming about treasure. I read some more and came across the legend of the “Lost Iron Door of the Wichitas”. This was another supposedly lost treasure up there in the mountains, and that legend had lost Spanish gold, dead men, mule trains of gold coin brought up from Old Mexico and Indian attacks. This particular stash was placed in a cave and the cave was sealed by a large, black, iron door. And, as a lot of legends relate, it was lost. Some say a hiker back in the '30's ran across it. When he went home to get companions and helpers to recover the gold, he couldn't find it again.

Even after many years of searching.

With visions of outlaw loot and minted gold Spanish coins dancing in my head, I spent many an hour wandering around those mountains, poking into holes, clambering over rocks and boulders, scurrying down granite gulches where it seemed the only visitors that had been there in the past 100 years were scorpions and rattlesnakes. Of which there were plenty. I realized after some of these “expeditions” that losing something in there would be extremely easy. Like I almost lost myself there on numerous occasions. Some of the areas in the Wichitas are strewn with rocks and boulders from the size of your fist to the size of semi-trailers or even larger. All jumbled together with no trails, no roads and no signs as to where you were. And areas like that might stretch for mile after mile in all directions.

I never did find any real “treasure” while poking around in those old mountains. But I did discover a virtual treasure, a love for the search and a hunger for the idea of finding lost treasure, which I carried throughout the rest of my life.

My first metal detector wasn't much more than a toy. I'd bought it at Radio Shack for a few dollars and was out one morning in the driveway trying it out, not expecting much. I was swinging it around the gravel, just killing time, when it sounded off with an electronic squeal. I poked around in the driveway for a second where the machine had pointed and pulled out a quarter. I felt a smile start on my lips. Granted, the quarter wasn't old and it was only a half-inch down in the gravel. But... I found treasure! Son-of-a-gun!

And if it was in my driveway – hell, it could be anywhere!

My next detector was a lot better than the first. It was a White's and I had many, many hours of fun swinging this machine all around town. Of course it was much happier detecting aluminum foil, pull tabs, iron junk and a thousand other pieces of detritus that'd found its way into the earth than it was in finding coins. I threw away pounds and pounds of this stuff, wore out numerous pairs of blue jean's knees and sweat buckets of sweat digging small holes in the ground. But I found treasure also. Coin after coin would go into my pocket from digging in the dirt. Some of them pretty nice, too. Silver Mercury dimes, the occasional silver Washington quarter, some Indian Head pennies and lots and lots of modern coins of all denominations.

I was lucky. I was one of the first in my town to have a detector and, therefore, was one of the first to detect over “virgin” ground. I was lucky insofar as I was able to recover a lot of the “easier” finds – the ones not so deep.

I upgraded my detector not long after that and, once again a few years later as my finances allowed. The new machines had discriminators that rejected a lot of the junk I'd been digging with the old ones. I found more coins and “stuff” with each iteration of detector – jewelry, old artifacts, bullets, medals and tokens. Some of the coins were the older and rarer ones, too.

It was along about that time that I was coin-shooting the old high school in town when a skinny man stopped and watched what I was doing. I noticed him and pulled off my headphones to see if he wanted to ask me anything. And did he ever! I think he had about a hundred questions for me immediately and another hundred not long after. He was extremely interested in what I was doing and wanted to know everything about it. I gave up doing much more detecting that day, sat down and we chatted for almost two hours.

I think he caught the bug almost immediately.

He purchased his first detector within a month – one of the earlier White's if I remember correctly. He “cut his teeth” on that one, dug his required hundreds of pounds of trash along with some quite nice finds. We went detecting together many, many times. He was quite the researcher, too. He devoured whatever the library had as far as old maps and transcribed them to new ones where he'd marked out the old sites that might hold coins or even caches – old schools, churches, seldom-used picnic grounds, abandoned family homesteads. We went poking around all over the county looking for “treasure”. We'd even knock on the doors of homes in our hometown that looked old and ask permission to search their yards. We almost always got a “yes” answer, too. Sometimes we went alone – usually because one of us had to work or to do other things beside hunting treasure. Family stuff, this and that. But we got together a lot of weekends in the summertime. He'd hear of a place or I would. And we'd get our little expeditions going and start swinging our detectors.

You probably should know that Gregg wasn't a well man anytime I'd known him. He'd left the Air Force with a medical disability back in the late '60's or early '70's. And he'd suffered (and would continue to suffer) from various cancers and other debilitating diseases. He'd lost a kidney, a testicle and a number of feet of intestine when I'd met him. He would go on and off a colostomy bag a couple times while we were friends. He was ill a lot and had a horrible time trying to gain weight. He was always a skinny guy because of it. He was a year younger than I was and looked a dozen years older. He had very little money and eked out a living from a disability pension.

I felt that Gregg's problems were his and never bothered him much with questions. I just listened when he wanted to talk and gave him as much support as he required, which wasn't much. He did alright for himself, even being as sick as he was a lot of the time.

He was a tough little guy.

And he just loved treasure hunting!

Gregg and I got to be quite good friends over the years. We went coin-shooting as often as we could. Sometimes Gregg was too sick to hunt for more than an hour or so at a time. I was content with that. He genuinely loved poking around in yards and fields with the detector. He wore a nail apron when he was shooting – to carry out the trash he found and to place the “goodies” in also. He was an expert in cutting a trap-door hole in the grass, retrieving the “treasure” and resealing the sod so you'd never know he was there.

After our hunts we'd go to one or the other of our homes and wash up our coins and other finds, exclaim over one or the other, relax and talk about where we'd go the next time.

We always had a great time together.

Once Gregg told me he'd found the location of an old bottle dump and did I want to help him dig around in it? Boy, did I! The dump itself just looked like a small stretch of woods – nothing to show what was buried under the surface of the soil. We took our hand-held digging equipment and spent many hours poking around in that dump, recovering several hundred bottles of varying kinds – medicines, whiskeys, beers, sodas, condiments, even some crockery. It was different than coin-shooting – you had to be much more careful digging in the ground. Most of the time you couldn't see it, but there was LOTS of broken glass in there. I have at least one good scar to prove that! But I also have the most beautiful old glass bottles propped up on my window ledges at home that catch the sun to remind me of our days poking in the dirt for bottles.

Gregg's health never did really get to where you could call him well. It was always up and down for him. It was getting worse and worse in the late '90's and he made a number of trips up to the VA hospital in Cleveland for operations and other therapies. He'd tell me of his treatments there and what a difficult time of it he had. It finally got to a point where he couldn't coin-shoot any longer than a half hour or so at a time, so we planned carefully some hopefully better sites so he could recover something before having to go home to rest.

And we did all right. He got some recoveries, even on the shortie trips.

Gregg had an apartment on the third floor of a low-income housing unit in our home town. It was crammed with the flotsam and jetsam of a life hunting for treasures. He enjoyed haunting the local Goodwill store and buying up little treasures and reselling them in a boutique store in our downtown. He made some money doing that and it gave him something to do other than lament on his health. He also had collections of various things including a bunch of old LP records. He was the first to introduce me to Zydeco music which I now adore.

I visited him as often as I could when he was out of the hospital and in his apartment. He'd moan and groan about his ailments, but he'd always done that for the years and years I knew him, so I never took them too much to heart. That was just Gregg and, even though you knew he was sick, he'd always been that way, so you figured he'd just go on and on.

I should have known better, I guess.

I received the phone call on a sunny day toward the end of July, 2001 from his sister. I immediately knew what was up as soon as I heard her voice. She informed me that Gregg had passed away the day before and would I be available to be a pall bearer for his funeral?

I immediately agreed. After I listened to the arrangements from his sister – the funeral home, the hours, the cemetery – and had hung up the phone it hit me.

Gregg was gone. He'd died in his bed in his apartment, alone as we all are in that hour. He was never going to call me again with ideas for a new hunt. He was never going to stop at the house and chit-chat on a Saturday afternoon. He wasn't going to be there for me to call when I made my “big” find. And he would have been the first on my list for that call.

He was a close friend and losing him was really a gut shot.

Gregg was buried in a beautiful oak coffin with a white satin lining. His thinning gray hair and his salt-and-pepper beard were combed nicely and he had his favorite walking stick in his hands. He'd had an awful time walking toward the end. I helped carry him from the hearse to his last resting place - a veteran's area of the local cemetery where he now rests. He has a simple gray headstone indistinguishable from the other ones nearby with just his name, date of birth and death and military rank. The names on a lot of the nearby stones are familiar. They're friends and acquaintances of Gregg and I who served their country and who chose to be laid with their brothers-in-arms. It's a nice spot and close to the street that runs next to the cemetery. They plant small American flags on each veteran's gravestone on Memorial Day and they stay there until the autumn leaves begin to fall. On trips to say hi to my mom and my gram, who lay nearby, I now say hi to Gregg also.

I like to think he'd appreciate that.

So on beautiful summer days when I take up the old metal detector, slip on the big headphones and listen for it's sweet song of silver while I'm swinging over dewy green grass, I think of Gregg, I think of Gregg.

His grave will be the first place I will visit when I hit the “big” one.

I think he'd like to know.