Buried Treasure

© Thomas Wilson Shawcross 25 September 2002

My daughter Lauren and my son Michael have asked what I did for entertainment when I was a boy, back in the dark ages before the invention of the Internet, cell phones, I-Pods, and shopping malls. They appear bemused that I didn’t accompany my classmates on summer trips to Europe or that I was not chauffeured to exciting after-school activities every day (since Dad always took our lone family car to work with him, it would have been pretty difficult for Mom to drive us anywhere).

After walking home from school, twenty-miles-barefoot-uphill-both-ways, I would milk the cows, dig a load of coal, and perform the other everyday chores that children were expected to do in those days, and then I would go outside and “play.” The following is the story of one such afternoon when I was six years old:

Our family lived in a semi-rural, pre-suburbia area in South St. Louis County. Our home was surrounded by acres of undeveloped land, which was great, as that meant my backyard was a four acre forest which was a great place to play, and there were plenty of grassy, prairie-type fields that afforded space for running. Across the “prairie” from our little house was the home of my Uncle Jack and Aunt Ruth Shawcross. A path led from our house, through Dad’s massive vegetable garden, then across the open field for about two hundred yards to Uncle Jack and Aunt Ruth’s.

They had two sons, John and Richard. John was three years older than me (still is, come to think of it), and Richard was three years older than John. Richard was a lot older, so he didn’t usually play with us. Instead, he liked to draw the most amazing pictures, some of which are permanently imbedded in my memory. Uncle Jack was an architect, and Richard inherited a talent for art. John was always game for something to do, and he was usually the mastermind of our adventures. I am tempted to say John was the “criminal mastermind” of our adventures, as his plans usually involved a bit of daring or semi-felonious behavior. I used to think John would have made a great pirate captain. I was sure that he would one day become a famous gangster, like the ones played in the movies by Edward G. Robinson, and let me ride around with him in his chauffeured mob car. I looked forward to the day. I was stunned when John turned coat and joined the Military Police when he entered the Air Force.

One afternoon, my brother Jim and I were playing at John and Richard’s house, and we momentarily ran out of things to do. We were bored. Suddenly, John got the spectacular idea of burying a treasure in the mountain that was in his backyard. I should explain that his home was under construction. Uncle Jack was building the house in sections. As I recall, the part of the home that was their kitchen, and the place where Uncle Jack had his drafting board (which I longed to play with but wasn’t allowed to) was planned to someday be their garage (when everything was done). Meanwhile, construction had begun on a large basement, which was adjacent to the existing part of the home. A large “mountain” of earth and clay had been dug out to create the hole for the basement, and that is the mountain in which John planned for us to bury our treasure.

What a brilliant idea! Buried treasure! John was a genius, for sure. However, as was typical of all our adventures, we had not thought this one out. We were missing a few details. Before we could bury a treasure, we had to first have a treasure and a treasure box. The treasure box was no problem. Richard knew where to find a suitable sturdy cardboard box. Now, all we needed was some treasure.

Fortunately, someone in the house had been tossing spare change into an empty coffee can. Suddenly, we had lots of pennies, nickels, and dimes to pour into our treasure box! But the box still looked pretty empty. Then, Richard remembered where Aunt Ruth kept her mills. “Mills” were nearly worthless, but they looked like real coins, sort of, so they made a great addition (see the end of this story for an explanation of what mills were and photos of them).

But, the box still looked a bit too empty. Now, this is the kind of time when many people will give up on a project and forget about it. “Forget about trying to invent a steam-driven riverboat! It’s too hard,” Robert Fulton’s brother Larry used to tell him. But we had John on our team, and like Robert Fulton, John never gave up.

“Jewels,” John said. “I know where we can get some jewels.” John’s fertile mind had hatched another brilliant scheme! Aunt Ruth had a pair of sandals (or maybe they were house slippers, I can only “see” them through my memory as a six-year-old boy, and I didn’t know what they were then, so I don’t know now). They were made of leather and encrusted with what appeared to me to be actual gemstones - rubies, sapphires, amethysts, diamonds, emeralds, and maybe some topaz. Each gem was about the size of my six-year old thumb. There were lots of them. Wow!

Unfortunately, the jewels were not easily detachable from the slippers. It was as if the manufacturer had meant for them to stay on. John knew where Uncle Jack kept a screwdriver. With Richard’s help, every precious bauble was soon pried from its anchor, and we had ourselves a box of treasure!

Oh, Jim and I were so lucky to have such wonderful older and wiser cousins. We could never have thought of these adventures by ourselves. I was only six, so my schemes were still shallow as the enamel on a cafeteria tray. Jim was the best brother in the world and a genius himself, but he was only three, so his best years were still ahead of him.

I knew we were ready to bury the treasure now, but then Richard stunned us by coming up with an idea that transcended all reasoning powers of mere mortals. We needed to make a treasure map! Of course. How stupid of me not to have thought of that. Everyone knew that pirates made maps of where they had buried their treasure, so they could someday find it again and dig it up.

This is where Richard’s vaunted power as an artist came into play. He quickly and amazingly sketched the best pirate map I have ever seen and marked with a large “X” the spot on the mountain where we planned to bury the treasure. Then, Richard outdid himself. He said we needed to make the map look old, the way real pirate maps looked. He suggested we use a match to burn brown spots on the map and make it look authentic. Genius, genius, genius.

Richard found a box of kitchen matches and lit one, holding the sputtering yellow flame the correct distance below the paper. Like magic, gorgeous brown spots began to appear on the paper. Moving the paper over the match, he traced a series of brown age spots across the map. Then, John wanted to try it too. Jim and I were too young for such awesome responsibility, so we just watched as John added some more authenticity to the map. Then, the unimaginable happened. Who could have foreseen that the match would catch the map on fire? Suddenly, Richard’s oeuvre was a flambé. Flames shot up toward the ceiling. I knew Aunt Ruth would be upset if we burned her house down. Richard kept his head and quickly stamped out the map. A few black spots were made on the carpet, but the map actually looked even better now that its edges had been burned off. This was a great adventure!

Grabbing a shovel, we charged out of the house and headed for the mountain. We all dug at once, even Jim, who was a pretty good digger for his age, in our frenzy to carry out our plan. It was hard digging, because the mountain was made of clay, for the most part, and had been baking all day in the hot St. Louis sun. Eventually, we had a treasure-box-sized hole, and we put it in and covered it up. Perfect. No one would ever know what wealth lay a few inches beneath our feet.

I asked Richard how much he figured our treasure was worth. My estimate was $600. Six hundred dollars seemed like an incredible fortune to me at that time, because that was the amount of the grand prize on a television quiz show hosted by Warren Hull. I suppose for my kids, who watch shows where the winner can become a millionaire, a six hundred dollar grand prize seems like chump change, but I had seen swooning housewives go into near apoplectic seizures after winning six hundred dollars, so I knew it was A LOT of money. Richard said he thought six hundred was too low. He thought it was worth a million dollars. That was the artist in him speaking. Six hundred, one million, what was the difference?! I knew we had done something grand.

After that, as pirates will do, we split up and went our separate ways. Jim and I went home across the prairie and had dinner. I expect John and Richard did the same. That night, it rained. A lot. The next morning, Aunt Ruth couldn’t find her jeweled footwear, and our scheme began to unravel. Fortunately, we had had the foresight to make a map, so we could quickly and easily unearth the treasure and retrieve her jewels. Unfortunately, the nocturnal downpour had turned the mountain into a slippery mound, and the cardboard treasure box had nearly melted under the onslaught of the muddy seepage. The coins, the mills, the jewels, were all commingled in a stew of soggy cardboard and mud.

I suppose Aunt Ruth can laugh about it now, but as I recall, she did not see the humor in the situation that day. Let’s just say Aunt Ruth was not pleased. I think she must have been rather fond of those shoes. Jim and I stayed away from her house for about a week. I don’t know what happened to John or Richard. Fortunately, Aunt Ruth didn’t hold a grudge, and we had many a happy and somewhat nefarious, scheming days at her house after that, even though she didn’t have cable. Such was the life of players.

Reference: This story refers to Mills/Milles.

Mills were tax tokens used in the State of Missouri in the days when the Missouri State Sales Tax was first put into effect. Originally, the sales tax was one-half of one percent (why did they bother?). The sales tax was calculated down to the fraction of a penny, and mills were used to represent and pay those fractions. The word “Mill” came from the root word of mille, meaning one thousand, as in one-thousandth of a dollar, so one mill was worth one-tenth of a penny and five mills was a half-penny. As far as I know, the word for them might have been Milles, not Mills; I don’t recall seeing the word spelled in print. The picture above shows the newer-style mills, which were made of plastic. The first mills/milles were made of some kind of nasty, finger-staining metal and were really messy to handle, so the plastic ones replaced them.

It is hard to conceive of a day when people actually cared about a tenth or a half of a penny, but those were the days when one could actually buy some things for a penny. The mills were a real hassle. No one who had lived through the Great Depression of the 1930’s could bear to throw mills away, but they were hardly worth the effort. Retailers probably hated them too. I remember the Kresge’s Dime Store (or maybe it was a Woolworths) at Hampton Plaza (a proto-type of future malls) had to maintain two separate compartments in their cash register to store the mills in addition to the regular coins.

No one was sorry to see the mills go the way of the Passenger Pigeon, but I wish now that I had kept a few mills as souvenirs of my pirate days.