Social media finds family of woman who wrote message in bottle 64 years ago

More than six decades ago, a 14-year-old girl from Worcester threw a message in a bottle into the ocean. Last week, a stranger came across the bottle on the shore of a beach on the Cape.

With the help of social media and a local reporter, she soon found the letter writer’s daughter, who saw it as a sign from her late mother.

While walking along the shore of South Cape Beach State Park in Mashpee, Kate Rivers spotted the bright orange cap atop a pile of seaweed. Upon closer observation, she saw it was Coca-Cola bottle with a note inside.

Though she found that water had seeped into the bottle, Rivers was able to extract the note and discern some words from its pieces.

“Never did I think I’d find a 60 year old bottle with a note, or be able to find the owner!” Rivers said in a message to Boston.com.

After she shared her find in a public Facebook post on April 10, a Spectrum News 1 reporter used the barely legible details from the letter including the name “Wendy,” the age 14, and a Worcester address to track down the person behind it. His efforts eventually led him to Wendy’s daughter, Aja Talarico.

The reporter, Dan Reidy, found Wendy’s family by first visiting the address on the letter to see if the current property owners knew her, according to Talarico.

Wendy had sold the house back in 2001 to the current owners, who did remember her.

“Apparently she went there 10 years ago to ask if she could look inside her childhood home, and they let her slide down the stair bannister like she used to do when she was a kid,” Talarico revealed in an email to Boston.com.

Through conversations with the property owners, Reidy found out that Wendy attended Bancroft High School and so, he looked through alumni magazines until he came across an In Memoriam that Talarico had written written following her mom’s passing in 2021. After reaching a high school classmate who had an email address in the alumni bulletin, Reidy was able to get in touch with Wendy’s best friends who eventually connected him with Talarico via email.

He then emailed Rivers’s Facebook post to Talarico to see if she could confirm that her mother wrote the letter.

“When I scrolled down to look at the photos, I was struck because I immediately recognized my mom’s handwriting which apparently was the same at age 14 as it was at age 70,” the age she was when she died, Talarico said.

“It was also so like my mom to do something whimsical like that. Throw a bottle into the ocean and see who would find it, find her!” Wendy’s daughter explained. “She struggled as a kid and a teen. She never felt like she fit in. She didn’t like growing up in upper class Worcester society. She just wanted to ride horses and be in nature.”

It’s not clear where the bottle has potentially adventured over the past six decades — whether it spent it a lot of time in the ocean or not — but Wendy spent her summers on the Cape, Talarico told Spectrum News.

“Part of the letter said something to the effect of: ‘I’m so sick of…..’ and I can picture my mom as a disgruntled teen throwing her feelings into the ocean,” Talarico told Boston.com.

In the three years since her mom died, Talarico has felt “so intensely sad without her,” and this unexpected sign has given her the chance to connect with her mother once again.

“It feels like she’s maybe reaching out to me. Or at least the 14 year old version of her is…I’m taking it sort of a sign,” she said. “And it’s comforting. I just wish I could tell her how incredible it is that she wrote this letter 64 years ago and now it’s making its way back to her daughter.”

This week, after the two woman connected over Zoom to discuss the beach find, Rivers mailed the letter to Talarico, who “can’t wait to see it.”