Medallion hunt has never been about the money

They are as tough as winter bicyclists, the treasure hunters, as well equipped and clothed, and as determined to succeed. Some of them bring a lunch and think nothing of plopping down at a picnic table frozen to the ground in a park. There they munch on a sandwich while studying a map with fingerless mittens, like prospectors from the days of the gold rush, or pirates newly arrived on an unknown island.

What drives them? I mean what drives them aside from $10,000? Because, when you get right down to the heart of the thing, it has always been more than money. Why, for years, the reward was chump change. It is only in more modern times that the cash flow has increased, which tells you something about how slowly American newspapers have adapted to the modern life outside their buildings.

I don't mean to be critical, for I am ink-stained and a wretch through and through. I am merely pointing out that for about the first 40 years or so of the Winter Carnival treasure hunt, the newspaper got away with offering a prize of about $500 or whatever it was. And still they came in droves, so powerful was the newspaper as a principal source of news and entertainment.

No, it has never been about the money.

Times change, and we have changed with them. The hunt is now an interactive affair with discussion boards so fully involved that it almost appears to be a hunt within the hunt.

In the old days, it was enough to go out with a shovel and a rough idea. Clues were on the order of "go to a park that has a zoo.'' In those days, as a young curmudgeon, I was allowed to hunt, having no connection to the newspaper. My favorite memory, and one I have shared previously, involved my mother taking me to Como Park — "go to a park that has a zoo'' — where she pawed at the ground in the middle of an open meadow.

"Dig,'' she instructed.

I was just old enough to be vaguely suspicious that she had no idea what she was doing. Off in the distance, I could see people, but we were alone in a field.

"Dig,'' she said.

So I began digging and digging, and in the excavating I lost my glasses.

"I lost my glasses,'' I said.

"Oh, no.''

For there was a time when losing your glasses was a terrible blow to a household's financial well being, tantamount to losing your car or the mortgage payment.

Now we were digging furiously for my glasses, and when my mother came up with them, she said, "I've got them!'' or exciting words to that effect.

Only to see now the unwashed heathens advancing on our small party in the middle of an open meadow, men in frosted beards with crowbars and guns, as I seem to remember.

"No, his glasses,'' my mother said, "his glasses.''

They retreated, mumbling dark oaths.

There was a bit of neighborhood propriety in the formative years of the hunt. We weren't exactly the GPS generation. My friend Leo, who has a cabin up north, always knew he would have to endure a winter week without supper, because his wife, Harriet, always spent the Carnival week looking for the medallion. But she never left the Phalen area because that was her area, just as we might have never left the Como area. Even if the clue said "go to a park that has a zoo,'' Harriet and her children trudged to Phalen and kicked at the snow and looked under trees and peered under mailboxes. (It was under a mailbox once, in 1955, I believe.)

She never came up with the prize. So few of us have. And yet we feel a part of the exhilaration when it is at last unearthed because it could have been us, if only we had strayed a few feet to the left of that path or gotten over our territorial beliefs and gone instead to the park that has a zoo.

Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray is heard from 2 to 6 p.m. weekdays on KSTP-AM 1500.

Copyright 2011 Pioneer Press.