Name: Linda Martin - I’m a former Californian and my husband and I now reside in Erie, PA. I have two grown sons, Kevin and Scott (California and Idaho)

How I Became a Treasure Hunter

I used to ride my horse across the huge sand dunes that were created from the processing of quartz rocks to extract gold. What a view it was up there, galloping along the crest overlooking the valley below and the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the distance. What can I say, I had a dream childhood.

I think growing up on the land of the old Argonaut Gold Mine has had side effects, though. I’m forever searching for gold. When I was young, I’d hike all over the land, turning over every rock I could find hoping it contained gold. I learned early on the difference between fool’s gold and real gold. Once, I actually found a hunk of quartz that had a gold vein running through it. I brought it to show and tell and then put it in the built-in china hutch to look at through out my school years (only to find out years later that my dad, thinking it was just a rock, threw it out after I left home.)

As an adult my search-for-gold addiction didn’t wane. I spent hundreds of hours gold panning in “them thar hills.” Then, once, there it was! A gold nugget! I grabbed it and danced around like Gollum of Lord of the Rings. I still wear it around my neck. It is quite small, but I found it.

There is just something about searching for gold. There is a famous quote that goes something like this, “It isn’t the finding of gold, but the search, the anticipation of finding gold that is exhilarating.” I think that is true of most things in life but that one moment I found that nugget, I saw a gleam of light block out everything else around it and I really could hear singers singing “hallelujah, hallelujah!”

My treasure hunting never stops though it has pretty much changed from gold to antiques and rocks and beach glass. But I haven’t stopped altogether. I still have my gold pan. I brought back a big black garbage bag of potentially gold-filled dirt a few years ago from my trip back to California for vacation. It has sat in the garage and my husband hasn’t once complained about it. He knows about my addiction. I’ll have to get a big tub and when the little nephews come over in the summer, we’ll have to have a gold-panning picnic.

Some old pictures I recently was able to acquire of my Dad. He turned 91 this past September.

This picture was taken at his 90th birthday party.

The ones below are from the Wahkonian (Wahkon, MN) 1934 class yearbook.

Note the leather shoes in the basketball photo. It must have been cool to roll your socks down back then. I love these old photos and am so happy to get them. Dad is the one in the bottom row, second from the right. The photos in the yearbook were actual photos pasted onto the pages.