Baby Jar Bobs Up After Adult Voyage

To most folks, Gerber is synonymous with pureed carrots smeared on a cherub-faced baby or little jars used to hold everything from screws to nuts.

To Donald Gustin, Gerber is a long-distance carrier of sorts.

Twenty-nine years ago, Gustin grabbed a baby food jar from his log-scaling shack near Avery, Idaho, wrote a quick note, stuffed it in the jar and flipped it into the flooding St. Joe River.

Last month it floated special delivery to Julie Shoemaker’s summer home in Conkling Park, 70 miles from its starting point.

She opened the jar - intact except for a small hole in the lid. Shoemaker found Gustin’s name and called him in Helmer, where he’s lived all 66 years of his life.

“I think she first asked me where I’d been” in 1967, said Gustin. “Then she told me about finding the jar.”

Crisp, block letters are still clearly penciled across a piece of lined paper, with Gustin’s name and address and the words “Drop in St. Joe River at Avery, Idaho, 5-17-67, 12:15 p.m.”

“My spelling is bad,” Gustin said. “I put drop instead of dropped.”

Gustin doesn’t remember any particular motivation for that bottle-dropping. Or another he dropped in the Potlatch River just below his house in Helmer.

“I had probably seen something in a newspaper or a magazine,” he said.

Maybe it was a slow moment in the tree measuring business, something he did for Potlatch Corp. for 39 years.

Shoemaker has offered to return the jar, Gustin said. He’s not interested.

“If she wants to keep it, that’s fine.”

, DataTimes