Found in Newell Park; $5,000 prize
John Davoli didn't trust his wife to stay calm when he found the Pioneer Press Treasure Hunt medallion as they and their daughter searched in St. Paul's Newell Park Saturday afternoon.
So he told her he had enough searching for one day, went home and waited for them there. He considered calling his wife on her cell phone to tell her to come home quick, but he was concerned she might start screaming in the middle of the park and get mobbed by the 200 other searchers who were still there.
"I knew if I called her she would go hysterical," said Davoli, 40.
"He didn't tell me. He left without me," said Lori Davoli, 38.
So she spent 20 more fruitless minutes digging in the snow before giving up, going home and finding the medallion in her husband's hand. It turned out John was right about how she would react.
"I was jumping up and down. I was in shock. Just hysterical," she said.
The St. Paul couple said they are frequent medallion searchers. Lori Davoli, who works as a housekeeper, remembers looking for the medallion the last time it was found in Newell Park -- 15 years ago. She was one week from giving birth to their daughter, but she still was out there digging at night using a shovel with a flashlight taped to its handle.
This year, the couple said, they spent four or five hours studying the clues and consulting dictionaries to check alternate meanings of words in some hints. On Saturday, with only seven of the 12 clues revealed, they decided to take a look in Newell Park, which is a couple of blocks from their home in the Midway area of St. Paul.
They had been digging about an hour and a half when Davoli spotted a flash of red in the 6-inch deep snow he was turning over with a hoe. The spot was near the bench swing in the park. Without examining it, Davoli immediately pocketed what he found, a cardboard box for a set of Bicycle playing cards.
"It felt pretty good. I squeezed it and it felt round," he said.
He said he didn't dare breathe a word because he was concerned about alerting other searchers. Treasure hunt winners traditionally eschew in-your-face victory dances in the snow, opting to slip away without drawing attention to themselves.
"Most people are looking at each other," said John Davoli, a carpenter.
"There's a lot of people watching," Lori Davoli said. "People are vultures."
When Davoli got home, he found a fabric pouch in the card box, but he wasn't sure it was the medallion until his wife got home and he cut it open.
"It was nice of you to wait," she told him.
They then rushed to the Pioneer Press to claim their prize.
"Oh my god. I wanted to shout out the window on the way downtown, 'We've found the medallion,' " Lori Davoli said.
The family will get $2,500 for the find, plus an extra $2,500 for clipping out the daily clues from the Pioneer Press and providing them with the medallion. They missed out on an additional $5,000 because they failed to get a registered Winter Carnival button.
"I've only registered the button once in my life," Lori Davoli said.
The couple, who also have a 12-year-old son, said they don't have particular plans for the money.
The Davolis found the treasure faster than average. In a typical year, it usually takes about 10 clues before the medallion is found.
Some clues they interpreted correctly. A reference to "a turning machine," for example, they figured must mean Wheeler Street, on the park's north side.
Others clues led them astray. The word "foul" in another clue had John Davoli concluding the treasure was in the foul area of a baseball field. The clue actually was supposed to refer to the opposite of foul, that is fair, as in the State Fairgrounds, which is near Newell Park.
Copyright 2000 Pioneer Press.
