With a strike from a hoe, Benjamin Haselman uncovered the St. Paul Pioneer Press Treasure Hunt medallion Monday morning in Como Park.
Now, he can forgive his dad for a hunt misstep in 1993 in Hidden Falls Park.
“I was 6 and found this diaper. I thought, ‘This must be it,’ ” Haselman said.
But his dad, recognizing a spent diaper when he saw one, told the boy to put it down.
“The next day or so, we read it was found in a diaper there,” said Dan Haselman, the dad.
“Yep, so it only took me another 20 years to pick it up again,” Benjamin Haselman said. “Now I can finally forgive him for the diaper year.”
With the find, Haselman wins $10,000. The St. Paul lifer brought the gold-colored plastic puck in to the Pioneer Press, along with all of the clues and a registered Winter Carnival button.
Haselman, 27, has spent three to four hours in Como Park every day since Jan. 18, when the first clue of the hunt was released in an early edition of the Pioneer Press.
His drive to hunt is a family trait, he said, with his dad picking it up from family matriarch Audrey Haselman, Benjamin Haselman’s grandmother.
“She recruited as many kids as she could to go out and kick snow,” Dan Haselman said.
As he has every year, Benjamin Haselman started his hunt in Como, he said, and with each clue he felt better about being there.
He had started looking near McMurray Fields, then moved to the baseball diamonds of Hodges Field. He even spent some time in the frog pond, just south of the Conservatory, before moving to the lawns beneath a statue of Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller.
Haselman said Clue 9 and its reference to “remembrance” prompted him to move across Lexington Avenue. He correctly assumed the mention was about the torpedo memorial for the sailors of the U.S.S. Swordfish SS193, which was lost on patrol in the Pacific Ocean 69 years ago.
“I would have hunted in front of it, but there was no room,” he said. “So I found a spot behind it.”
He was moving snow until 2 a.m. Monday and would have stayed longer but had to leave when a hunting buddy complained about his cold feet.
“I felt good about the spot,” Haselman said. The location gave him a view of a nearby mansion, referenced in Clue 5, and the statue of von Schiller, noted in Clue 8, and it lined up well with Estabrook Drive, which he had noodled from an anagram in Clue 5.
He vowed to sleep a few hours and then head back out if the medallion hadn’t been found by daybreak.
“It was so cold out, I was kind of hoping to find out it was found,” he said.
He was able to get moving by 7 a.m. but couldn’t persuade his roommate to head out with him. So he ventured to the park solo.
Within 20 minutes, he was back in his spot, chunking out bricks of snow and ice with a shortened hoe. He sat with his back against a tree and excavated a semicircle in front of him.
“I was taking hundreds of pulls, and all of a sudden, I saw the blue denim,” he said.
A nearby hunter, Rick Brass, brother of two-time finder Rob Brass, said Haselman yelled, “Dude, I think I found it!”
Haselman picked up the bundle — a frozen hunk of fabric from the seat of a pair of the clue writer’s jeans — and borrowed Brass’ pocket knife to cut into it.
Inside was the prize, a gold-colored plastic medallion with a bejeweled totem floating inside it.
“I was screaming,” Haselman said. The few hunters in the park came over to admire the loot and take pictures of the lucky finder.
Haselman’s dad had told him that if he ever found the medallion, he should pocket it and quietly leave the park for fear of being mugged.
“I thought, it’s 7 a.m., 20 below, who out here is going to do that?” Haselman said.
Aside from using the money to pay down some student loans and maybe get a newer car, Haselman said he might buy some warmer boots for his friend.
The manufacturing engineer said he could finally go back to work, too — he takes time off at the hunt each year so he can be out in the parks.
“I talk to everybody about the hunt. A lot of people at work just think I’m nuts,” he said. “Then when I called to say I found it, they didn’t believe me.”
Except for his dad.
“I was a little bit shocked. It was like a chain reaction. He called me, and my first reaction was to call my mom,” Dan Haselman said. “She couldn’t even talk.”
Will finding the treasure tamp the winner’s drive to hunt?
“No. If anything, this just lit the fire under me even more,” he said. “There’s no shortcuts to this thing. You’ve got to go out into the parks.”
John Brewer can be reached at 651-228-2093.
BY THE NUMBERS
8: Times the puck has been found in Como Park
2003: Last time medallion was hidden in Como Park
$10,000: Amount Benjamin Haselman wins for finding the medallion
9: Number of clues released in the 2014 hunt
Copyright 2014 Pioneer Press.
