Windsor man 'hooked for life' on treasure hunting

What might be on your mind as you step across the lawn of a favorite park, the sand of a popular beach or the grounds of a historic site such as a long-abandoned military barracks?

People like Michael Curl might well be wondering, what glinty riches may lie mere inches beneath my feet?

Curl is one of Sonoma County’s busiest and most richly rewarded metal-detector treasure hunters. Every Saturday, he leaves home in Windsor to scan some expanse of well-trodden but unpaved earth for valuables that someone dropped anytime between an hour and a couple hundred years ago.

The Montgomery High alum, Class of 1975, had previously dabbled with metal-detecting when he and his wife, Janet, borrowed one of the machines in 1985 and tried it out on a playing field at a Rincon Valley school. Janet wore the headset when a promising tone sounded.

Her husband used a garden tool to dig down a few inches. There lay an 1886 U.S. silver dollar.

“I was hooked for life,” said the 58-year-old Curl, a purchasing agent for a Santa Rosa electronics firm. When the wand detects a metallic object and you dig down and take hold of something of value, he said, “It’s like a little kid at Christmas, opening a present.

You couldn’t lift all the loot he’s plucked from two, three, four inches of soil or sand these past 30 years.

Not long ago, Curl spent every Saturday for about two years sweeping his detector across the broad, earthen median strip of San Francisco’s Sunset Boulevard.

“As soon as I hit 100 silver coins, I quit,” he said. By “silver coins” he means the 90-percent silver dimes, quarters, half-dollars and dollars that the U.S. minted until 1964, when the government switched to making coins clad in copper and nickel.

Those two years of Saturdays spent combing the center strip of Sunset Boulevard also yielded to Curl about ?10,000 clad coins.

He keeps the silver coins, packaging each and noting where and when he found it. He also routinely finds jewelry: gold and silver and non-precious rings, chains, earrings, watches, pins, bracelets.

A while back he sold a box of unearthed jewelry to a precious metals refinery and took home about $6,000. As exciting at is to find, examine and perhaps make a few bucks from a piece of recovered jewelry, Curl also savors the chance to return an item to the person who lost it.

In recent weeks he’s returned high-school rings to two Sonoma County women. In both instances, he found initials engraved inside, phoned the schools and asked for help locating the former students.

Carolyn Preston’s ring from San Francisco’s Mercy High School was practically new when it slipped from her finger into Clear Lake near the city of ?Clearlake in 1960 - almost ?55 years ago.

Pamela Bell Simmons lost her Ursuline High Class of ’72 ring to a burglar in 1990. She can only imagine how and why it ended up in Spring Lake.

Curl found both while treasure-hunting with his submersible Fisher CZ-20 metal detector, which he recalls costing him about $800. There are less expensive machines, and also some, engineered for serious seekers of gold, that cost well into the thousands.

Both Preston and Simmons were incredulous and grateful to have Curl hand them their long-lost class ring, then decline a reward. He said, “To me, that’s more of a joy than finding it.”

It happens sometimes that people who’ve lost something valuable or important will ask a hobbyist like Curl for help finding it. “I’ve found car keys for people at the beach,” Curl said.

Once, he was beseeched by a woman who’d been playing baseball on a Santa Rosa field when her wedding ring, worth more than $3,000, flew off her hand as she threw a ball. Curl found it in right-field grass after a short search.

“I gave her the ring, and she was absolutely in tears,” he said.

He belongs to two groups of treasure hunters, Sonoma County Coin Poppers and Mendocino Lost & Found. At a recent meeting of the Sonoma County club, Rod Orr recounted scanning at a beach in Waikiki and having a distraught man approach and ask his help.

The fellow was a judge from New Zealand and while wading at that beach had lost the 120-year-old signet ring handed down from his grandfather. Orr said the conditions were tough but he did find the ring just offshore. ?He accepted $100 from the ?judge.

Orr and his wife, Marie, go to Hawaii every year for electronic beachcombing. He said that several years after he found the judge’s ring, a woman on the Waikiki beach asked him, “Are you Rodney?” Surprised, he said he was. The stranger told him she had something for him.

She walked to her beach chair, took something from her purse and gave it to Orr. A $20 bill. She told him that her father is the judge who’d lost his ring, and that every time he recounted the miracle of getting it back he said he hadn’t given the guy with the metal enough of a reward.

Such stories flow at monthly meetings of the Coin Poppers. Members said the club exists for swapping tales and suggestions, and also to encourage ethical treasure hunting.

The hobby sometimes gets a bad name from wielders of metal detectors who scan and dig where they’re not supposed to, such as on federal property or on private property without permission. Responsible treasure hunters follow the rules and also pride themselves on digging carefully into lawns or soil - they typically have to go down only a few inches - and neatly replacing the divot.

Most fun at the club meetings is the show-and-tell that features recent finds. Michael Curl almost always has an impressive report, recently showing the 1748 Spanish real he found at Golden Gate Park.

He said it was a remarkable find at a park that “has been hunted to death.” Fellow Coin Poppers agreed that as the hobby has grown in popularity and metal detectors have become more sophisticated, it’s harder and harder to find old coins and relics.

But, every day, people lose coins and rings and all manner of valuable, little, metallic things. Michael Curl will tell you there are far less rewarding ways to spend a day than to take up a beeping wand and try to find them.

Chris Smith is at 521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @CJSPD