@ your library (R) ......by Paige Turner November 25, 2004

Happy Thanksgiving to all of our Mammoth Lakes volunteers, residents, second home owners and visitors. We are thankful for your support of our library during the past year and wish you much happiness during the coming holiday season. In the spirit of the holiday, the following true story is about a gentleman who found something to be very thankful for when he least expected it and needed it most.

On a brisk day in 1949, a man named Jack Wurm, unemployed and broke, was walking along a San Francisco beach when he spied a bottle with a piece of paper inside. Curious, he broke the bottle on a rock and unrolled the paper, which read: "To avoid confusion, I leave my entire estate to the lucky person who finds this bottle, and to my attorney, Barry Cohen, share and share alike. Daisy Alexander, June 20, 1937."

The will was no joke. Daisy Alexander was a real person. She was born Daisy Singer, of the sewing machine Singers, and had inherited some $12 million of the family fortune. Two years before her death she had written her simple will, corked it in a bottle, and tossed it into the Thames River, near her home in London. Oceanographers believe the bottle made its way down the Thames, across the North Sea, then above Scandinavia, Russia and Siberia, through the Bering Straits and into the Pacific Ocean, where it drifted south until finally, after a twelve-year ocean voyage, it washed onto that San Francisco beach.

Daisy Singer Alexander left no other will. Jack Worm, who had been walking along the beach because he was out of a job and almost penniless, got $6 million of Daisy's fortune, and an additional $80,000 a year income from Singer stock!
TRIVIA QUESTION OF THE WEEK: Why do we pull a turkey's wishbone apart?

ANSWER TO LAST WEEK'S QUESTION: "When you are growing up, there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully -- the church which belongs to God, and the public library which belongs to you. The public library is a great equalizer." These words of wisdom were spoken by rock musician Keith Richards.