" . . . Letterboxing is a spawning ground for respect, kindness, compassion, appreciation, creativity, adventure, and a genuine love of nature. . . " Rae Record
Rae Record's Biography
First, thanks, Mark and Sue, for your enthusiasm and love of the hobby. Your blog is a prime example of how letterboxing encourages and inspires imagination and creation. I love your site.
I’m from the South. I was born in
After 136 inches of snow and 5 months of braving the weekly blizzards in search of our permanent home, I found myself crossing the
My first guest was a deer tick! I battled tick borne illness for the next 5 years. In 1998, when I was in the last year of treatment, letterboxing in the
Killington, VT at The Inn at the Beginning
First Official Gathering Held in the US
Photo courtesy of Letterboxing.org
Please tell us about your original involvement in letterboxing. What year was it and how did you come to discover this pastime?
Like thousands since, it was the friend-of-a-friend thing. Our friend Sylvia Lynn Moore in
We spent all night looking up the maybe 30 or so letterboxes that had been placed in the
By the time Fred left, I had decided that I would place the first letterbox on
I was not to actually hunt my first letterbox for 7 months. Fred became the LoneWolf. (Later, he discovered that John DeWolf already claimed that name, so he changed his to LoneMassWolf.) He traveled in his career and went letterbox hunting often. He talked Jerry and I into joining him on a letterbox trip to
Up until your involvement, letterboxing was a series of clues to a final destination; pretty straightforward in approach. I’ve heard from others and yourself as well, that you changed that technique of clueing a letterbox. Can you tell us what gave you that inspiration and what developed afterwards?
Letterboxing appealed to me on several different levels. Foremost was that it would be joyful, gleeful and fun. It could take me places both virtually and in reality that I would never know to go to otherwise. The part of the
I still remember very vividly the day I said “OK, it’s done!” and hit the SEND button to submit the story for posting on the Letterboxing USA web site. I eagerly searched the site every morning for any word of the Secrets of the Knob. But none was there. Weeks passed. Nada! Finally I emailed one of the members and asked why my clues were not posted. I did not, and still don’t, log onto the website’s talk list daily to read what everyone was saying - and I rarely post. So when I created the Secrets of the Knob, I was not aware of what was happening on the site or behind the scene.
In addition, the folks who were putting this whole idea of a website for letterboxing together were operating with a budget of zero. They were all volunteering their time, their resources and their expertise and they forked over the bucks for it as well. There were numerous expenses paid out of their own pockets to help get this hobby started.
Now here I come along with a 7 page story for clues! What if everybody submitted 7 pages for every letterbox? Worse, what if they submitted more? Books, for example! And there were other angles of clue writing to debate. The ease of a standardized fill-in-the-blank form was appealing on many levels. But then, who should have access to the clues if they were all stored in one location? They wouldn’t want someone unwittingly or otherwise crashing the server and losing all the clues! And another thing, shouldn’t compass bearings to each letterbox be mandatory? There were those blessed with left-brains who read my story and said very seriously, “I don’t get it. Where are the clues in this story?”
Obviously, my clues did not fit any mold of any kind. But I was not the only one submitting clues that were not straightforward. Tom and Randy were already weighing in quite strongly with their novel ideas for clues. For example, Tom placed a letterbox inside a book in a library. And Randy had already built quite a reputation that his clues were so hard that his boxes were impossible to find! I recall that he put them on a rating system so as not to discourage folks from at least trying. In comparison, I thought mine were quite easy if the hunter could only read.
As
From: "
Date: Thu
Subject: [L-USA] Is it true love on
And how does one find out?
With
And Ice hissing all over
it's hard to know what to do!
How to go about
getting on the map
and becoming properly registered
for the grand
Ce la vie! Details take time!
While they are ironed out
Some will just search out
their own source for a clue!
In the end, the idea of trying to control and contain clue writing lost out to the concept that writers must have complete creative control of how and what their clues and letterboxes will be. Suggestions and guidelines are there to help people get started, but there are no restraints on what the clues are. In addition, they decided to come up with a way to post clues into a central location and also to post links to clues if submitters wanted to store them on their own sites. This win/win solution opened letterboxing to grow in ways no one could have predicted at the time. Just think of all the different types of clues and letterboxes out there today. The only restriction is your imagination! GO FOR IT!
Another three weeks later, and after much debate behind the scenes and several requests to add explicit maps to my site to make sure everyone can find Quissett Harbor on Cape Cod, (?????) the link to my site was finally posted in mid February. It was right after another ice storm and I hurried down to the Knob to place the box in its new home.
I asked a group of friends to find it so I could check the clues. So they were the first to log in. After that came Tom, the Orient Express, in April - followed a week later by Randy, the Mapsurfer. Those two had a friendly competition going about being the first to stamp in. Others have come from all over. I loved that two groups of letterboxers chose to celebrate Y2K finding it.
As the years have passed the Knob has changed. Publicity of the Knob in a foreign travel brochure opened it up to tourists from all over the world. The TREE was cut down which was a huge loss. And this past year storms eroded so much of it that several thousand tons of rock were brought in to shore it up. So it really looks different now. But the charm, the magic and the energy of the area has survived...and…so has letterboxing and the Secrets of the Knob!
You have 5 letterboxes currently listed on the LBNA site. How many of your boxes are still active? Why did you stop planting those wonderful story letterboxes?
Placing a letterbox is not a casual decision or quick affair for me. For one thing, I seem to only know how to write LONG romance stories for clues! : ) Actually, I try to do what inspires me. And I’ve noticed that I end up in strange places doing strange things that somehow become part of a larger story…not of my making. Each one of my boxes has spawned its own special history.
I’ve actually placed 4 boxes. USA/Canada Encounters is one set of clues where the story contains clues to two boxes. Labor Day week in 2000, Fred and Jerry and I went on a letterboxing trip to
Many people have asked when the sequel for the Secrets of the Knob will come. I clearly left it open for one. That may still happen…who knows! But the story didn’t wait for me - it created it’s own sequel. When Fred came down to find that box in 1999, I videotaped him on the tree swing. I sent a still from it for Christmas and the following year, he put it on Matchmaker.com. Joyce saw it, recognized the tree, and contacted him. Their first date was letterboxing in
The ghost story Phantom of the Boardwalk is also making its own stories. (God only knows what goes on out there after dark!) One afternoon, my friend June Robie took her two grandsons Eric and Daniel Thompson to find it without having done their homework on the clues. It was their first hunt and it was hot and they were hungry and thirsty and tired. She called me from the beach on her cell phone and told me that anyone who would do letterboxing should GET A LIFE! I went over and took the kids back out there after they had eaten and reread the clues and figured out the code. The boys were thrilled to find it and couldn’t stop talking about it. Their whole family pursued the hobby enthusiastically, becoming the Water Wizards. They attracted the attention of Cape Cod Times. I can’t tell you how much fun the local reporters had with it. They decided to cover both letterboxing and geocaching and ran several pages on it. Not only did the editor send reporters out to find letterboxes, but they picked up on my “story style” and embedded clues to their own Cape Cod Times Letterbox in the news story. Since the issue appeared last year, the number of boxes on the
Has your interest waned to letterboxing?
No.
How else do you recreate?
We have a lot of choices for recreation here on the
Do you see yourself planting any more letterboxes in the future?
I never know when inspiration will hit me or what form it will take. But I usually follow it when it does!
Have you visited some of those great
YES! Most of them - and they are indeed GREAT!
Did you ever subscribe to the theory that letterboxing should remain the game of a small group of people in the know and might not be for general consumption?
Never.
How were your early clues passed around? Was it more like our word of mouth (WOM) clues of today where clues were handed or mailed to a select group of players? Do you find anything elitist in that method of clue-sharing?
When I first placed the Knob, I asked friends who were very close to me to find it so I could check the clues and they obliged! Then a Cape Cod friend Wendy Williams who was interested in writing an article about letterboxing went with us when Fred came down to find it. Anyone else who knew me gave me strange looks and wondered if I might be developing schizophrenia when I talked about clues to hidden Tupperware boxes all around us! I love for folks to find one of my boxes and I don’t really care how they find out what the clues are.
Now in its 7th year, the hobby has blossomed and it has all the markings of just about every other social setting. I love that there’s room in it for everyone. And I love that there’s plenty of boxes to be found just about anywhere you go these days. Elitist would not be a term that would ever enter my mind…clever maybe…like acronyms – WOM…yeah.
In a game that “has no rules” there are some tenets that are understood – rehide boxes well; do not give away mystery box locations, etc. Do you feel that letterboxing should have rules and if so, what might they be?
Rules? Gee, now that really sounds serious! Guidance and reminders are probably more helpful and more heeded. This is such a wonderful opportunity for people to do something fun and wholesome. Letterboxing is a spawning ground for respect, kindness, compassion, appreciation, creativity, adventure, and a genuine love of nature. I find people are generally good-natured and want to be respectful stewards whenever they can. There may be some who will not be for whatever reasons, but I try not to let the actions of a few dictate the whole for me.
What do you see as your role in that first community?
Fate
Can you tell us a little about the early players in that first letterboxing community and their individual roles?
Well, probably not, as I don’t know all the “early players” personally. But I do know who they are to me. I can tell you they are amazing visionaries that were brought together through mutual intrigue just when the internet was becoming a household word. And at that exact time in their lives, miraculously, they had the exact skill set, the necessary resources to put it all in place, the time to do it, and generosity of spirit to undergo all the headaches and heartaches so Letterboxing.org could be born, matured and ready for the masses to come. They wanted this hobby to be easy, fun, and free for all to enjoy. And that’s exactly what it is! When you think about it, it’s hard to deny the timing here. You just have to know that there was a connection bigger than we are at play in this game! Kudos and many thanks to each and every one that contributed in those first difficult years and who continue behind the scenes to keep it that way.
Did any of you ever foresee that this small group of devotees would explode to number in the thousands?
Obviously, they were preparing for just exactly that!
Did you ever think, as you stood behind that camera, that your picture of those in attendance at that event would become part of letterboxing history?
I definitely knew the meeting was historical. I was in awe of these folks. I have no idea how my life’s path got me there though. It’s like meeting you at the Mansfield Monster Mash. How in the world did that happen?
Can you tell us a little about that first gathering that took place in
It was not a business meeting. In thinking about the contrast between that meeting and the MMM, it was actually like a forerunner to the many gatherings we have today…Well, gosh, Mark, how would you like to just SEE for yourself? : )
Flash version
Or
WMV version and download
http://home.comcast.net/~jerryhoughton/lbnavideo.htm
Merry Christmas & Happy New Year
To all Letterboxers Everywhere!
Related Links:
"Secrets of the Knob" Story & Clues
"Phantom of the Boardwalk" Story & Clues
posted by Mark and Sue | 9:30 PM
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