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Traveler scatters bottles, awaits far-off repliesBy SAUNDRA AMRHEIN
© St. Petersburg Times, SPRING HILL -- What else is a guy to do, with weeks at sea on a Navy ship on a secret mission, but drain a liquor bottle and throw it overboard with a message? "Hell, it gets kind of lonely," said Roland Warman, now a retired Spring Hill resident recalling his days as a technician with a private company contracted by the government to track spy satellites. Of the hundreds of bottles Warman threw overboard in the South Pacific in the 1960s -- each floating with a $1 bill and a message about himself -- none turned up a letter or a phone call. Later, as the drifting communicator spun around the globe on pleasure cruises on less covert operations, he kept up his practice of reaching out for possible contact with a mysterious friend in another culture. Last week, for the first time, he received a reply. A man from Panama sent him a letter, saying he has stumbled on Warman's bottle at the beach. Warman had tossed this one overboard on a cruise in April about 70 miles off the coast of Cuba. He had included a note and a little more cash than in the old days -- a $2 bill. Though intrigued by the letter, the 69-year-old divorced bachelor had hoped for a different response. "It would have been better if a nice-looking girl had written back," he said with a slight chuckle. Warman's interest in other cultures was fueled by his line of work, which moved him around the globe. As a technician with Bendix Corp., Warman was based in Spain and California on tracking missions for NASA, including Apollo 11, which first put men on the moon, and the disastrous, near-fatal journey of Apollo 13. He and his colleagues collected data on conditions and paths of the spacecraft traveling through space. But they also heard firsthand the communication between all parties involved in the joyous landing of Apollo 11, as well as the panic-stricken moments of Apollo 13 after an explosion that nearly doomed astronauts on their trip around the moon. "When that thing blew, man, we heard something," Warman said describing the thudding noise. Someone near him said, "What the hell was that?" and then an astronaut said, "Houston, we've got a problem." Warman said he and his colleagues worked through the tense hours doing nothing more than making sure their high-powered antennas were functioning properly. "There was nothing we could do to help," he said. The Apollo 11 mission to the moon was another story, full of backslapping among his co-workers in their sprawling offices. The line was drawn at champagne. "There's no drinking on the job," Warman said dryly in a leather chair behind his desk in his Spring Hill home. After a few years in California, Warman was on the move again, this time to Alaska in 1973, installing communications systems until he retired in 1997 and moved to Florida. The walls of his home -- full of American Indian masks, Chinese bottles and art from the Dominican Republic -- reflect his ongoing travels and curiosity about other cultures. It's possible, he says, that someone found one of his bottles through the years but could not reach him. "I might have gotten an answer. I don't know. I move around so much," he said. The letter from his newfound friend, written in Spanish, doesn't say much about the stranger. Signed Jose Walthers, it says the letter was received April 29, just seven days after Warman threw it into the water. The letter confirms that the bottle contained a $2 bill and a card and a boarding program from the Regal Empress. For reasons not explained in the letter, the writer asks Warman to send another copy of the boarding program. Warman says he plans to respond, but also wants to carry on his tradition. "It's kind of intriguing to me to see where they end up," he said of his vodka bottles and messages. He'll continue with the $2 bills, which he finds special, but will add something to the bottles on his next cruise to speed along the discovery process. "Now I'm getting sophisticated," he said holding up an orange blinking reflector. "Now I'm going to use light."
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From today's Pasco Times |
