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BY BETTY ADAMS
Staff Writer 06/24/2008

enlarge Staff Photo by Joe Phelan

DISCOVERY: Noah Milliken, 10, and his brother Taylor Milliken, 13, hold up a photocopy of the message in a bottle that was they recently found. It was floated in Annabessacook Lake in 1974 by Sharon Levesque. They contacted Levesque and she wrote them back a letter.

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MONMOUTH -- On July 8, 1974, Sharon Levesque wrote the proverbial message in a bottle.

"Please write back to me," it said, listing her Amesbury, Mass., address.

Then the 8-year-old and her dad sealed the message inside a green glass Coke bottle and tossed it into Annabessacook Lake.

Early this spring, Taylor Milliken, 13, and Noah Milliken, 10, of Winthrop were walking their dog and found the bottle, washed ashore.

They opened it.

"It was kind of cool and kind of freaky because it was from a really long time ago," Noah said.

"I read it thinking it was just a joke from some kid," Taylor said. "Then I showed my dad and he thought it was really cool."

Their mother, Julie Milliken, looked up the address on the Web and found that Sharon's parents still lived at that Massachusetts address.

Sharon Levesque's father, William Levesque, told the Millikens he remembered writing that message with his daughter, and he supplied his daughter's Cary, N.C., address.

"I actually threw in four bottles that night," he said, "One was for Sharon, one for my older daughter and two for the neighbor kids." Within a year, the Levesques heard from people who found his older daughter's message.

Sharon looked for her own bottle about 1985, but found nothing and gave up on it.

William Levesque gave his daughter, now Sharon Gonthier, a heads-up about the recent find.

"I cried," she said last week from her North Carolina home. "I couldn't believe it. I was so excited."

"We wrote to her and she wrote back asking us a bunch of questions and gave us a map and a picture of the cabin she lived in," Taylor said. "She lived in the cabin on the road next to ours."

The boys each took a copy of the message to show their teachers and classmates.

Taylor said it's not the first time the boys have found something special. "We get all the trash that washes up, once we had a deer carcass and a canoe," he said.

"We're at the end of the lake and the wind blows a certain direction, so everything that goes in the lake flows to our direction."

Betty Adams -- 621-5631

badams@centralmaine.com

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