Bob Momsen knows how to keep a secret.
For many years, no one but his fellow conspirators knew he was one of the shadowy agents behind that most clandestine of missions: hiding the Winter Carnival medallion.
Starting with the hunt of 1964, Momsen and his wife, Yvonne, along with colleague Marsh Genshow and his wife, Ethel, were the decade-long masterminds of the Pioneer Press Treasure Hunt.
It was serious business, and they viewed all those out to find the medallion as their adversaries.
“Our basic feeling was it was us against the world,” said Momsen, 79, a retired Pioneer Press advertising executive. “Everybody that’s out there is against you — they’re all trying to find it.”
Someone always finds the medallion. But the question by which Momsen and the group judged themselves was: Just how long would it take?
“We always said that if it happened in one to three days, you lost, really lost,” Momsen said. “If it happened on the fourth day, it was pretty poor, because the crowds hadn’t joined. And on the fifth day, it was pretty good. On the sixth day, it was very good, and on the seventh day, we won. That’s really how we looked at it.”
According to Momsen’s estimation, they won four times. Filling out their tenure were two “pretty goods,” three “very goods” and one “pretty poor,” which was due to their footprints leading a pair of grandmothers to the treasure on Harriet Island.
“I could see that was going to happen,” said Momsen, who worried about their footprints when it failed to snow after they hid the medallion. “That was a disappointment. It should have been good for a couple more days.”
For Momsen and his crew, the treasure-hunt planning began in August, when they would start narrowing a list of prospective hiding spots. Two or three locations would be decided by December, and at the end of the month, they would have all the clues, which were roughly put together by Momsen and Marsh Genshow and then written out by Ethel Genshow, the “poet laureate” of the group.
“And we’d always get together for cocktails and hors d’oeuvres and talk about it,” Momsen said. “The cocktails were an important ingredient to this thing.”
The medallion would be hidden as many as 30 days before the start of the hunt, preferably when snow would cover their tracks. That someone might find it before the clues went to print didn’t cross Momsen’s mind, but the team was careful. The treasure was hidden late at night, and only when no one was around.
Back then, the medallion was about the size of a silver dollar and made of metal. Momsen was worried something could inadvertently happen to it, so they attached the medallion to various items, including a wheel from their baby buggy, lead from the newspaper’s composing room, a flat iron and a horseshoe.
“It was always fun to figure out what to attach the medallion to, whether it be a piece of wood or a wheel,” said Yvonne Momsen.
During those years, the Momsens took great pleasure in watching hunters search the parks, streets and lakes in an attempt to unlock the mystery they had devised. Yvonne remembered people narrowing in on the medallion and lighting up the night with thousands of lanterns. The old and young, the rich and the poor all joined in the hunt.
“That would be the part that would be so much fun,” she said. “You’d say: ‘Isn’t this great? They’re having so much fun doing this.’ ”
The group eventually gave up their reign, and when Bob Momsen retired from the paper in 1991, it began to leak that he had been behind the hunt. Other paper people took over after the Momsens and Genshows, most notably Jack Moser and Diane Moser, who helped run the hunt for 21 years. Columnists Don Boxmeyer and Larry Millett later ran the hunt for several years, but the hunts that followed are shrouded in mystery, Bob Momsen said.
If you ask him who hid the medallion this year, he’ll just shake his head and say, “I haven’t got a clue.”
Andy Rathbun can be reached at 651-228-2121.
Copyright 2009 Pioneer Press.