Treasure hunt aficionada Anne Matzke found this year's paperweight medallion on the south campus, just five pine trees from O'Shaughnessy Science Hall.
Research on O’Shaughnessy pays off for this year’s treasure finder
If there’s such a thing as a treasure-hunting veteran at the University of St. Thomas, the finder of the 2007 Heritage Week treasure would be it.
Anne Matzke hunted for the treasure all three years that the contest has been held, and she was close to finding it the first two years. The first year, in fact, she was at the correct spot just an hour or so after it was found at the south end of the Chapel of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Matzke put two and two together (actually, it was five and five) and found the treasure (actually a College of St. Thomas paperweight) at around 7:45 a.m. Friday, the day that the sixth and final clue was published.
Matzke knew that you don’t have to wait for the Bulletin Today e-mail to arrive in your St. Thomas Outlook account before you can read each day’s issue. Another way to do it is to simply click on any of the headlines on the left side of the university’s homepage. Each day’s edition generally can be seen shortly after midnight (something to keep in mind for next year’s treasure hunt).
Matzke is a big fan of treasure hunts. Two years ago, after she just missed finding the treasure by a whisker, she made up her own treasure hunt for her then-boyfriend, Brian Matzke, who is now her husband. Brian had to follow the poetic clues and find the hidden treasure in order to receive his graduation present, a digital camera.
“Brian has a lot of relatives who either graduated from here, or are studying here, or are working here, so we’ve always had fun studying the puzzle clues each year. It’s been kind of a family affair,” she said.
“For this year’s hunt, I read all the information about I.A. O’Shaughnessy that was on the Heritage Week Web site, and I did some searching on Google about him. It was interesting and I learned a lot,” she added. “He was a really cool guy. I didn’t know all of that before.”
By Thursday, she narrowed her search and was walking around O’Shaughnessy Science Hall, one of five buildings (if you count the stadium as a building) named for O’Shaughnessy. She walked close to the treasure, but it still was covered by a light coating of snow and she didn’t see it.
On Friday morning, after studying the final clue, she brought her treasure-hunting gear – a car windshield brush – and headed for the fifth tree from the northwest corner of the science building. She brushed away the snow and found what she was looking for.
Matzke, who graduated from St. Thomas last spring with a social work and psychology major, lives in Dowling Hall and is a hall chaplain for John Paul II and Murray residence halls.
She doesn’t have specific plans for her prize, a $300 gift certificate at the St. Thomas Bookstore. “It will be a fun little shopping spree, that’s for sure. I’m thinking about getting something for all our family members who have helped with the clues over the past three years.
“This was very fun,” she added.
