BONNIE WELLER / Staff Photographer
Heidi Mozzo with her cat, Randall. She put a bottle into the ocean in 1985. It washed up recently.
24 years later, she wins beach contest
On vacation in 1985, 6-year-old Heidi Kay Werstler begged boardwalk merchants in Ocean City, N.J., for a container to enter in a "Message in a Bottle" contest.
Twenty-four years later, she found out she's a winner.
Her green plastic soda bottle, complete with the entry form her mother filled out, turned up in North Carolina following a recent nor'easter.
The bottle landed 300 miles away, at a resort in the Outer Banks.
Werstler stayed closer to home. The little girl from Earlville, Pa., just east of Reading, is now Heidi Mozzo, who lives with her husband, Anthony, and daughter Emily, 2, in Claymont, Del.
"I just can't believe it finally surfaced," Heidi Mozzo said of the bottle. "Also, I just can't believe the plastic lasted that long."
The Jersey Shore town decided she deserves her prizes, even if the contest officially ended Aug. 1, 1985.
Besides a big box of Shriver's saltwater taffy, Mozzo will get a free stay in Ocean City, said Mark Soifer, the town's answer to P.T. Barnum.
The contest was one of scores of promotions he's created for Ocean City over the last four decades - everything from hermit crab beauty pageants to Tastykake pie sculpting ("You chew it into something meaningful," he said) to the Quiet Festival, in which a pin drop is an actual event.
Mozzo accepted his invitation yesterday to be a guest, with her husband and daughter, at the town's First Night celebration on New Year's Eve.
Ocean City also has an annual end-of-year dash into the surf - "the polar bear thing," Soifer said - but Mozzo won't be taking part.
"Oh, no," she said. "No, that's not for me."
Entering the contest also was a family effort.
Mozzo and a friend she made on the beach obtained the bottle. Mozzo's mother, Bonnie, inked in the form and - perhaps most important - her father, Harvey, made sure the cap was on extra-tight. The family turned the entry over to officials.
Where the bottle met the sea, neither Mozzo nor Soifer is sure. Maybe it was tossed from a lifeguard boat. Maybe it was dropped from the Music Pier.
"I remember that Channel 6 was there, because they were interviewing kids that were there, but I never made it on TV," she said.
A couple of weeks ago, the bottle was found by a worker at the Sanderling Resort & Spa in Duck, N.C., which contacted Soifer's office, per instructions on the form. An online records search led to the discovery of Mozzo, who learned of her good fortune when she was contacted by the media.
Mozzo, who processes payroll for a large corporation, said she has not been to Ocean City for years, because recent coastal getaways have been to Myrtle Beach, S.C., popular with her in-laws.
But she fondly recalls Ocean City's rides, fries, funnel cake, and Mack & Manco's pizza.
Soifer hopes that Mozzo, when she visits this month, will help choose a winner for a more environmentally correct contest. For the Message in a Bag Contest, people will write why it's important to help the less fortunate.
The bag will be recyclable, he said.
And it won't go into the sea.
Contact staff writer Peter Mucha at 215-854-4342 or pmucha@phillynews.com.
