ALL THAT GLITTERS ...
This summer, take a step back in time each week as we highlight some of the more memorable moments in the Ottawa Citizen’s storied past. Russell Mills joined the Citizen in 1971 and became editor of the newspaper in 1976 and publisher in 1986. Today, he r
Stealing a good idea is sometimes abadplan.
In 1979, British children’s author Kit Williams caused a sensation with his lavishly illustrated book, Masquerade. When the book was released, Williams announced that he had buried a gold and bejewelled statue of a hare “somewhere in the British Isles.” Clues to its location could be found in the book’s illustrations.
The book became a bestseller and people turned up all over Britain looking for the golden hare.
I was the Ottawa Citizen’s editor at the time. Great idea, I thought: We can do that with a newspaper. We’ll hide a treasure and plant clues to its whereabouts in the pages of the Citizen.
This was the origin of the Ottawa Citizen’s legendary Gold Rush campaign in 1980. In an age before the internet or social media — in a city where print media were highly competitive with each other — it seemed like a good idea. It was a mixed success, at best.
We decided to hide $5,000 worth of gold somewhere in Ottawa. Clues to the location would be hidden in daily Gold Rush cartoons in the newspaper. We hoped it would sell some extra copies and give regular readers another reason to be involved with the Citizen.
First, we realized that if we wanted to announce and publicize the winner, we could not hide real gold. The finder might just take it and go home without informing the Citizen.
We decided to hide a replica of the gold, along with a certificate saying that this was the prize in the contest. The finder would have to bring the replica and the certificate to the newspaper, where we would exchange them for the real gold. This would ensure we had a story about the winner in the paper.
Keeping the location of the “gold” secret was paramount. We decided that only two people should know where it was hidden: the paper’s promotions manager — who would direct the drawing of the cartoons with the clues — and me. The cartoonist himself would not know the location.
This tight security meant that I had to hide the gold personally. On the day the contest was to be announced, I put a stepladder in the back of the family station wagon and set my alarm for 3:30 a.m. I had already scouted out what I thought would be a good location for the prize: one of the many drainage pipes along the side of the Rideau Canal.
There were hundreds of these pipes and, since the Gold Rush took place in winter, thousands of people were skating past them every day on the world’s largest skating rink. Finding the gold would require climbing over several metres of snow banks and putting an arm at least a foot into a dark hole. Normally, few went near the walls of the canal because of the snow banks.
At 4 a.m., I was hidden in some trees beside the canal holding our aluminum stepladder, an unusual position for the editor of a major newspaper. When there was a long gap in the sparse traffic on Colonel By Drive, I quickly ran across the road, lifted the ladder over the railing and put it down on the canal’s ice. I climbed down and stuffed the replica gold and certificate as far as I could up one of the drainage pipes.
During another gap in the traffic, I carried the ladder back across the road and loaded it back into the car. By 4:30 a.m., I was back home trying to sleep.
The Gold Rush contest was announced in the paper later that day with the first cartoon containing some vague clues. The contest was planned to last for about three weeks, with the clues getting more specific near the end.
With some confidence, I went into hospital the next day to keep a long-scheduled appointment to have my wisdom teeth removed. My wife drove me home later with a sore jaw and woozy head from the anaesthetic. When we walked into our house, the phone was ringing. It was the promotions manager telling me that someone had called the Citizen and claimed to have found the gold.
“How could someone have found it after only two cartoons?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he replied. “But the guy will be here in half an hour.”
I quickly forgot about my sore jaw and drove out to the Citizen to meet the claimant. A rather excited young man walked into my office with the certificate and our replica gold. We turned over the real gold and suggested that he immediately sell it or put it in a safe-deposit box.
He told us that he had not even relied on the cartoons. He just decided that the canal drainage pipes might be a good location for the gold. He waded through the snowbanks to search all of them. On his second day of looking, he hit the jackpot.
The contest had ended quickly and unexpectedly. Naturally, we decided that we had to do another one almost immediately.
This time, the promotions manager and I went deep into the bush near one of the crosscountry ski trails on the Greenbelt, and hid the prize high in the crotch of a tree. This more obscure location worked and the contest came off as originally planned. Increasingly specific clues led searchers closer to the prize and after about three weeks, someone found it.
The Gold Rush did sell a few newspapers, and it was the talk of the town while it was running, but it caused a few problems.
The ski trail where the gold was hidden was off Conroy Road, in the city’s south end. One cartoon featured a drawing of the yard of a penitentiary with a convict and a guard. The clue in this was the convict. This was a subtle direction to “Con”-roy Road. Get it?
Some Gold Rush searchers took the drawing of the penitentiary literally and were found digging outside the fence of the regional detention centre. This may have been the first time anyone has ever tried to break into a jail.
Others thought the guard in our cartoon was a city policeman and that searchers were being directed to the Ottawa police station. People were found removing insulation from police station air conditioners that faced a city street.
This second contest was a success, of sorts, but we decided not to do it again. We feared that someone might get injured or do serious property damage during a search.
An idea that was a great gimmick for selling a children’s book turned out to be a little more problematic for a daily newspaper. Good ideas, like good wine, don’t always travel well.