G: ..,I nearly gagged at every mouthful. I ate in the place. I was suspected also of being

 some sort of a game warden in that area. The, the ah state seal on the door of the car

 said Forestry and Parks, but ah I do not think that really made much of a distinction to some

 of these people. The site, it was interesting and now there is a little museum on it and

 it was kind of fun to poke around there for a couple of days. One of the things that alwasy

 impressed me about the people of that area was the ah old fellow had told me about some of

 stuff that had come up out of the river including the rifle. He said that it was real old

 and it loaded from the bowel. (Laughter) Ah, let's take just a minute for the Safety

 Harbor Caper. Rip and I, Ripley Corbillon, I just kind of passed over this hill and went

 back to school after about a year, finished his doctorate and then came back to start the

 department at FSU. Ah, I hired Ripley Bowen in the in-between time. I had a little few

 qualms about it initially because one of those periods, believe it were, when there were

 more jobs than there were archeologists and ah, I had a hard time finding anybody that ah

 wanted the job. Finally J.D. Griffin told me there was a fellow up in Massachusetts who

 ah might be interested, so I got in touch with Rip. The only problem that I had with

 the situation was that I was still about mid-twenti:es and ah this fellow that I was going

 to hire for my assistant was about forty-two, forty-five, which seemed like a fairly old

 man to me, you know, at the time and I must admit that the day that he arrived, I probably

 felt more qualms about the new working relationship than he did reporting for a new job.

 BUt it, it worked out really pretty well. And Rip and I, one of the early things we did

 was go down to Safety Harbor on the dig and that is reported and we do not need to go over

 that. The local newspapers did have one one bit of interesting publicity on the site. Rip

 and I had a little fox terrier that went everywhere with them and when the press photograph-

 ers came out to the site, the dog was laying on a spoil heap and the caption in the paper,

 and it was a good size photograph in the St. Petersburg paper said, "The dog helps look for

 bones". (Laughter) But a few months later, we had another call about Safety Harbor. It

 seems that the county commission had been approached by several treasure hunters who swore

 that they had the evidence that the $30,000,000 that ah was paid for Louisiana ah was buried

 in this mound and that they did not want it for themselves, they wanted it for the oldne

 and that really put the county commission on the spot, you see. They did not want it for