Nov 2, 2006 2:13 pm US/Eastern
Unanswered Prayers Wash Ashore In Atlantic City

(AP) ATLANTIC CITY, N.J.
It is a mystery how about 300 letters to a Jersey City minister ended up in the surf off Atlantic City.

The distraught teenager poured out her heart on yellow-lined paper in the curlicue pencil handwriting of a school girl, begging God to forgive her and asking for a second chance.

“Lord, I know that I have had an abortion and I killed one of your angels,” she wrote. “There is not a day that goes by that I don’t think about the mistake I made.”

She intended for the letter to be read by a northern New Jersey minister, who would act as her intermediary with God, and pass along her prayer. But that letter, along with about 300 similar ones, ended up dumped in the ocean, where a fisherman spotted them bobbing in the surf in a plastic shopping bag adorned with yellow and orange flowers.

The minister died nearly two years ago at age 79. How the letters, some dating to 1973 and many of them unopened, ended up in the ocean remains a mystery.

“There are hundreds of lives here, a lot of struggle, washed up on the beach,” said Bill Lacovara, a Ventnor insurance adjuster who was fishing last month with his son when he spotted the bag and waded out to retrieve it. “This is just a hint of what really happens. How many letters like this all over the world aren’t being opened or answered?”

Many of the letters were addressed to the Rev. Grady Cooper, although many more simply said “Altar.” According to the text of several of the letters, they were intended to be placed on a church’s altar and prayed over by the minister, the congregation or both.

Some were neatly written in script on white-lined paper, others in feverish scrawl on tattered scraps of parchment or note cards. Many were crinkled by being in the water and then dried out after Lacovara fished them out of the sea.

A dog-eared business card inside one the letters identified Cooper as associate pastor of the Mount Calvary Baptist Church in Jersey City. A woman who answered the phone at the church office confirmed Cooper once was a minister there, and had died nearly two years ago. The current pastor did not return several telephone messages from The Associated Press over the past few days.

Other documents in the bag, including bank statements and canceled checks, also listed Cooper’s name and an address for him in Jersey City. A death certificate issued by Hudson County in December 2004 for a Grady Cooper lists the same address as those on the bank documents and some of the letters.

His wife, Frances, whose name also showed up on some of the letters at the same address, died in July 2000, according to Hudson County records.

No one answered the door last week at the address where Cooper once lived, and a neighbor said he did not recall anyone by that name. Attempts to locate Cooper’s relatives were not successful.

Lacovara speculates that someone cleaning out Cooper’s home found the letters and threw them on the beach about 100 miles away from Jersey City.

“I guess rather than just throw them in the garbage, maybe they thought they’d set them out to sea to bless these people,” he said. “So they made a trip to Atlantic City, maybe went to a casino, and put the letters in the water.”

The letters, wrapped in several smaller brown paper bags inside the larger floral plastic shopping bag, did not appear to have been in the water too long, Lacovara said, although about half were too badly damaged to be legible. He opened a few with his son, Rocky, on the beach. The first few were humorous, if slightly ungrammatical.

“I’m still praying to hit the lottery twice: first the $50,000,” one man wrote. “Than after some changes have taken place let me hit the millionaire.”

Another asked God to make a certain someone “leave me alone and stay off my back,” while still another asks God to calm a woman who “call the Internal Revenue on me.”

One woman complained that her husband always talks about sex, and another writer dropped an anonymous dime to God on someone he claims was cheating on his wife, complete with dates, times and locations.

But those, Lacovara soon found, were the exception.

Many more were written by anguished spouses, children, or widows, pouring out their hearts to God, asking for help with relatives who use drugs, gamble or cheat on them. One man wrote from prison, saying he is innocent and wants to be back home with his family. A woman writes that her boyfriend now closes the door to her daughter’s bedroom each night when it used to stay open, and wonders why.

One unwed mother wrote that her baby was due in four weeks, and asked God to make the baby’s father fall in love with her and marry her so the baby would have a father.

“It seem to me that he really don’t want me or the baby,” she wrote.

Lacovara said he’s sad that most of the writers never had their letters read. But he hopes to change that soon: He’s putting the entire collection up for sale on eBay.


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