Unlikely Flea Market Find
Sends Family Treasure Home

  TOLEDO, Ohio – When Tim Casey walked into Consign-It-Home Interiors on Central Avenue one morning in late May, he wasn’t looking for anything in particular. Retired with considerable free time, Tim visited the consignment shop from time-to-time as it’s only a few miles from his home.

  His interest, as always, was not in the used furniture section but the kiosks displaying mostly antique knick-knacks.

  He stopped at one, The Unusual Trading Co. As he rummaged through several tables and shelves filled with scores of toys, tableware, magazines and lamps, he noticed a small box.

  “I’ve always been interested in boxes,” he would later say. “You never know what’s inside.”

  Tim opened it.

  In life, events sometimes occur that are unexplainable. You bump into a neighbor while touring Paris. After a bad night at a casino, you drop a dollar into a slot machine on your way out and hit the jackpot. Your child’s 5th grade teacher is the same as yours even though you’ve moved to a city 2,000 miles away.

  Such was the case when Tim saw what was written in black ink on the inside lid of what was an old tackle box for fishing lures.

  M. Casey. Oregon, Ohio.

  The M stood for Mike, as in Mike Casey, Tim’s older brother.

  He had been dead 21 years.

                                                 ***

  The Casey boys – Patrick, Mike and Tim in that order – grew up in West Toledo and attended Catholic schools. As youths their favorite sport was pick-up hockey on Walden Pond in Ottawa Park. Tim became a sales manager for Kuhlman Corp.; Patrick, a priest; and Mike, a beloved teacher, coach and athletic director for 34 years at Clay High School.

  As an adult, Mike loved to fish. He shared a boat with his good friend Frank Beier and virtually lived on Lake Erie in his free time, angling for perch and walleye.

  Mike was a lifelong diabetic, a condition that worsened over the years. A kidney transplant followed by a then rare pancreatic transplant in his 50s further complicated his declining health.   Mike died June 6, 2004. He was 61.

  His fishing days had long since ended.

  “He spent his last three months in intensive care,” Tim said. “It was terrible.”

Mike was survived by his wife of 37 years, Suzanne, whom he met at the University of Toledo, and four adult children, Patricia, Matt, Kathleen and Erin.

  So respected was he at Clay, that the school established the Michael Casey Memorial Scholarship upon his death.

  It continues today.

                                                ***

  The tackle box was listed at $20. Tim got a good deal.

  The aluminum-plated box, Model P-9 and measuring 6.5 by 4.5 inches, can be found on eBay for around $40. Its value likely has been enhanced by the fact its manufacturer, UMCO Corp. of Watertown, Minn., is now defunct.

  Unusual Trading Co. owner Scott Carroll didn’t know the back story – he only exchanged text messages with Tim - until reached by a reporter.

  He had no recollection of where he bought the tackle box but speculated it was at a garage sale somewhere in the immediate area.

  “I usually cover a radius of 10 miles or less when looking for stuff,” he said.

  Carroll, of Northwood, Ohio, has been in business since 1998. He recalled instances when he’d display vintage photos and family members from a later generation would stumble upon them. More common were old high school yearbooks that were discovered by former students.

  But this was something altogether different.

  A coincidence? he was asked.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “This is more than a coincidence.”

                                                 ***

  Mike Casey’s family feels the same way.

  His youngest daughter, Erin Centa of Westerville, Ohio, said when she received the call from her uncle Tim about the tackle box it was just before the anniversary of her father’s death.

  “Maybe it was a sign from my Dad,” she said. “It comforted me a little bit.”

  For Patricia Edwards of Clintonville, Ohio, Mike Casey’s oldest child, the unlikely discovery conjured up recollections of her Dad’s famous perch dinners.

  “He’d invite family and friends to our home and he had this frier he made that could handle a lot of fish at once,” she said. “And he made this light batter, not the heavy stuff you get in restaurants. That was the highlight for everyone.”

  Tim Casey kept the box for a few days and then shipped it to Erin. [Mike’s wife, Suzanne, died in 2017.] Erin then returned it to Tim so he could pose with it for the photo for this story. But she had another reason for sending it back to her uncle.

  “Kathleen really wanted it,” she said of the second oldest of the three Casey sisters. “She doesn’t have much from Dad.”

  Kathleen Hart of Evergreen, Colo. was ecstatic when she returned home from a short vacation to Montreal on June 16 and found the packaged tackle box in her mail.

  For her, the box, which she clearly remembered, triggered memories of fishing with her father on Lake Erie and off piers in Point Place.

  “I spent lots of time on his boat, although I used to get sea sick,” she said.

  As for the mystery of how the tackle box left the family, Kathleen had the answer.

  “I can guarantee my brother Matt got it and all his fishing gear because he also got the boat,” she said.

  Matt had health issues and died at 50 in 2019.

  “When he stopped fishing, he probably got rid of everything,” she said.

  Now that the tackle box is back in the Casey family, Kathleen said it’s likely her husband, new to trout fishing in Colorado streams, will use it to stash his flies.

  “For sure it’s not going to sit around.”

  New family memories await.

  There’s little doubt her father would be pleased.

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Reported and written by: George J. Tanber

Edited by: Michael Gordon

Photo editor: David Kozy