THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 11, 1996 TAG: 9602090222
SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER PAGE: 02 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Random Rambles
SOURCE: By Tom Shean, Business Weekly staff
LENGTH: Medium: 82 lines
Life being what it is, some of us have to settle for second-hand fame, like telling you that Ted Kaufman is my cousin by marriage. I have just found out that Ted was named ``Dowser of the Year'' some months ago.
The honor was conferred by the American Society of Dowsers, which is to dowsers what the American Kennel Club is to bowsers. I mean, if the Kennel Club says you're a champion pooch, you durn well are. And if the Dowser Society says you are king of their particular hill, you rate a serious salute.
Your basic dowser is a person with the apparent ability to find water by walking along with a forked stick. When the stick is over water, it points downward. Ted's explanation is that electromagnetic signals are picked up from the water and transmitted to the body. Those signals tell the hands to make the stick point downward.
But dowsing is more than finding water. Some dowsers can use a pendulum swinging back and forth to answer questions. With the pendulum and a map, they can locate objects and people. Ted can. He lives in upstate New York and he's helped the police locate missing people and bodies of accident victims.
Like the man who drowned when his truck plunged into a lake. Ted told the police where to concentrate their search, and that's where they found the truck.
Ted started dowsing some years back when he and my cousin Carolyn moved to their home in the Adirondack Mountains. They needed a well and a local dowser found water for them. Ted tried dowsing and it worked for him. It doesn't for me. Ted wanted to teach me some years back, but my signal system must have been waiting for a service person to hook it up.
This award from his fellow dowsers is actually Ted's second waltz with fame. The first came some years back when he got much of the western world talking about brassieres for cows. I kid you not. It happened when Ted was a public relations man working for a company that made netting.
The question to the company's customers was ``What do you use the netting for?'' And here came a lady in New Jersey who said she made udder supports for her cows. Quicker than you could say ``Maidenform,'' Ted was publicizing cow bras. Newspapers and magazines wrote articles. TV shows featured the story. Nationwide, Ted told me, makers of bad puns were udderly delighted.
I, as steady readers (both of you) know, am a maker of bad puns. As noted, I am no dowser. But I have no doubt that the talent is real. I first heard of dowsing years ago when a guy I used to work with retired to western Virginia. Three well companies told him his property was drier than the Sahara Desert in a hot August. He called in a dowser, and the dowser turned up a working well.
Then there was the time I wrote a story about the Association for Research and Enlightenment at Virginia Beach. They have done studies on extra-sensory perception, and they told me about a famous dowser named Henry Gross. Gross lived in Maine and they sent him a map. They said there were six cypress trees in an area marked on the map. They challenged Gross to mark their locations.
He correctly spotted all six. No problem. But he also found cypress tree number seven which the association didn't even know about.
There may be those among you who figure, ``Hot ziggety! I will dowse me an oil well in the back yard and match thousand-dollar bills with Ross Perot.'' Or ``I will dowse every lottery number, buy Florida and move it next door so I'll be warm next winter.''
Forget it. Ted tells me that when dowsing is used for personal gain, the signals go deader than the buggy whip business. It can work, though, if you're trying to do good for other people. My favorite story is one Ted told about the folks who lost a wedding ring at a railroad station. A dowser surveyed the scene and saw a dog nosing around the station. Follow the dog, the dowser said. Wait for nature to take its course. After two days of poop probing, the ring was recovered.
I find the notion of dowsing fascinating. If you do, too, check out an article in the January issue of Smithsonian Magazine. The article says some folks even pick videos by dowsing, but any film with Jamie Lee Curtis already sends signals to my fantasizing brain.
Anyway, if you still doubt dowsing, the author of the article says dowsers operating by telephone located a notebook and an insurance folder he had misplaced. A little weird music please, professor.
And I'm convinced. If I could afford it, I'd hire a resident dowserto keep track of my glasses and car keys. Which were here just a minute ago and now. . by CNB