By Marilyn May
Milford History
The large, cast iron, hand-forged item looks like it was deliberately made with curves on one side to make places for fingers to grip. Abbazia thinks it may have been a latch on a gate or door. The oblong pointed fragment has holes at each end, but its use is unknown. It was found in a backyard on Prospect Street in Milford. Photo courtesy of Abbazia.
The unusual, torrential five to eight inches of rain on June 5-6, 1982 inundated not just Milford center; along the shoreline, powerful waves were rolling in higher and stronger than ever. Residents were evacuating, but for one teenage boy it was time to run to Bayview Beach.
“I went to see the waves crashing on the sand,” Ed Abbazia recalled. “Then I was surprised to see two guys with headphones walking out there right where the waves were rolling up on the sand.”
He realized they had metal detectors and were finding coins and jewelry that had come closer to the surface as the waves curled at the water’s edge and pulled the sand off the beach.
Some years later, he said “I went to Radio Shack and bought a metal detector. But it didn’t work. It just went beep, beep, beep all the time, and I never found anything with it,” he said. “Forty years later I brought a $90 detector from Facebook Marketplace, and I went to Woodmont and Gulf beaches only to find tent stakes and bottle caps.”
He decided if he could eventually find $90 in change he would buy a better machine.
“I found $1.84,” he said.
Later on, however, he did buy a more expensive detector, and now finds coins, horseshoes, part of a license plate, a gate latch, a square brass buckle with a bit of leather still attached and lots of cast iron, hand-forged fragments of metal. It’s hard to date the finds, but he suspects some were from the 1800s, perhaps earlier.
What would he like to find?
“I’ve always collected coins, so I’d like to find some gold coins. I have found a few mercury silver dimes,” he said, referring to the pre-1965 dimes that contained 90 percent silver. Today’s dimes contain none.
There are three rules about metal detecting among the like-minded:
1) You have to get permission to go on private property.
2) If you hear beeps telling you there’s buried metal and you dig it up, you must remove whatever you find.
“There are tons of garbage out there,” Abbazia said, citing gum foil wrappers, beverage can pull tabs, common bottle caps, fishing line sinkers – “lots of metal.”
3) You have to fill in the hole you just dug and replace the turf. Those who go “dirt fishing,” as some people call it, have, over the years, cleaned beaches and fields of lots of rubbish.
Abbazia likes to go out three to four hours a week and has found his own special kind of treasure.
“When you go to the beach by yourself in the morning you are in a different place, not thinking about what’s going on in the world. I’m always wondering what I’m going to find. God gave me this day; I don’t have to work and metal detecting is fun,” he said.
He has a number of finds from old farm fields. His guess is that most of them are parts that broke off farm tools, and some came from old doors or gates. Other typical finds are foreign coins, rings (gold, silver, tungsten), necklaces, chains, bracelets, earrings, nails, screws, aluminum cans and wheat pennies. Wheat pennies, also called “wheat cents” or “Lincoln cents,” were made from 1909 to 1958 and have a distinct design with sheaves of wheat. Comparatively few were made and consequently they are rare.
Most items are found 2-4 inches deep, but with expensive equipment, the finds are sometimes down as much as 24 inches. Low-cost detectors are typically $50-$200; mid-range detectors are $200-$500; and the high-range models can be $500-$2,000.
Metal detecting is Abbazia’s avocation, but there are few people who have a work resume like he does. He went to the Connecticut School of Electronics and his first job was with Dun & Bradstreet as a data communications tech.
“That’s the same company Abraham Lincoln worked for,” he said with a grin.
Lincoln worked for Dun & Bradstreet’s predecessor, The Mercantile Agency, which sized up the credit status of businesses.
With that job, he said, “We basically flew all around the world installing private networks that became the internet that we all use today.” The job took him to Tokyo, Hong Kong, Australia, England, Ireland, Hawaii and “all over South America.”
Next Abbazia worked for the NASDAQ exchange as a Cisco certified engineer. “We were the ones who kept the stock market running,” he said.
Then he took a technical sales job and worked on Wall Street, where he dealt with such firms as Reuters, Prudential Financial, Bloomberg Financial and the Knight Capitol Group, all companies that support traders, investors and financial institutions and analyze and report market trends.
It was during this time that he got a US patent on a system he designed to ensure reliable delivery mechanisms for what he calls inherently unreliable data and a way to quickly spot errors on stock market feeds. When a stock is bought or sold, he explained, it takes about one second to report and clear a transaction. Then it’s disseminated all over the world. It also updates the brokers’ ledgers or what they call their “book.” If market makers or brokers do not have the correct pricing in their books, then they cannot trade in that market.
After NASDAQ, Abbazia was ready for a change. “I no longer wanted to work in the corporate environment world,” he said.
His next job was with a friend who ran a machine shop where Abbazia worked for eight years. He learned a whole new skillset.
“I liked having machine shop experience where I could make something useful,” he said.
When the machine shop closed, he walked to a company next door. “I need a job,” he told the owner. The reply was “You’re hired.”
He became the shipping and receiving person, but that title didn’t sound quite right to him.
“I reinvented the name of my position. I became the customer interface and engagement person and hand-delivered parts to the customers,” he said.
Today he works for Xcel Tool & Mfg. in Milford in shipping and receiving. He still likes the customer interface and engagement aspect of his work.
He didn’t leave the tech world behind completely. Today he helps veterans and senior citizens who need help with their computers.
If Abbazia had written this story, he probably would have started with the fact his friends call him the “Jerky King.” One day in 1982, his father, Ed Abbazia, Sr., asked if he wanted to make flank steak into beef jerky. So, they thinly sliced the meat and marinated it for 24 hours. Their first batch to dry was put in the oven of their home kitchen. It took another seven hours to dry the meat – and fill the house with smoke. Then it took a lot more time to wash the curtains and everything else. But the beef jerky was delicious.
“My father and I ate it all,” he said. During the next 44 years, the marinade and drying processes were perfected. He has shared the jerky with relatives and friends who gave him his nickname.
Marilyn May is a lifelong resident of Milford and is on the board of the Milford Historical Society.