A little bit of tweeting and just the right timing paid off for a Cookson man and his son, who found a cache of goodies at the USS Batfish on Wednesday.

Mike Branan, an assistant manager at the Tahlequah Walmart, said he was reading champion skateboarder Tony Hawk’s page on the Twitter Web site when he saw Muskogee mentioned.

The skateboarder was hosting a Twitter hunt, a scavenger hunt featuring prize boxes hidden in locations around the world. Hawk posted clues to each location on his Twitter page, part of the Twitter social network in which people update or “tweet” their status in short sentences.

Branan said he read this cryptic tweet on Wednesday morning: Muskogee: “Torpedo Run, 1958, starring Glenn Ford and Ernest Borgnine.”

“I decided there was only one place that could be,” Branan said.

However, Branan worried if he and his 10-year-old son Hayden, would make it in time from their home more than 40 miles from Muskogee’s famed landlocked submarine, the USS Batfish.

“I really didn’t think we had a chance to find it,” he said. “We waited 45 minutes to get going, and it took us 45 minutes to get there.”

Once they got there, the father and son had to pay $11 to get in, he said, recalling that he had to get to the nearest automatic teller machine to get the money.

Branan said he found the box at the bottom of the submarine. Contents included a watch, several T-shirts, a Spiderman Wii game and a book.

“I was excited,” said Hayden, a fifth-grader at Tahlequah Middle School. “Dad saw it and said, ‘There it is.’”

Hayden said he was wearing one of the T-shirts found in the box. “It has a lot of designs on it.

Sarah Hall, publicist for Tony Hawk, said the skateboarder started his Twitter hunt on Monday and will continue it through this weekend, when he will do a skating demonstration at a yet-to-be determined location.

“He has a rather large following on his Twitter account,” she said, counting more than 1.7 million followers. “He feels a responsibility to keep things engaging, so he wanted to do a large-scale hunt.”

She said Hawk hid skateboards in Hawaii and London. The Twitter account showed prizes at all sorts of famed and obscure locations, including San Antonio, Texas; Fargo, N.D.; Campbellsville, Ky., Basingstoke, England.



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