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Mitch London started metal detecting as a way to look for rare coins; now he also uses his skills to help strangers find lost and meaningful objects.
The full transcript of this episode of KUT News Now is available on the KUT & KUTX Studio website. The transcript is also available as subtitles or captions on some podcast apps.
This Is My Thing: Metal Detecting!
Show open and theme
Michael Lee [00:00:12] I’m Michael Lee and you’re listening to This is my Thing. You’re probably hearing the show as part of the KUT News Now podcast feed, and we’re happy to be a part of that feed. But it’s really only two thirds accurate in our case. This is a KUT production and you are listening to it right now, but it’s not a news thing at all.
On This is my Thing we talk to people about the things they do just for themselves. It is not their job and it’s not a responsibility. It’s just a thing that brings them joy or feeds their soul. This week, metal detecting!
My guest today is Mitch London, a detectorist who uses his metal detector to look for treasure, but also to help perfect strangers find things they’ve lost.
Mitch London [00:00:56] My name is Mitch London and I am a member of the Austin Metal Detecting Club here in Austin, Texas, and a subgroup of the Austin Metal Detecting Club’s search team. And that basically is where we get requests to find lost items.
Mitch (in the field) [00:01:11] …yeah, I have that at maximum sensitivity. So that’s not going to be…
Michael Lee [00:01:23] Something that I’ve been struggling with since we started talking is that I’m never really sure how to refer to what you do. I keep wanting to call you a metal detector, which I know is the equipment, right?
Mitch London [00:01:32] And there’s people that get picky about that. I mean, that’s a that’s a metal detector. Well, I’m a detectorist. And there’s even a show in England called The Detectorists that they clearly state that in the show several times to non-metal detectorists. To me, it doesn’t matter. I do metal detecting. So you can call me Mitch or ‘hey, you’ or whatever you like.
Michael Lee [00:01:53] Okay.
Mitch London [00:01:54] Or ‘treasure hunters’, you know. But I haven’t found any treasure yet. Now, it’s a matter of.
Mitch (in the field) [00:02:01] Just digging in this little area because it seems to be fairly close to the surface. Or it’s just big and hard to find. Hush. This is always the amazing thing. It seems to move as soon as you dig one little spot. And it may just be a penny, which It’s a dime. All right. Not an old dime, but it’s a dime nonetheless. So it’s $0.10. Well on my way to paying for my detector. Which was my original goal when I first started metal detecting. Like, as long as I can pay for my metal detector, I’m happy. After a few short months, I realize that’s not probably going to happen. And so I moved on to this, which is more rewarding. Finding something for somebody else than finding a dime in the ground or a whole bunch of bottle caps.
Michael (in the field) [00:02:50] My guess – and please tell me if I’m wrong – is that that’s a pretty common path.
Mitch (in the field) [00:02:54] I think so. I think, you know, because I see the TV shows, you know, Aussie Gold Hunters and, you know, whatever. They’re out in there and, here’s a hunk of gold or here’s whatever, here’s here’s a whole bunch of stuff. And the reality is bottle caps, pull tabs. Which is kind of fun finding pull out the old pop top, you know. Pull tabs. You know, you find some of those. Especially I found one that had K 98, an old Austin radio station on it. I was like, Hey, I remember that station. You know, they had rock and roll back in the 80s and all that. But the pull tabs, you know. Yeah, they’re, they’re still out there waiting to be found. But, you know, nickels, dimes and pennies, they all add up. So a penny at a time.
Michael Lee [00:03:37] How did it first capture your attention?
Mitch London [00:03:40] I’ve done a lot of variety of of hobbies. I do coin collecting and so I kind of do a little cross into that. And I think someone from the metal detector club came and gave a presentation one time to the Coin Club and I thought, that would be fun. And so probably within a month I went down to a place in body, a metal detector that was returned, and it was like a few bucks off, you know, found the club and pretty much went right away.
Michael Lee [00:04:08] So this is a hobby that you kind of entered into via an earlier hobby?
Mitch London [00:04:12] Yeah, I basically started in coin collecting. And, you know, of course people find a lot of coins and pull tabs in metal detecting and so it kind of kind of flowed in perfectly for that. So I jumped in with both feet, as it were, and, you know, started metal detecting. And within a year I had joined the search team.
Michael Lee [00:04:31] Describe what that is for people who don’t who don’t know about it.
Mitch London [00:04:34] Well, basically, the search team is a group of people within our club that have designated themselves to be available to go out and find stuff that people lose. And people can go to our website, AMDConline.com, and there’s just a tab at the top that says ‘Lost Something?’ basically. And they can click on that, fill out the little, you know, form name, address, phone number, whatever, and say, I lost a ring, I lost, you know, my earring or my, you know, wedding ring or something last week doing yard work or something. Or in more extreme cases, they say, I lost our wedding ring 20 years ago in the front yard. Could you find it?
Audio of Mitch in the field
Michael Lee [00:05:16] I first met up with Mitch in the front yard of Kelly Goodpastor
Kelly Goodpastor [00:05:19] My name is Kelly Goodpastor.
Michael Lee [00:05:21] She had contacted the search team for help finding a very special earring.
Kelly Goodpastor [00:05:24] This last Saturday, I realized as I was getting ready for bedtime that one of my grandmother’s earrings was lost and her name was Baba. And she was just very, very important to me. And my mom had just given it to me about a month ago and I’d never taken them off except at night. And so somewhere along the line, in the course of running after my kids during the day, I lost it. And it was a beautiful, gold knotted earring. And I have to meet, so at least I have one of them. But I have turned this house upside down. I went through the entire recycling bin piece by piece. I keep telling myself to stop looking and that someday, hopefully, I’ll find it. But it’s just it’s on my heart because it’s very important to me in the car. And so we parked in the driveway there. Okay. We lost our house key somewhere in here.
Mitch (in the field) [00:06:14] That might be a secondary find.
Kelly Goodpastor [00:06:16] I’d be thrilled!
Mitch (in the field) [00:06:19] So we’ll start in the front yard and work the side yard. And then you can do the. We can do the backyard area.
Kelly Goodpastor [00:06:24] Awesome. Thank you. Still boggles my mind because I think it’s. It’s just something just give me a bit of hope. Like that is just a sweet thing that people are willing to get out there and do this for people amazes me.
Mitch (in the field) [00:06:36] Well, I’m going to turn this thing on. I want and I want to use that one to test the find to get a signal. That way I can zero in on..
Kelly Goodpastor [00:06:45] I hope Baba is looking down on us right now and having a good laugh.
Michael Lee [00:06:54] And what did you get out of that part of it?
Mitch London [00:06:59] That’s my favorite part. I really, really love finding stuff for people. I’m sure I’d like to find a gold treasure hoard in my backyard, but that’s not going to happen. Probably.
Mitch (in the field) [00:07:09] But back to you. And hopefully we’ll have some luck here. I’m going to start…
Mitch London [00:07:40] You know, finding something that somebody had lost is really awesome. It makes me happy. You know, first thing I do is, of course, smile and, like, you know, found it, you know, for me to score. Yes. And then I show it to them and then they’re, like, overjoyed. And it’s really, really cool. Or sometimes it’s like we had one where the husband was like, it’s here I was. We were literally pulling up his back porch, his wooden back porch nails, pulling them out. I was reaching underneath, sticking the metal detector as far as I could reach under there. Now, okay, pull up some more boards, ten handed, spend an hour, hour and a half doing that. And I was basically about done and starting to pack up my gear that was off the porch at that point. I look down and I see it right there on the ground and I go, Is this it? And the wife was like, I told you, it wasn’t under the porch. And so I finished and I left. But of course, he had to reassemble his porch back.
Michael Lee [00:08:11] So in that case, you use nature’s metal detector, the human eyeball.
Mitch London [00:08:14] Yeah, That’s like. And we’ve done that before. We’ve gotten everything set up, and you’re setting your metal detector, putting the batteries in and you looking down, and there it is, just like, okay, well, that was easy. Sometimes it takes a minute and sometimes it takes a couple hours or even a weekend.
Mitch (in the field) [00:08:31] I mean, it would be great if I found it right away, but there is just, you know, who knows what all is in here. And mainly what I’m trying to do is I did a sample on the on the ring earring and I got a number from it. And so. I get numerous.
tones, but I’m getting higher numbers and I’m like, okay, that’s too high. That’s not going to likely be it. So what I need to do is not dig every single thing because I will find a thousand roofing nails. And usually the higher pitch like that means there’s something real close to the surface. And I go in with my pen pointer. There you go. There’s something. It feels kind of big, actually, so… And it looks to be. Wow, That’s a yeah, it looks like a Boy Scouts pocket knife. Definitely an interesting find, I will say.
Michael Lee [00:09:42] How often do you guys get together to show off your findings?
Mitch London [00:09:45] We have a monthly meeting and we basically have a find of the month and people bring in all the stuff they found, whether it’s one coin or 100 different things. And we have a little about four tables right wide with what looks like calendars. It’s just a bunch of squares and numbers and you know, you fill out your form and you put yours in that way and there’s a whole bunch of there’s foreign coin, us coin, most interesting whatever, or a collection. And we have a bunch of categories and people can then after the meeting, they’ll vote on it. And it’s kind of a people’s vote what you think is the best. So usually the fun ones are the wild cards. That’s where you find the old cap guns or the pocket knives and various strange, just some strange. Stuff that people find.
Mitch (in the field) [00:10:26] That’s a good sound of something. A key. I wonder if this is the house she was talking about? Well, there we go. Something. I think we found the key.
Kelly Goodpastor [00:10:51] This is awesome. Is that the key?
Mitch (in the field) [00:10:52] Let’s just check the door.
Kelly Goodpastor [00:10:55] I mean, come on! Have you found the key?
Mitch (in the field) [00:10:56] There you go. Well, I also found a Boy Scout pocket knife.
Kelly Goodpastor [00:10:57] Come on!
Mitch (in the field) [00:10:58] It was right over here by this tree.
Kelly Goodpastor [00:11:05] This is so cool.
Michael Lee [00:11:06] So metal detecting is – it’s not your job. It’s a thing that you just do because you like it. Tell me what it does for your brain and for your heart.
Mitch London [00:11:15] It’s a lot of fun. It really is. Takes your mind off of things. And that’s really what it is. It’s an escape from the everyday going to work, yada, yada, yada. Got to go to work, got to go get groceries and do this. It’s like, where is metal detecting? You’re just out leisurely, just swinging the detector back and forth. It really is just a relaxing thing. I’ve never actually gotten to do it on a beach, but I can just imagine hearing the surf, you know, the smell of the ocean and, you know, just being out there in the cool breeze, searching and out in the beach. It’s great because there’s that’s a replenishing source. There’s always people out there dropping cell phones, dropping rings, dropping watches, everything. And so there’s always detectors out there searching on the beach, you know, and they’ve got these little special sand scoops. And it’s just a really relaxing thing to do. It’s not high stress, but it’s so much fun. It’s just, you know, you get to be out in nature, which is awesome. You can take as much time as you want, You know, you can just pack a lunch, sit out there and you can even do it in the rain if you really wanted to because they make them waterproof. So why not go out and enjoy the day?
Michael Lee [00:12:21] Were you expecting it to kind of be that for you when you when you started on?
Mitch London [00:12:26] No, I really wasn’t. I was just doing it because it sounded like fun to do. I didn’t think it was going to be relaxing, almost therapeutic in a sense that, you know, it just calms your mind. And, you know, I don’t use the word Zen lightly, but it just it just lets you just be there, you know, And it’s fun. You can do it with group of people. And it’s just because you’re not, you know, all bunched up, you’re all spread out and you’re all just out there having fun. Take a break for lunch chat. What did you find? What I find. Here’s what I found. Here’s this. I found that over there. And you can’t have that area that’s mine now. So, you know, and it’s just a lot of friendship and camaraderie out there that you don’t get to do a lot of times. And it’s it’s not a huge investment to do that, that you can it’s you you spend as little or as much time as you want to do. It’s like, I got, you know, I got a lunch break. Instead of that, I’ll just take a little sandwich and just go out and swing in the in the parking lot, you know, at our building. You know, if you get permission. Of course.
Michael Lee [00:13:29] You mentioned that it can be kind of therapeutic. Does it sort of serve as a form of therapy for you sometimes?
Mitch London [00:13:35] I don’t know if it’s necessarily a therapy, but it’s definitely… it’s calming. And then, of course, if you find something, you get the endorphin rush. And so it’s like, this could be something good.
Michael Lee [00:13:45] I feel like the common thing that people’s hobbies and passions give them are relaxation and an endorphin rush.
Mitch London [00:13:53] It does. You know, I mean, it may be knitting to some people or crochet or something, and it’s just a relaxing. It’s just, you know, what to expect kind of thing. And you just do it. And then when you’re done metal detecting, you might have some treasure. When you’re done crocheting, you might have this amazing Afghan that you made. So, you know, it’s you may not find, you know, the most expensive treasure and it’s not necessarily about finding the most expensive treasure. It’s kind of the journey of doing it is was the rewarding part.
Mitch (in the field) [00:14:23] Sadly, does not look to be a very successful day, unfortunately, so… But like I say, I will contact our club members the rest of the search team and say, Hey, I couldn’t find it. But if somebody else has a time, they can come out and and try their luck, hopefully. I always hate to leave a house with something not found, but sometimes you have to.
Michael Lee [00:14:47] So that was the end of our search that day. But I think Mitch was right, that the journey is sometimes more important than the treasure. But I’m also a sucker for a happy ending, so I was really glad to hear this from Kelly:
Kelly Goodpastor [00:14:59] About a week later, we found it! It was in the bottom of my son’s toy box.
Michael Lee [00:15:04] So it was never in the yard to begin with.
Kelly Goodpastor [00:15:06] It was never in the yard! It was in this messy house the whole time.
Michael Lee [00:15:16] And how did Mitch react when you told him what had happened?
Kelly Goodpastor [00:15:19] You know, I thought sweet Mitch, I thought he was going to be upset that he had wasted his time. And he was so gracious. He was just excited that I found it. And he was excited. He was thankful that I reached out, let him know that it had been found. Well, and you know, I hate that it happened, but really and I’ve said this before and I’ve told a bunch of friends this the fact that I lost something so meaningful and it was so upsetting for, you know, what, a week that I couldn’t find, it was like the sadness of it all was lessened by the fact that I connected with this really unique community within this great town. I mean, I’ve never in my wildest dreams think that there’s a group of people who literally are happy to come searched for missing things just for complete strangers. It was a really it was a sweet thing that they would do that.
Mitch (in the field) [00:16:09] Of course, we’ve also had stuff where we’ve spent hours looking, and then two weeks later they’ll say, ‘I found it in the garage.’ Or ‘I found it in the house somewhere.’ And it’s like, well, at least it was found. We count that as a win.
Michael Lee [00:16:21] Thanks for listening to This Is My Thing. I’m Michael Lee and I produce the show. Thanks, of course, to Mitch London for sharing his love of metal detecting with us. And also thanks to Kelly Goodpastor, for letting me and Mitch wander around her yard for a few hours.
If you haven’t done it already, you can see some photos of Mitch and his detector on our show page at KUT.org. And we’ve got more This Is My Thing coming soon. We’ve recently interviewed a guy who plays bike polo and a woman who found her creative spark with fingernail art. And we’ve talked to a bunch more interesting people and haven’t interviewed them yet, but we will! Keep listening to hear those stories and more. If you’d like to tell us about your thing and maybe be a part of a future episode of the show, that’s pretty easy. Just go to the This Is My Thing show page at KUT.org. There you’ll find a form that will let you tell us about your thing. And of course, that is not the only form on the KUT website. There’s also a form you can fill out to become a member of this station. Our members make this in everything we do possible.
This transcript was transcribed by AI, and lightly edited by a human. Accuracy may vary. This text may be revised in the future.
