Man really digs Lynn Commons

LYNN ?
LYNN? Larry Kadra’s weapon of choice is a metal detector, his target Lynn Commons and his aim is hit or miss. And he’s just fine with that.
The 68-year old Lynn native has been metal detecting and finding pieces of local history around Lynn, especially at the commons, for 49 years now and has amassed quite the collection of artifacts.
?It’s a passion about finding something. I love to find an old coin, old ring or piece of jewelry,” Kadra said.
?Finding something” is an understatement, considering that he has a pile of old and rare coins, jewelry, horseshoes, bullet casings, knives and even Civil War musket balls that one might expect to see in a museum or in the counter at a pawn shop. Larry Kadra has found them all at Lynn Commons.
In fact, he’s so passionate about metal detecting that he’s even been published in Lost Treasure Magazine, a periodical dedicated to metal detecting.
The very first detector that Kadra ever owned he built himself, although it wasn’t the greatest piece of equipment he said, success is more dependant on the operator being familiar with their own machine than it is on the quality of the device.
Kadra’s favorite things are the old coins. His collection of rare aged coins, which he has found and traded for over the years, has an estimated value of around $8,000, but he’s not the kind of guy that is necessarily interested in the monetary value of his collection. For him, the real value comes from holding a piece of history in his hand, like one coin that he found that was minted in 1864.
?Who’s to say that Lincoln didn’t hold that very coin?” Kadra said as he explained his fascination with holding relics of American history. “I like being able to hold a piece of history, like those Civil War bullets. Those were held by actual soldiers at the time.”
Kadra picked up the hobby when he saw an old Army buddy doing it, and he asked him if he could try it.
?The first time I didn’t find anything, but I was instantly hooked,” he said.
It wasn’t long after that that he went out and bought a detector of his own. Now he and his brother, Arthur Kadra, enjoy metal detecting together and trading various different pennies they find.
?I give a lot of stuff away,” said Kadra, who works for the Hall Company, a group that owns, manages and develops real estate on the North Shore. Kadra manages the J.B. Blood building in Lynn as well as the building where he lives. “And every Christmas I do what I can do to raise money to buy a metal detector for a kid to get them into the hobby, too.”
The artifacts are not all relics, valuable coins and jewelry, said Kadra, “You find tons and tons and tons of bottle caps. ? Most coin shooters are well aware of the fact that you have to dig through a lot of trash before you find the good stuff,” Kadra said.
He explained that most often metal detectors will alert their users of metal in the ground, only for them to dig it up and find that it is an old bottle cap, or an aged pull tab from a beer can. This leads many people to tune their metal detectors to be less sensitive so that they will not pick up signals from such things, reducing the “chatter” that many users find unpleasant to have to audibly sift through to find real buried treasures.
Kadra said the experienced members of the metal detecting community, however, know that if they reduce their device’s sensitivity to trash items, they could also be missing out on things like gold or silver rings that often sound similar to pull tabs and bottle caps.
?That’s a good thing, because the experienced people will take all the trash that they find when digging and take it with them to dispose of it in the trash barrel when they get home. This does two things: that way when you go back to the same area you don’t have to worry about finding that stuff again, and it also removes it from the ground so that no kids can prick themselves on any kind of sharp metal trash if they decided to go digging through the dirt themselv