The Associated Press

Patrick Webb landed his first job with the FBI while a student at the University of Washington. He was a mail clerk.

The Seattle native ended up spending 34 years with the bureau, mostly as an explosives and counter-terror expert. One of his early high-profile cases, the Wall Street Journal reports, involved The Order, the white-supremacist group that pulled off various robberies in the 1980s and murdered radio talk-show host Alan Berg.

"It is wild how much of his professional life was spent tracking down dumb-ass white supremacists," his daughter Eileen said on Twitter this week.

Webb, who died of liver cancer Dec. 17 at 73, also was part of the team that hunted for the mysterious Unabomber, the domestic terrorist who set off bombs around the U.S. over a 17-year period, killing three people. After Ted Kaczynski surfaced as a suspect, Webb led the 1996 search of Kaczynski's Montana cabin. Soon, he turned to his team members, tears in his eyes.

"It's over," he said. "This is the guy."

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A 1995 FBI sketch of the Unabomber (AP)

"Later that day," Eileen wrote, "he broke his shoulder as they were evacuating the cabin because they found live pipe bombs under the bed."

The Journal's James R. Hagerty wrote an obituary for Patrick Webb that's well worth reading, but it doesn't include the following memorable story.

After the Journal's article about her father was published, Eileen took to social media to relate an anecdote about him finding a message in a bottle on an Oregon beach. What he did with it, she wrote, epitomized the kind of big-hearted, playful man her father was.

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Here's a true story about my dad. When I was little, we were on a beach in Oregon and he found a message in a bottle.



The note contained an address, with a plea in a young boy's handwriting to send a postcard and let him know how far the bottle had traveled. — Eileen Webb (@webmeadow) January 9, 2019

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It had very clearly been thrown in the ocean from the nearby crab docks. It probably traveled a whopping 1/2 mile before washing up in the sand.



He decided to wait until we got back to California to send the postcard, so it would seem like the bottle floated all the way south. — Eileen Webb (@webmeadow) January 9, 2019

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The postcard ended by saying "I threw the bottle back in the ocean for someone else to find!"



Then he shared the address with his brother, who sent a similar postcard from Seattle a few weeks later. His postcard ended the same way. — Eileen Webb (@webmeadow) January 9, 2019

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They did this for DECADES, sending postcards to this kid from all the places they traveled, always saying they were throwing the bottle back in the water. Mexico, Alaska, Boston, Florida, London! "I found it in the Thames!" — Eileen Webb (@webmeadow) January 9, 2019

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Sometimes he'd recruit friends, so that the handwriting didn't always match. He sent that kid postcards from Chicago, from Paris, from landlocked towns in Wisconsin and Oklahoma. He kept the address in his wallet, though it didn't really matter because he'd memorized it long ago. — Eileen Webb (@webmeadow) January 9, 2019

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Somewhere out there a grown man from Tacoma has hundreds of postcards in my dad's scratchy handwriting. If there was a way he could do a good deed *while also being slightly mischievous*, he was all in. That's the kind of guy he was. — Eileen Webb (@webmeadow) January 9, 2019

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Hey this is my dad. https://t.co/05rICgHJOA — Eileen Webb (@webmeadow) January 9, 2019

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-- Douglas Perry

@douglasmperry

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