NOVEMBER 25, 2015 LAST UPDATED: WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2015, 9:17 AM
BY MATTHEW SCHNEIDER
STAFF WRITER |
THE RIDGEWOOD NEWS
A recently unearthed time capsule has given its viewers a look back to the days of 1986.
The container was interred on the Benjamin Franklin Middle School grounds roughly 30 years ago and was aptly named “Halley’s capsule” by the former BF students, a tip of the cap to the comet that last appeared that year.
The time capsule was intended to be recovered upon the next appearance of Halley’s Comet, but was accidentally dug up this summer by an excavation crew working on the new driveway cut-out at BF.
Gregory Wu, BF assistant principal, said he hurried to the scene once he was informed of the crew’s find.
“Finding value in those types of things,” he said, “I rushed over to take a look.”
Upon arrival, Wu discovered that the capsule had not been well-preserved, and as a result, some of its items were damaged throughout the years.
“I was disappointed to see that its contents (mostly seventh-grade English essays) had been stored in a pretty flimsy plastic container that had failed to keep the water/elements out,” he said. “There was an audio cassette tape, a Betamax tape, various coins, a ‘Vogue’ magazine I believe, a class set of essays and a few other paper items that could not be read due to deterioration.”
Torrance Watson, a current physical education instructor at BF, was one of the students to bury the capsule. He also expressed disappointment at the condition of the container.
“It would have been nice for the capsule to be undamaged so that whoever unearthed it could read all of the entries,” Watson said.
However, the capsule, which was scheduled to be unearthed around 2061, according to Wu, did contain a few mostly intact items: a yearbook from the BF class of 1986 and some of the aforementioned essays.
