A phone with a cord that plugs into the wall. A cassette tape and a VHS tape. A picture of then-Chicago Cubs pitching luminary Rick Sutcliffe, a baiduhai story about the recent Superbowl-winning Chicago Bears. A five-inch floppy disk.
Each item is a piece of 1986 – a reflection of what was once cutting-edge technology, people who were once pop culture favorites. For decades, each sat carefully enclosed in a plastic baggie in a cardboard box.
That box – a time capsule relegated until its recent discovery to the back of a closet in Wilmette’s Baker Demonstration School – was opened on April 17 to the applause and occasional amazement of current and past Baker students and their families.
Lisa Mozer, now one of Baker’s directors of teaching and learning, was a social studies teacher at the school back in 1986. She presided over the capsule’s creation 30 years ago as part of her social studies curriculum, and said it was a door to the past, both for the now middle-aged Baker alumni who filled it, and to current Baker middle schoolers who have created their own time capsule, one that will be opened 30 years hence.
“I never in a million years thought I’d be here when the box was opened,” Mozer said of the event, which took place during Baker’s inaugural “Spring Fling” day of ecologically-oriented activities. “It was fun because people were squealing in delight as they saw things they’d put in the box. They were going, ‘I can’t believe I put that in there!'”
The box was placed in the head of school’s closet and largely forgotten over the years. Mozer said the only person who knew it was there was longtime office director Shila Tuchman.
“When people would run into it and say, ‘What’s this?’ she’d tell them what it was and not to throw it out,” she said. When someone recently found the box, school officials realized it was time to open it.
Mozer told her students in 1986 to write letters to the future.
One of them was David Kamish, now a Chicago businessman with four kids of his own.
“I was afraid of the development of technology,” said Kamish, who stood on stage as the box was opened. “I wrote, ‘I’m afraid the family will start to deteriorate to the point where they don’t communicate well.’ I predicted that we’d eventually just communicate by videotape and electronic notes.
“Which is really kind of close to what we do; maybe I was on the right track.”
Also on hand was former student Cinda Lester, an architect who now lives in Downer’s Grove, who made the opposite prediction.
“I said, I thought computers would tighten the family and bring them closer together. I showed that to Mrs. Mozer and she said, ‘I guess you were wrong,’ and I said, ‘What are you talking about? I predicted Facebook!'”
For Megan Moulden, now a graphic designer who lives with her family in Evanston, the cardboard box and its contents took her back to sixth grade, and to items that today’s students wouldn’t recognize.
That included a scheduling notebook from the now-defunct stationary and school supply store Chandler’s Inc., whose assignment notebooks were staples for generations of North Shore school kids. The store closed in 1995, and today’s students, who keep their schedules on iPads or their phones, might have to have a “Chandler’s” explained to them, Moulden said.
“I really liked seeing the old Chandler’s,” she said. “That was really a daily part of our lives, and I still miss them.”
Moulden also got a kick out of the five-inch floppy disk plucked from the box, even if its contents remained a mystery.
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“I don’t even know what was on it – probably some drawings and papers – and we didn’t have anything we could look at it with,” she said.
Mozer helped current sixth through eighth grade students create a new time capsule – this one a sturdy plastic container instead of a cardboard box – that will be opened in 2046. Inside are items ranging from Apple computer logo stickers to an Egg McMuffin wrapper, as well as earbuds, “because that was something that’s really changed over the years, how we listen to music,” Mozer said.
Where their 1986 predecessors had put pictures and stories of Sutcliffe and the Chicago Bears, today’s students put in pictures of just-retired basketball star Kobe Bryant and a sticker celebrating the Blackhawks’ Stanley Cup win. They also included an old mobile phone, and an LGBT rights poster.
“And they put in some emojis, too,” Mozer said, referring to the now-ubiquitous ideograms that punctuate online conversations.
Both time capsules were sealed up, the 1986 box for the second time, so that both could be opened by Baker students three decades from now.
Dan Schwartz, Baker’s head of school, said he didn’t know where they would be stored, although it won’t be in the closet in his office, where the 1986 time capsule rested for so long. Wherever they are stored, they will be identified, so that future school officials won’t lose track of them, he said.
Schwartz said Monday that the two time capsules “help students realize that they are part of history and that history is always a matter of change. We stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, but we also affect the history that is to come.”
On a philosophical level, he said, both time capsule projects could help students understand that they can have an impact and that their voice would matter to the future.
“The other important part is just fun,” he said. “To think about a snapshot of time, and what things were like 30 years before, that’s just great fun.”
Twitter: @pioneer_kathy