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LEESBURG – Try as they might Saturday, four former Leesburg Elementary students and their former PACE teacher couldn’t find the time capsule they buried 31 years ago.
They might make another attempt, but for now the location of the plastic five-gallon hermetically sealed bucket remains a mystery. If it’s still there, the time capsule is under two layers of landscape rock, weed matting and dirt in a walled-off area in front of the world headquarters of Maple Leaf Farms, which was formerly the site of Leesburg School. The poultry company gave the group permission to dig in that area to try and find the relic.
Warsaw Community Schools sold the former Leesburg school in 2011 to Maple Leaf Farms. The company has since renovated the building and the grounds.
PACE was a WCS program for gifted and talented students. During the 1986-87 school year, fourth-grade PACE classes created and buried time capsules at their schools. Washington and Lincoln elementaries are the only two elementaries who found their maps to the time capsules, former PACE teacher Cindy Nash said Saturday morning as the dig was underway.
She said Leesburg School has had so many principals over the years, they were supposed to save the maps, but they’ve been lost. Washington Principal Tom Ray thinks his school’s might now be buried under paving, while Lincoln’s wasn’t uncovered when the new school building there was constructed.
Nash taught PACE at Leesburg, Claypool and Madison, with two other teachers covering the other Warsaw schools.
Nash said she and her former student, Ethel Massing, knew about the area Leesburg School’s time capsule was in because the small area has always been walled off.
She said the items she thinks are in it are a collection of what was popular then from music and television shows, as well as social and political items. Serenade Foods donated the buckets for the time capsules.
“We made predictions about our lives and put those in there. Ethel said she thinks she put a Cheetohs bag in there,” Nash said.
Four of Nash’s former PACE students from that year were helping to find the time capsule – Massing, Michelle Hyden, Topher Wiseman and Trevor Jaynes. The fifth, Cilissa Mellott, was unable to make it.
Hyden said she didn’t remember what she put in the time capsule. “I really don’t. I don’t remember what side of the building it was. I remember doing the time capsule, I just don’t know what I put in it.”
Besides the Cheetohs, Massing said she was “pretty sure” she put dirt in the bucket, too, so they could analyze it.
“I remember that we did it. I remember we put it in this enclosure,” Jaynes said, adding that he may have put some neon shoelaces in it because they were popular at the time.
After about 40 minutes of digging, Wiseman got a probe to find the bucket instead of randomly digging. At one point, he thought he found it, but it turned out to just be an old drain tile.
Wiseman said he didn’t remember much about doing the time capsule and he didn’t have a clue as to what he put in it.
Nash, who now teaches first grade at Claypool Elementary, said students at the time were given a packet of ideas of what they could put in the time capsule. Many students focused on what was popular at the time.
Though they didn’t find the time capsule Saturday after two hours of digging, the former classmates and their teacher found something more valuable than the bucket of stuff from the 1980s.
“The real value of this was we all got to get together and tell stories of what we do remember,” Jaynes said.
