Photos by Michael Maloney / The Chronicle

No one knows the location of the time capsule buried in Livermore's Centennial Park including city workers shown digging around the park.

City workers buried a time capsule 25 years ago, but now, no one can find it

Livermore city workers dug a shallow hole, then used a metal detector --- but found only a bottle cap.

Livermore --- the Little Bo Peep of cities --- has lost its time capsule and can't tell where to find it.

Everyone in the city is laughing about it, although the merriment seems a shade less lively at City Hall.

It was city workers who buried the metal canister in Centennial Park 25 years ago, supposedly two feet behind the totem pole, or maybe it was in front, or maybe it's not in the park at all.

" We can't find it," a chuckling Mayor Cathie Brown said yesterday, after a second day of metal-detector sweeping and shovel digging yielded little but rusty bottle caps, old batteries and holes in the carefully sodded park at Fourth and Holmes streets.

No one kept a record or a map, and no one is even sure who was on the crew that buried the capsule, which is about the size of a small

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beer barrel. Although filling the capsule with local materials and wine was a public event, the burial was done secretly by a public works crew to keep would-be thieves from knowing where to find it,

One person who reportedly was on the crew reportedly said he does not remember anything. The public works director at the time does not recall, and the city has not been able to find the supervisor who oversaw the project, said Mike Miller, the current head of public works, known officially as Public Services.

'We find that collective memories are pretty weak," said Barry Schrader, the person who persuaded the city to dig up the capsule so that it could be displayed in a special case already reserved for the Alameda County Fair, which opens in two weeks. Schrader, past president of the local historical society and former editor of the Tri-Valley Herald, was on the Livermore Centennial Committee, which created the capsule.

Probably the most valuable artifact in the capsule was a magnum of special red wine from Livermore's Concannon Vineyards.

Jim Concannon whose grandfather was the first Irishman to start a winery in America, went home laughing but disappointed yesterday after coming to the park to find out if the specially bottled petite sirah is still drinkable.

The wine sold for $25 when it was released for the centennial commemoration and now is worth "a couple thousand, easy," Concannon said.

Also joining the search yesterday was Bob Howard, a prospecting store owner who took pity on the city after seeing "the mayor on the front of the newspaper with a cheap metal detector," he said. "What she had --- I don't think would find a cannonball on top of the ground."

After its first fruitless search last week, the city issued a public appeal for help. Howard showed up yesterday with his "top of the line" metal detector, a "White Spectrum XLT with a magnum force loop." But the super-machine --- along with two city detectors and another one from a Mount Diablo metal-detector club --could not remedy what time forgot.

 "I haven't given up," swore Howard, who said he would come back with an even more powerful detector if the city will let him.

Also, the labs for which Livermore is famous --- Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory or the Livermore branch of Sandia National Laboratories --- could provide special imaging equipment used for finding land mines and underground tanks, said Schrader, who now works at Sandia.

One fear is that the canister, donated by a local army surplus store may have rusted away, Schrader said.

Deciding on further searches is up the city. Mayor Brown said she will have to report to the City Council, and Public Services director Miller said after yesterday's search, "I'm not going back to the park for a while."

It so happens that Livermore is not alone. A large number of civic time capsules are never found, according to an analysis published in Atlantic magazine 12 years ago. The article began with Wilkinsburg, Penn., which also lost its 25-year-old centennial time capsule.

Livermore has learned one important lesson, Schrader said. It is now preparing a millennium time capsule to be buried on Dec. 31, 1999. This time, it will be sealed in a double-layer, stainless-steel barrel designed to hold decommissioned nuclear bomb waste, and it will be buried under a brass marker set in a large amount of concrete next to the city library.

Meanwhile, Schrader promised to keep looking for the old capsule, even if the mayor did threaten yesterday to have him declared "a public menace to city parks."

"The search will continue," he said. "We're not going to give up."

April 2, 2000