Reported in The San Jose Mercury News
June 19, 1999

LIVERMORE --- Memo to Livermore: Next time you bury a time capsule, keep the memo handy that describes where you buried it.

Three weeks of confusion, ridicule and general amusement ended Friday, when city officials finally found a time capsule buried in May 1974. A 25-year-old memo detailing its exact location was found late Thursday afternoon in a city archive file.

The metal capsule, a storage container looking much like an old milk can was found right behind and next to the base of Centennial Park's totem pole, on the north side of the pole. The capsule was buried about 2 1/2 feet below the surface.

Though a small group of Livermore officials dug it up early Friday morning --- "just to make sure it was there," said Public Works Superintendent Pete Isganitis --- it was re-buried for a mom festive ceremony just before noon.

Mayor Cathie Brown laughed a couple of times as she and a group of kids pulled the canister out of the ground --- with the help of an attached rope --- and turned the wing nuts open with wrenches.

"This has been too much fun," she said.

It's been a merry old time for many people, and the fun hasn't stopped, Friday was city crews' third time at Centennial Park On June 2 and again June 8, efforts to find the capsule proved fruitless. Metal detectors

beeped and wailed in many spots in the totem pole area, and shovels turned soil over in a few places, but found no trace of the elusive capsule.

The search drew national attention, going on Associated Press news wires and even rating a feature story June 11 on the CBS Evening News that featured Brown and local historian Barry Schrader.

Thursday morning, Doug Crice, president of the Saratoga-based GeoRadar Inc., scoured an area about 15 feet in every direction from the Centennial Park totem pole.

Schrader said the capsule was buried
so close to the base that it may not have shown up as a separate item on radar and metal-detection screens.

The Navy's West Coast Naval Environmental Detachment, based at Mare Island in Vallejo, had offered a "magnetometer" that detects underground shapes.

But a 53-word memo, written in May 1974, was found late Thursday by City Clerk Alice Calvert in an old file that hasn't seen the light of day for years. The memo gave concise directions to the location of the capsule.

Aside from a bit of rust around the lid, the can held up well. Except for a glass stein that cracked, the contents survived admirably. There had been concern that the container may have rusted through, putting its contents in peril.

Inside were two bottles of wine, two centennial tokens, an old newspaper, the book "Suburbia," by Bill Owens, several photographs, sheet music for the "Centennial Rag," written by former City Councilman Don Miller (which he forgot was in there), and several lists of city leaders and capsule committee members from 1969, Livermore's centennial year.

"A list of all the people who couldn't remember where the capsule was," Brown joked.

Schrader said the unearthed items, and the canister, will be on display at the Alameda County Fair from June 26 through July 11, and after that at the Carnegie Library downtown.

Herbert Hagemann, descendant of a pioneering family, was relieved the search was over.. He helped choose what went in the capsule, and Friday he was poring through the old photos --- some of them taken in his home.

It is a chapter he, and others, are glad has closed. Councilman Tom Reitter was on hand, too, and told Councilwoman Lorraine Dietrich he hopes this history mystery is not repeated.

"Now, 100 years from now, they'll forget they dug this capsule up," he said.

April 2, 1999