A Bangor school’s 1980s time capsule is nowhere to be found

A time capsule buried 38 years ago by Bangor middle schoolers was expected to be unearthed Monday morning.

But, despite volunteers digging more than 12 feet deep, 5 feet wide and 10 feet long in the outfield of the softball diamond at James F. Doughty School, the tube was nowhere to be found. The capsule, buried in 1986 by students at the then-Fifth Street Middle School, was originally supposed to be unearthed in 2011.

Almost no one remembered that it had been buried. To make it more difficult, no one knew where exactly it was.

In the years since it was buried, a building was built and torn down in the area near the southwest corner of school and a road used as a point of measurement was widened. Now multiple feet of fill dirt form a hill, then level off for the softball field.

The search was spearheaded by James F. Doughty School social studies teacher Stephen Riitano, who learned about the time capsule while doing research before he and his students buried a new capsule in 2023.

It took about 18 months of work and a community effort to get to the point of digging, Riitano said. C.A. Strout & Sons in Bangor volunteered its time and large machinery to dig Monday, while another contractor used ground penetrating radar to narrow down where they would dig.

“I never thought we’d get to this point,” Riitano said. “It was really tapping into the right people.”

Richard Glueck, the teacher who buried it, and then-seventh grader Josh Carey watched Monday as the field was dug up, hoping for the time capsule to be unearthed.

“Not every experiment ends the way you want it, with a successful eureka,” Glueck said.

Despite all the changes to the land, geographic information system mapping and satellite photos — some from just a few years after it was buried — helped narrow down where the capsule should be, Kendra Bird said. Bird attended the middle school 10 years after the capsule was buried. She has worked as an archaeologist and has a graduate degree in GIS mapping.

“I’m still befuddled that we’re off by this much,” Bird said.

There’s no soil evidence that shows the capsule was unearthed and removed before Monday’s dig, Bird said. The layers of dirt would have been disturbed.

A Twix bar, can of Pepsi, two dead bumblebees, a Rick Springfield pin and punk socks are among the items buried in the time capsule, according to a Bangor Daily News article.

To Carey, the most important thing in the capsule is a VHS tape of himself and classmates talking about what they want from the future and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. It’s one of the only videos he has from his childhood, and multiple classmates are now dead.

“It was an amazing thing,” he said. “I never forgot it.”

Not finding it was disappointing, but the capsule is still doing its job, preserving history, Glueck said. Students did math to try to locate it, saw a layer of glacial marine clay when the area was dug up and learned that not every science experiment ends with success.

“I don’t call it a failure by any means,” Glueck said. “Some day somebody else can come after it.”