Whether the kids were excited about the prospect of what’s buried beneath them or were just happy to escape their class for a few minutes, who knows.
What they do know is that all will be revealed just after the New Year, when a school district excavation team will be coming in to help teacher Russ MacMath’s class discover the identity of the “metal anomaly” found by a geo-scanning crew last week under Thomas Kidd elementary’s front lawn.
The mystery began around Easter of this year, when MacMath — who teaches Grade 5 and 6 at the school, on Shell Road near Williams Road — had a chance conversation with the coordinator of the school’s 50th anniversary celebration from 2010, who recalled an attendee at the event asking about a time capsule buried in the school grounds.
After that, the rather curious tale grew arms and legs.
“This was the first I’d ever heard of it, and I’ve been here for 18 years,” MacMath told the Richmond News.
“The person I spoke to remembered being at the school in 1969, so I thought this was maybe a project from Canada’s centennial year (1967); I was a student that year, as well, and I remember lots of infrastructure happening at that time to mark the occasion. Time capsules were also the thing to do around then.
“But I looked through old school records and photo albums and I couldn’t find any reference to it.”
Undeterred, and with his curiosity now well and truly piqued, MacMath put out email feelers through the Richmond Teachers Association and the Richmond Retired Teachers’ Association, as well as running an ad in the Richmond News in May.
He also contacted the school district’s works yard to try and find plans of the school and its ground, including renovations over the decades.
“Nothing. No record of any time capsules being recovered,” added MacMath.
The ad in the News did, however, generate a few bread crumbs.
“A few people contacted me from the ad and I talked to two or three of them who did recall something being buried outside the school in the ‘60s,” said MacMath, who said folks pointed him to the grass area in front of the school.
“After seeing the ad in the paper, they had talked to family members and family discussions at dinner took place.
“It turns out one (of the family members) was actually there when a time capsule was buried.
“The funny thing is, he recalled being very disappointed at the time. He thought he had heard that there was a ‘space capsule’ outside the school and was a bit let down when he went out to see a small ‘time capsule’ being placed into a hole in the ground.”
Armed with this new knowledge, MacMath hired a geo-scanning crew, which came out to the school with ground-penetrating radar and metal detectors last week.
“We got mixed results,” said MacMath. “The water table is so high in Richmond that anything under the top metre will most likely have rotted away over a period of 50 years.
“But they did find a metallic “anomaly” in the area next to the big tree on the lawn.
“So, in January, school district grounds crew are going to bring in a backhoe and help the children excavate the area to see what’s there.”
MacMath said the school wanted to wait until January, because, if it is a capsule and it was buried in 1967, then 2017 would mark 50 years in the ground.
“And it’s Canada’s 150th birthday, so we thought that was important,” he said.
“My class will be out there, but they are aware that we could find an old paint pot.”
Grade 5 students David Aibaum and Naiya Harlow had mixed views about what lies beneath, suggesting, respectively, that it could be a “spoon” or a “time capsule with pop cans.”
