Something totally awesome happened in Nome this summer: a time capsule from 1990 was opened, and it was like history class met a treasure hunt! The whole town (okay, maybe not everyone, but a bunch of curious folks) crammed into the Richard Foster Building to see what was inside.
Back in the day, Dee McKenna was Nome’s Library Director (a.k.a. Queen of Books) from 1979 to 1997. In 1990, she and her trusty sidekick Joe Davis ran the summer reading program, and the theme was “Traveling Through Time.” Naturally, they decided, let’s actually travel through time… with a time capsule!
They found a big ol’ metal tube and invited kids to stuff it with all kinds of cool things from home. Thanks to the local airline Bering Air, they filled the capsule with nitrogen (science-y!) and sealed it shut. Then the time capsule did a bit of its own traveling around Nome for the next few decades.
Eventually, it ended up chillin’ (literally) at the city’s Public Works Building. But plot twist! In 2023, that building caught on fire.
“The first thing that was said is, oh my gosh. What happened to the time capsule? Is it there? Is it okay? Where was it? We asked people to look for it. We can’t find it,” McKenna recalled.
Thankfully, local heroes Cheryl Thompson and Marguerite La Riviere jumped into detective mode and searched high and low. And guess what? They found it. In a freezer van. (No joke.)
History saved! Time-travel dreams intact. And somewhere, 1990 kids are high-fiving from the past.
