by Lori Shriner, for the Seward County Independent
This is the second article in a series about the discoveries made during the opening of the pyramid portion of the world’s largest time capsule in Seward on July 4. The opening of the main time capsule is scheduled for July 4, 2025.
Sue and Rich Bollwitt celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary over the course of a year, making several trips from Alaska to Nebraska to attend friends’ anniversary celebrations.
So it was easy for Sue to contact her friends Dan and Rose Policky on July 28 to retrieve the letter she had written to her daughter in 1985, when Harold “Budd” Davisson asked people to add items to the new pyramid top of the world’s largest time capsule.
Dan had seen a Facebook post from Davisson Furniture Center that included Sue’s letter, sent Sue a photo, and told Trish Johnson that he could deliver the letter. Since unpacking the pyramid, Johnson has been in touch with several of the intended recipients or families of the letters and other messages from the time capsule to review the contents and better plan for the opening of the main time capsule in 2025.
On August 1, a few time zones away, Sarah Bollwitt opened her letter in the presence of her mother and 8-year-old daughter.
She was just three years old when her mother submitted the letter to the world’s largest time capsule.
Neither of them could have imagined back then that Sarah would fall in love during a 13-week assignment as a traveling occupational therapist and settle in Homer, Alaska. Or that Sue and Rich would leave Seward after 45 years to find a new home up north near Sarah, a son-in-law, granddaughters Sidney (8) and Jenaka (5), and grandson Kincaid Jones (2).
There is a certain irony in the fact that the delivery was made 4,000 miles away in Homer, Alaska. Harold “Budd” Davisson, the creator of the world’s largest time capsule, was also one of the instigators of the Seward high school basketball team’s 3,446-mile road trip to Seward, Alaska in the 1950s, before the construction of the interstates began.
For many years, a directional and mileage sign on the southwest corner of the courthouse square reminded residents of the distance between the two Sewards.
Sarah and Sidney sat with Sue in Homer to open the letter and try to decipher the words on notepaper taped together in a greeting card. (Sue encourages future writers to write one-page letters.)
“When Trish said it was going to be brittle, I had no idea,” Sue said.
A photo of Sarah was better, offering a view of her neighborhood in the 1980s from the window shown in the background.
“It was just the best feeling to see Sarah dismiss the letter not as just one of my quirks, but as a window into the past. I had expressed thoughts written by a 33-year-old mother who hoped for good things for her family,” Sue wrote in an email to Johnson, which was obtained by the Independent.
In an interview, she said her letter to Sarah contained her hopes and dreams for her only child, some of which came true and others of which did not.
“I couldn’t remember anything specific about what I had written in the letter,” Sue said.
Today’s technology makes it easy for people to look back and research what happened on certain days and in certain places. But these letters are different.
“It’s unique because I wrote it,” Sue said.
She thinks Sarah enjoyed the mystery of the letter. Sidney asked why she hadn’t given Sarah a letter sooner.
“It was wonderful. I was just thrilled that it had survived at all. That I could give it to Sarah. That she could show it to one of her daughters. It was definitely worth it.”
Sue also has a letter in the main time capsule that will be picked up next year.
But the letters from the time capsule will not be the last documents from Sue that Sarah will read.
She also submitted a letter to Sarah for a 1992 Goehner Post Office time capsule project that was opened 25 years later and displayed at the Seward County Historical Museum, and then submitted another to be opened there in 2042.
Sue continues a diary tradition started by her parents – her mother during World War II and her father after he returned home from the war. Her father kept notes in five-year diaries until his death.
Sue began keeping a daily diary in 1967, recording family events, friends, and what happened during her and Rich’s time in Seward and her 40 years as a teacher in Centennial Public Schools.
Sue said her diaries, like the time capsule, capture life in one-day vignettes. She said she liked Harold Davisson because she shares his interest in learning about life from the past and the future.
She has all of her parents’ diaries, her own diaries, diaries that Rich kept for about ten years, and Sarah’s letters from her college days – some from Nebraska and some from Alaska.
She will occasionally use it as a reference to look up an event for friends and family.
“I never face hostility,” she said.
She also encouraged others to write diaries or letters.
“Letters are a dying art,” said Sue.
During the decades that Sue taught at Centennial, she had her sixth-graders write letters to themselves and keep them until their senior year. A time capsule for each class was kept in her home.
She then invited the seniors into the classroom to share their letters with the students, who were in the process of writing their own letters to their future selves. The notes were to include lists of friends, things that worried them, events, and predictions about where they might be as seniors.
Next week: A great-grandmother’s hand commemorates a family’s devotion to a child.
