School’S Memories Pour Out Time Capsule Proves It: The Music Was Bad, But The Times Were Good

Canfield Middle School’s auditorium was silent as a warped cassette was inserted into a boom box. A teacher held a microphone to the speaker and pushed play.

“Oh what a night,” sang Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. “Late December back in ‘63 …” The students started clapping along, but the old tape faded, then stopped.

The cassette was one item pulled from a rusty metal box on Friday - a box that had been in the ground for 25 years. It was buried, not in 1963, but in 1976, the year Canfield opened as a junior high school.

The time capsule was a present and a message to today’s students. After student Robby Myers broke it open with a hammer, the past poured forth.

Out came a bicentennial flag, a two-dollar bill, and a red T-shirt with an iron-on decal. Attached to a progress report was an explanation that students only received them if their grades were bad. A movie magazine highlighted “Jaws,” the biggest film of 1975. A slang dictionary included the word “nerd” as being “someone without class.” A 15-cent newspaper boasted headlines about a bond election. Magazine clippings showed popular hairstyles. Two “drummer-boy” quarters and a “Happy Birthday America 1976” sticker further stressed the bicentennial.

“The movie `Jaws’ - I didn’t think it was that old,” eighth-grader Matt Day said.

“The music was pretty lame,” Chad Klein, a seventh-grader, chimed in.

Memories flowed from the time capsule, but also from teachers and students who were part of Canfield when it opened. Doug Cresswell was assistant principal at the time and eventually became superintendent. He wrote a letter describing his memories.

He remembered starting the day in the old Coeur d’Alene Junior High School, at the corner of Seventh and Montana, and finishing at Canfield. In the middle of a January day, students picked up their books and desks, loaded them onto trucks, then unloaded them and carried them into the new school.

“The students were a livesaver,” Cresswell wrote. “It’s amazing how much manpower was generated by 1,100 seventh-, eighth- and ninth-graders.”

Bob Bloem, a Canfield teacher then and now, told stories about the old junior high, built in 1910 and remodeled in 1950. The floors creaked so badly that teachers knew when students sneaked out of class. Brown liquid dribbled from drinking fountains. The school was too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter.

Bloem said the school had a rule not to paddle kids in front of others. So they took them into the hallway, where sound carried. One teacher would say students’ names loudly and tell them to grab their ankles.

Then he’d deliver a sermon about how the punishment was going to hurt him more than the student.

Then everyone would hear a “WHAP!”

“I swear, that whole building jumped three inches,” Bloem said.

Everyone knew that if the student made a single sound, he would get another smack. The school would hold its collective breath, waiting.

When the students and teachers entered Canfield that day, Bloem said, they thought it was wonderful. They tested the drinking fountains and even admired the now-dreaded yellow carpet.

“This really is a special place,” Bloem said.

Lane Sumner, a music teacher at Woodland Middle School, was a ninth-grader at Canfield then.

He remembers the band teacher at the old school being mad at a student and storming into the hallway, slamming the door so hard it fell off its hinges.

Sumner’s most vivid memory of the time capsule was wondering where he’d be in 2000. He ended up teaching at Canfield for nine years, up until two years ago.

He asked the students to think about where they might be in 25 years and told them to embrace everything they learn because “you’ll never know what you’ll need.”

With that, this year’s Canfield students took over the ceremony, showing off the items they’re putting into a new time capsule, to be opened in 2025.

If the big event of 1976 was this country’s 200th birthday, this year it’s the dawning of a new millennium.

In went 2000 coins, a yearbook and newspapers. A copy of “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me,” a Canfield T-shirt, Teen People and Seventeen magazines. Two CDs, a videotaped tour of the school and a newspaper list of the top 100 songs.

When a student said the top song this week was Britney Spears’ “Oops, I did it again,” boos echoed through the gym.

They also included a videotape of themselves digging up the time capsule from 1976.

Eighth-grader Rachel Waite said her generation represents a new era, a new millennium and an opportunity for change.

“We can make a difference,” she said. “We are the children of the future.”