In 1993, I was just 12-years old in the sixth grade. My elementary school St. Thomas More aka STM, was celebrating their 25th anniversary. In May of that year, kids from kindergarten all the way to the eighth grade assembled for a large school photo and put it into a time capsule. Each classroom participated and contributed items that would be put into that same time capsule and would later be opened at the school’s 50th anniversary. 25 years later on May 7th, 2018, I made sure to return to my roots and check out the festivities.
I attended the STM 50th anniversary with one of my childhood friends from the third grade. When we got there, we arrived to see the current crop of elementary kids participating in a musical presentation for the audience. Inside the gym, it was scattered with parents, faculty, former teachers and students that spanned decades. A slideshow followed that highlighted 50 years of the school’s history.
When the presentation in the large gymnasium concluded, people started to mingle and catch up with one another. Unfortunately there weren’t too many people from my grade or even teachers for that matter that attended this reunion. To be honest, the school did a terrible job of promoting the 50th anniversary. You would think that in this social media age, they would use it to their advantage to spread the word around such a momentous occasion. I found out about this 50th anniversary through the church that was next door to STM. They had a weekly newsletter, that had a small mention about it.
Anyways not to get off track in my story, I went into the smaller gymnasium (our school had two gyms), looking to see the time capsule. I was very intrigued to see the nostalgia inside that big wooden box that was padlocked for a quarter of a century. From a pop culture standpoint what I remember during that spring of 1993, Hulk Hogan was WWF champion and the Blue Jays got off to a rocky start in what would be their eventual second World Series championship season. The Maple Leafs were shocking the entire NHL and having an unbelievable playoff run at the time. The Fresh Prince of Bel Air was a popular comedy show among my classmates and Lenny Kravitz’ ‘Are You Gonna Go My Way‘ was a really big record.
When I finally saw all the items from the time capsule spread across the table, my childhood memories started to kick in. It was really cool to see what kind of stuff was inside there. There was a dated newspaper inside there, with politician Jean Chrétien leading the headlines with his running for Prime Minister. There were baseball cards and hockey cards from the 1992-1993 season. One class cut out fashion magazines and made collages, highlighting the fashion trends and styles of that year. Two mixtape cassettes were found in there, ranging from all the popular artists at the time such as Snow, Nirvana, Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey and Robin S to name a few. There was a VHS tape that had footage of a videographer coming to everyone’s class earlier in the year and having them say something on camera. They were playing that same video in the school’s library on an old TV that looked like this lol.
I was really disappointed that my class’ contribution, an ecosystem was not displayed on the table. I remember we submitted some fishbowl looking glass display with plants and algae inside it…maybe when they opened it smelled funny or the water evaporated, I have no clue lol.