A University of North Texas facilities work crew in the Clark Hall courtyard had let a backhoe rip on July 10. The crew was working to replace sanitary waste pipe serving the dorm in time for students to return to campus.
Carl Parsons, a mechanical engineer at UNT who was supervising the project, said the backhoe was moving dirt to dig a trench to get to the 6-inch pipe they were replacing. Other crew members were digging by hand, Parsons said, to protect the roots of the large trees in the courtyard.
The crews were working away when the backhoe’s bucket dredged up a plastic box.
“I think they damaged it, probably a little bit, with the backhoe,” he said. “But once I saw it, they were being very careful, because there are other utilities under there that they don’t know exist. So they have to be really careful because they don’t want to break a gas line or an electrical line. That creates its own problems.”
Parsons said the crew called him because there was writing on the box, which turned out to be a makeshift time capsule.
“It had a date on it, and it was just kind of intriguing,” Parsons said. “That’s when I said people might be interested in it. That turned out to be true.”
The plastic box was labeled “Wild Women 10-Year Reunion Homecoming 1992.”
So, a group of women from the Class of 1982 managed to put some keepsakes in the tub and bury it on campus.
Bonnie Kay Banks, the communications specialist for the UNT Facilities Department, said they found dirt-caked items in the tub. Neither time, pressure or moisture were kind to the plastic container.
“They were not really legible,” Banks said. “They kind of rotted away a little, if you will, or deteriorated.”
What was inside? There were two T-shirts, one of them a Clark Hall shirt. There was a heeled shoe, with another pair that appeared to have fallen apart, and a faded Polaroid picture that could still yield some information for archivists. There was a broken glass mug, an empty bottle with a faded label, a Texas Tech University sticker and a heart-shaped item with writing on it.
The UNT Facilities Department posted a photo of the time capsule and its contents on Facebook, hoping to find the alumni who slipped away during their homecoming weekend to leave their mark.
Several days ago, a few of the graduates commented on the main UNT Facebook page. Letty Gallegos dropped a photo of six women on spring break in San Antonio in 1981. Another commenter, Melissa Waltrip Atchison, replied to the photo with “Wild Women Forever.”
“They told us that they had a lot of energy and had a lot of fun on campus, and some of the guys they were friends with started calling them wild women,” Banks said. “It stuck for them.”
The time capsule is now in UNT Special Collections, where university archivists are studying the keepsakes and working on preserving them.
Parsons said crews don’t find these sorts of treasures often. They tend to find water bottles that residents have flushed down the toilet, either accidentally or on purpose.
While the facilities staff — and Facebook followers — found the nostalgia charming, Parsons said current students should avoid burying time capsules.
“Hopefully, students will see that these items didn’t really last the elements,” Banks said. “Because it wasn’t an official one, and like he said, it was in kind of a Tupperware tub that got smashed. So don’t bury stuff on your own because this might happen.”