You never know what you’ll find when you start digging.
Sheila Hensley was recently having a sewer problem at her home on West Sixth Street in Pittsburg, so Bud Johnson was doing some digging in the backyard.
He found a small glass bottle, probably from Chocks Vitamins, with paper inside.
“It was about eight inches down,” Johnson said. “I went in and told her somebody had sent her a message.”
Ground water had seeped into the bottle and the paper inside was wet.
“I let it dry for a day, then I pulled it out with tweezers,” Hensley said. “It was a folded page from ‘Redbook’ magazine, and the date on it was April 1969.”There was also a picture of a young girl from a school yearbook and a scrap of paper, on which was written “In 10 years I want to be a first grade teacher — Cherri Willis.”
Hensley and her husband, the late Charles Hensley, had bought the house from the Willis family, including the late KKOW Radio personality Dan Willis. Hensley called the station, certain that someone would know where Willis’ daughter was living.
“Cherri called me and introduced herself as the ‘Time Capsule Girl’, and she and her husband came over,” Hensley said. “What a thrill.”
As a matter of fact, Hudson and her husband, David, live only about a block away.
“I think this was a school thing,” she said. “If it had been something I and my sisters were doing, we’d have all put things in the bottle, and it was just me.”
At first she thought it was something she had done in third grade, but her mother, Helen Willis, checked school yearbooks and found the photo was from fifth grade.
“I thought I had written more than what was on the paper,” Hudson said. “I think I remember wanting to put in a quarter, but it was too big and wouldn’t fit in the bottle. I’m surprised I didn’t put a penny in, because I collected those.”
She said the magazine page was added as a proof of the date.
“We didn’t have a newspaper that day, or maybe it had been thrown out,” Hudson said.
She has fulfilled her ambition, and teaches in the gifted program at Pittsburg Community Middle School.
“I probably wrote that I wanted to be a first grade teacher because we used to go to the first grade to help the little kids read,” Hudson said. “I used to play school, and my two sisters had to be my pupils whether they wanted to or not.”
She added that she never expected anybody would ever dig up her time capsule.
“If you do this again, dip the bottle in bee’s wax,” Johnson advised her.
Hudson lived in the house from third grade until her sophomore year in college. She enjoyed seeing her childhood home, and Hensley, her son Caleb and her daughter Shannon and family enjoyed hearing her stories.
There’s just one thing wrong in this picture.
“I still have my sewer problem,” Hensley said.
