Time Out on Canoga Park Playground : Ex-Pupil Returns to Find Past Sealed Off

Jeffrey Stern had some time on his hands.

So the 19-year-old returned to his old school, Nevada Avenue Elementary in Canoga Park, to find out about the time capsule he and his classmates buried in 1976.

The container had been filled with mementos from America’s Bicentennial. Nevada Avenue pupils who contributed items were promised that the capsule would be dug up and opened in 10 years.

But Tuesday, Stern was in for a shock when he walked to the garden at the edge of the schoolyard where he and his friends had helped bury the metal box.

No More Garden

The garden was gone. It had been paved over with thick asphalt and turned into a kindergarten play area.

Principal Sy Schor went out with Stern to take a look. He explained apologetically that he knew nothing about any time capsule, having been at the school only since Feb. 3.

Schor called fourth-grade teacher Helen Lord into the search. Lord has been a Nevada Avenue teacher since 1963. She said she vividly remembered the Bicentennial time capsule.

“Kids from the enrichment program planned it,” Lord told Stern. “There was a ceremony and everything. I remember you fellows collecting things and digging.”

But many of the teachers from that era are gone, and none of the old hands had remembered the capsule when maintenance crews repaved the 25-year-old campus last year, she said.

“I’m just sick. I’m kicking myself we didn’t think about it,” she went on. “They came out of the blue to do the repaving and we just didn’t think about it.”

Stern, an automobile mechanic who lives in North Hollywood, paced across the asphalt to the spot where he thought the capsule ceremony had taken place, and reminisced.

“I brought a little eagle to put in it,” he said. “I got it off one of the gas lamps outside the apartment over on Independence Avenue, where we lived. I always planned to come back 10 years later and see what else was in there.”

Stern vowed to return to his school again--with a metal detector.

Word of that sent shudders Wednesday through the Los Angeles Unified School District maintenance officials who spent $200,000 on the campus repaving job last year.

“He absolutely won’t get permission to dig that new asphalt up,” said Eugene Alexander, a maintenance supervisor for the San Fernando Valley.

“We certainly won’t dig it up. A metal detector wouldn’t help anyway, because there are pipes and abandoned lines and conduits under playgrounds,” he added.

Alexander said the best idea is for Stern to accept the fact that the paving is protecting the time capsule for eternity “from the elements and the gophers.”

School administrators who helped coordinate students’ Bicentennial celebrations recalled Wednesday that time capsules were a popular item in 1976.

Hard to Keep Track

“There was no way we could keep track of everything that was done at schools back then,” said Norman H. Rossell, now a regional superintendent in the Valley.

“I think it’s a disaster that this one was forgotten. I’m glad somebody remembered,” he said.

The time capsule mystery expanded Wednesday when Nevada Avenue School students were swept into it.

Sixth-grader Jason Marnick, 12, confided to school administrators that he had seen the words “time capsule below” scratched in cement beneath a playground basketball net across the campus from the covered-over garden.

“I thought somebody was playing a joke, because everybody writes stuff in concrete,” Jason said.

School officials said they were not aware of a second time capsule. But Jason said he remembered seeing the message before the playground was resurfaced, which means it is unlikely that Stern’s capsule had been moved there at the time of the paving.

School secretary Margaret Pinhey said she is confident that whatever may be buried beneath the basketball court was there long before last year’s repaving job. “I feel sure I would have heard about it if they had dug up the Bicentennial time capsule and replanted it,” she said.

Kindergarten teacher Georgia Weinstein said the 1976 time capsule is probably hidden well beneath the new paving.

“The kids did the digging, and they dug for days,” Weinstein recalled. “It’s probably four or five feet down.”