Future Turns Out to Be a Shock for Seers of 1960

It was a best guess, that’s all.

Forty years ago, nobody could say for sure that by 2000 a missile base wouldn’t be built in Ojai . . . or that we wouldn’t whoosh around in sky cars, like the Jetsons . . . or that we wouldn’t be gulping down nutrient-packed pills instead of Fatburgers.

On the other hand, members of Matilija Junior High School’s first ninth-grade class hit the mark with some of the other predictions they made in 1960.

By 2000, a student named Colleen Sheridan wrote, many parking lots would be underground. Check.

Poking her head through the curtains of time, Susan Gilbert wrote: “Color television will be common item for the poorest of families. Black-and-white TV will be a thing of the past.” Check.

Sue Elliott predicted that when Casitas Dam was finished, officials would have “worked out a way you can swim in it.” Sorry. Forty years later, you still can’t take a dip in Casitas. Water supply and all.

Prepared as part of a social studies assignment, the predictions lay moldering in a time capsule exhumed at the school last weekend. Like all predictions, they tell a lot more about the time they were made than the time they foresaw.

I pored through a bunch of them this week. The moldy smell of the tomb wafted off of them, but a kind of innocence came through. Boys wrote earnestly of space travel; girls dotted their I’s not with dots but with fetching little circles. There was anxiety about the state of the world--many Americans were convinced the Russians would blow it up--but not a shred of cynicism.

We would live in sleek glass houses. At the push of a button, hot freshly prepared meals would pop into our kitchens. Class vice president Billy Marek wrote that big cities like New York and Los Angeles would have reached their limits by 2000: “Today’s less important cities will become the extravagant, ultra-modern cities of tomorrow.”

Whether Ojai would be one of them was a big question. Most class members figured a four-lane freeway from Ventura would finally be built, despite the fierce protestations of the Ojai Garden Club. Some warned of subdivisions surging up the mountainsides, but at least one student was excited by the now-quaint notion of Progress.

“Ojai will be a thriving community,” he wrote. “The citrus ranches will no doubt disappear and a beautiful light-manufacturing site will develop . . . .”

For the record, the freeway to Ojai wasn’t built, the citrus groves are still there, and the town’s only light industry is aura repair.

The Cold War wrapped its icy fingers around many predictions.

“The U.S. and Russia will have had their fight and what’s left of the world, the spacemen won’t want,” wrote one pessimist.

Mike McGowan was more moderate.

“I predict that in 40 years the world will be in destruction,” he wrote, adding that “I will be a cement contractor and running my own jobs.”

From his home in Manteca, McGowan acknowledged that he hadn’t been completely accurate about the apocalypse. On the other hand, he’s been doing concrete work as a sideline for 35 years.

Most boys weren’t quite so earthbound. Some were certain they would be among the first to explore Mars or live on the moon; Kenny Vogel wrote that he would make “in excess of $4,000 a week” designing systems to safely stop high-speed ships barreling through space.

Most of the girls, though, were strictly traditional.

One dreamed of “a beauty shop all my own.”

Another mentioned the name of the boy she would marry and the number of children they would have.

“We will live in Oak View and have a ’58 Impala and a nice house,” she wrote.

But even then, pre-feminist feelings were astir. Marty Bunte wrote that she would be “a great social leader” in some tropical city. In the United States, meanwhile, the first woman president would be elected in 2000.

“She will be, as most of the world’s women, more intelligent and physically able to perform that particular job,” Bunte wrote.

For the record, no woman will be elected president in 2000. Bunte, now Mary Stallings, is a retired medical administrator living not in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, but in Ojai. She no longer dots her I’s with circles.

“That probably ended in 10th grade,” she said.

An extraordinarily close bunch, more than half of the 120 members of the class of 1960 gathered in Ojai last weekend to reminisce. Five years ago, they celebrated their communal 50th birthday by renting a bus and heading for the casinos in Laughlin, Nev.

The odds there were no doubt better than the odds of forecasting 2000 correctly in 1960. Not one of the ninth-graders envisioned becoming a dot-com billionaire, or making a fortune in St. John’s wort, or unwrapping the genetic pretzel that underlies life on earth.

They weren’t crazy, after all.

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Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.