Santa Fe NM loses track of 'Time'

Santa Fe time capsule from 1960 never buried

The Associated Press
Posted: 03/20/2009

SANTA FE, N.M.—Santa Fe's 400th anniversary celebrations won't include opening a time capsule from 1960 after all.
The capsule never got filled and never got buried.

The 400th Anniversary Committee had been looking for where the time capsule was buried on the Santa Fe Plaza.

But according to 1960 editions of The New Mexican, the 150-pound steel tube that served as the time capsule wasn't to be buried on the plaza, but rather at what was then City Hall. It was to be filled with items "pertinent to Santa Fe's 350th anniversary celebration."

At the time, the capital city was believed to have been founded in 1610. Historians three decades later discovered evidence it was founded in 1607 or earlier.

The 350th anniversary was front-page news in June 1960 editions of The New Mexican.

One edition carried a photograph of Mayor Leo Murphy being handed, according to the caption, a box of "information which went into the cylinder scheduled to be buried right after the anniversary celebration."

Then in April 1964, reporter Mack Barly figured out the time capsule was gathering dust in a back room of an office machines business, being used "as a shelf for empty plastic bottles and other useless objects."

The business owner wound up with the capsule because he was in charge of a committee that was to gather things to go in it. The project was abandoned when the souvenirs failed to turn up, he said.

Murphy told Barly the time capsule never got filled because he was too busy trying to cover bills from the 350th anniversary.

"Those were days of confusion, days of chaos," he said. "I was more interested in getting some friends to sign a note with me to cover the deficit the celebration ran up than I was in what happened to the capsule."

Maybe next time guys????