Unearthed

An electrician working inside the Cameron Intermediate School principal’s office discovered a small parcel of mementos seemingly lost in time.

While working on wiring the ceiling to Cameron Intermediate School Principal Jayson Erdman’s office, the electrician discovered a PVC pipe labeled with the 1993 school year start-date.

“You never would walk through here and look up there,” Erdman said. “He said he was installing the lights and was up in the ceiling and came down and said ‘Hey, you got a second. Do you know there is a time capsule in your ceiling?’ It said open in 2018 so we’re a couple of years late.”

The time capsule was left by then principal Randall Relford, at the request of students and teachers to commemorate the then new building. Inside the capsule were articles written by the Cameron Citizen-Observer featuring student accomplishments and citizen donations to the CIS as well as old issues of the St. Joseph News-Press and the Kansas City Star to commemorate the date. Relford said he remembered creating the capsule, but did not realize it sat undiscovered for 27 years.

“The kids wanted to do something different and I let my teachers give me suggestions,” Relford said. “I received a call and I said ‘what?’ Then I said, “yeah, I remember we did it, but other than that I figured it was found a long time ago. It was kind of them to ask me to come over … It held up quite well.”

One of the students attending the first day of call in the new CIS building in 1993 was current CIS Assistant Principal Keri Sedgwick. Considering the historical nature of 2020, she hopes to return the materials from the previous time capsule and add a few more items from this year in hopes a future generation of CIS students and administrators make a similar discovery.

“It was really exciting and neat to find it. We talked about putting this back in the old time capsule and putting in a new one for 2020,” Sedgwick said. “We thought, what better year to start another time capsule and give an idea for future kids to see what it was like in 2020 - the year of the masks.”