A time capsule was interred Monday morning at Anchorage Memorial Park Cemetery by a team of cemetery staff and volunteers. The "Cemetery Centennial Time Capsule" commemorates the 100th anniversary of both the city and the 22-acre graveyard, which was mandated in the same legislation that established the original townsite.
"I don't know if time capsules are in vogue now, but it's a big day," said cemetery director Rob Jones as he stood over a deep, square hole prior to the capsule internment ceremony. "One hundred years from now they'll be talking about what we're doing today."
Jones said planning for the capsule began seven years ago. Monday's event marked the conclusion of the cemetery's centennial events, which included the annual solstice tour of the grounds and two presentations of "Stories at the Cemetery," where actors present the life stories of interesting personalities buried or commemorated there.
One of the items in the capsule was a DVD of some of those presentations. Also inside were a cell phone, an Anchorage Aces cowbell, flags that have flown over the cemetery and odds and ends donated by tract owners, funeral homes and others.
Cemetery assistant Jasmyn Faulk contributed a jar holding currency, personal photos, tickets to an Anchorage Symphony Concert and the movie "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay -- Part 1" and a "letter to the future" in which she described the cost of things and other details of life in 2015.
"I also put in a traffic ticket that I got last year," she said.
Faulk recalled that her West High School graduating class had buried a time capsule in front of the school's auditorium. It's to be opened in 2098, she said.
The cemetery time capsule is expected to be opened in another 100 years. Other time capsules have recently been placed in Homer and Seward. One was included in the Chugiak High School courtyard in 1989. One at Alaska Pacific University, originally assembled when the college was founded as Alaska Methodist University in 1959, was opened in 2009.
They are typically set into walls or cornerstones, or buried with a degree of fanfare. But posterity sometimes loses track. And in some instances the canister is deposited stealthily. A surprise capsule from the 1960s was found in a coffee can at the base of a 103-foot flagpole on the Delaney Park Strip after the pole blew down in a wind storm in 2012.
The cemetery capsule is a large PVC cylinder painted gold, 36 inches long and 8 inches in diameter. It was capped with a rubber plumbing stop held in place by a metal band that Jones torqued down before taking the container to the place where it's expected to rest for the next 100 years.
"It should be airtight," he said.
A dozen members of the public were on hand along with four members of the press as Jones and Faulk lowered the capsule with a chain into the square hole, 2 feet by 2 feet at the opening and at least 6 feet deep, taking care to keep it upright.
"That's similar to how Wally went," quipped Bruce Kelly, who organizes the annual Stories at the Cemetery event along with his wife, Audrey Weltman-Kelly. It was a reference to the late Governor Walter J. Hickel, buried in another part of the cemetery in a standing position at his request.
People in the crowd then took shovels and began filling in the hole until a little mound of gravel-laden dirt rose above the surrounding lawn. It will be tamped flat and a bronze plaque added at a future date, Jones said.
"We haven't quite figured out what the epitaph -- the saying -- is going to be," Jones said. "But it'll have to be clever."
The capsule is buried between the headstone that memorializes old-timer "Moosemeat" John Hedburg and the much-photographed whalebone arch at the grave of Elizabeth Rock.
Reach Mike Dunham at mdunham@alaskadispatch.com or 257-4332.