This is the second in a series of articles about the discoveries found in the opening of the pyramid portion of the World’s Largest Time Capsule in Seward on July 4. The main time capsule is scheduled to be opened on July 4, 2025.
Sue and Rich Bollwitt’s year-long 50th wedding anniversary celebration has included a couple of trips from Alaska to Nebraska to join the anniversary celebrations of friends.
So it was easy for Sue to connect with friends Dan and Rose Policky July 28 to retrieve the letter she wrote to her daughter in 1985 when Harold “Budd” Davisson invited people to add items to the World’s Largest Time Capsule’s new pyramid topper.
Dan had seen a Davisson Furniture Center Facebook post that included Sue’s letter, sent a photo to Sue, and let Trish Johnson know he could deliver the letter. Johnson has connected with several of the intended recipients or families of the time capsule’s letters and other messages since unpacking the pyramid to test the contents and better plan the 2025 opening of the main time capsule.
On Aug. 1, a few time zones away, Sarah Bollwitt opened her letter with her mother and her 8-year-old daughter by her side.
She was just 3 when her mother submitted the letter to the World’s Largest Time Capsule.
Neither could have imagined then that Sarah would fall in love while doing a 13-week stint as a traveling occupational therapist and settle down in Homer, Alaska. Or that Sue and Rich would leave Seward after 45 years to make a new home close to Sarah, a son-in-law, granddaughters Sidney, 8, and Jenaka, 5, and grandson Kincaid Jones, 2, up north.
There is some irony in the delivery 4,000 miles away in Homer, Alaska. World’s Largest Time Capsule creator Harold “Budd” Davisson was also an instigator for Seward’s 1950s high school basketball team’s 3,446-mile pre-interstate highway road trip to Seward, Alaska.
For many years a direction and mileage sign on the southwest corner of the courthouse square reminded residents of the distance between the two Sewards.
Sarah and Sidney sat with Sue in Homer to open the letter and try to make out the words on stationery stuck together inside a greeting card. (Sue encourages future writers to create single-sided letters).
“When Trish said it would be brittle, I had no idea,” Sue said.
A photo of Sarah held up better and offered a view of their 1980s neighborhood from the window shown in the background.
“It was just the best feeling to watch Sarah not just pass it off as one of my quirks for doing the letter, but as a window to the past. I had expressed thoughts that were written by a 33-year (old) mom, hoping for good things for my family,” Sue wrote in an email to Johnson that was shared with the Independent.
She said in an interview, her letter to Sarah included her hopes and dreams for her only child, some of which happened, and some not.
“I didn’t really remember anything specific about what I put in the letter,” Sue said.
With today’s technology, people can easily look back and research what was going on for specific dates and places, but these letters are different.
“It’s unique because I wrote it,” Sue said.
She thinks Sarah enjoyed the mystery surrounding the letter. Sidney asked why she did not just give Sarah a letter earlier.
“It’s been wonderful. I was just on a high to know that it had survived at all. That I could get it to Sarah. That she could show it to one of her daughters. It was definitely worth it.”
Sue also has a letter in the main time capsule that will be retrieved next year.
But the time capsule letters won’t be the last of Sue’s writing that Sarah will read.
She also submitted a letter to Sarah for a 1992 Goehner post office time capsule project that was opened and posted at the Seward County Historical Museum after 25 years, then submitted another to be opened there in 2042.
Sue has carried on a diarists’ tradition begun by her parents – her mother during World War II and her father upon his homecoming from the war. Her father kept notes in five-year journal books until the day before he died.
Sue began keeping a daily diary in 1967, including family events, friends and the goings on during her and Rich’s time in Seward and her 40 years teaching at Centennial Public Schools.
Like the time capsule, Sue said her diaries capture life in one-day vignettes. She said she would have liked Harold Davisson because she shares his interest in knowing about life looking backwards and forwards.
She has all of her parents’ diaries, her own journals, diaries Rich kept for about 10 years, and Sarah’s letters from her college years – some in Nebraska and some in Alaska.
She will occasionally use them for reference to look up an event for friends and family.
“I never get disputed,” she said.
She has also encouraged others to write diaries or letters.
“Letters are kind of a dying art,” Sue said.
Over the decades she taught at Centennial, Sue had her sixth graders write letters to themselves and kept them until their senior years, each class having a time capsule stored in her home.
Then she would invite the seniors into the classroom to share their letters with the students about to write their own letters to their future selves. The notes were to include lists of friends, things they worried about, events, and predictions about where they might be as seniors.
Next week: A great-grandmother’s hand recalls a family’s devotion to a child.
