'Little bit teary-eyed': 25-year-old time capsules opened at Windsor elementary school
Contained parent letters and student autobiographies envisioning their future
Alumni of Windsor's W. J. Langlois Catholic Elementary School returned to the school on Wednesday to look at the contents of time capsules that had been sealed since 1999.
The multi-grade, multi-classroom project involved filling the time capsules with artwork, writing projects, and letters from the students' parents — more than 25 years ago.
One assignment for Grade 7 students was to write autobiographies imagining their lives as adults.
"The only memory I had for some reason was the thing I wrote about Britney Spears and how I wanted to marry her," said Anthony Sunsin, who remembered himself getting in trouble a lot in school and being "not the best student."
"Now reading this really brings me to tears because it's pretty heartwarming … what I wanted to do and … not growing up with a dad and how I wanted to be a good father. I didn't think I'd write that stuff, and having written it, it really hit home."
The contents of the time capsules recall an era when Spears and N'Sync ruled the pop charts, The Matrix and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace were hot movies, and there were fears that computer systems could fail on a global scale when their clocks rolled over to the new millennium.
In fact, the turn of the millennium was the inspiration behind the time capsule, said Robert Ferranti, who was a Grade 7 teacher in 1999.
'It brings back a simpler time'
It was amazing to see so many former students reunited to open it, accompanied in some cases by their children, he said.
And like Sunsin, he said, it was an emotional experience.
"When I finally saw the contents, I was a little bit teary-eyed," he said.
"It brings back a simpler time. We weren't on our devices. I think the internet just started. At the time, nobody had a cell phone. It doesn't feel like 25 years ago. It feels like it went by in a blink of an eye. And part of me thinks it feels like yesterday that we did this."
Former student Michelle Younan Wahalathanthrige, who first met her now-husband in Ferranti's Grade 7 class, said making the time capsule was her fondest memory of that school year.
"It was a very exciting time," she said.
"Year after year, we would always wonder, 'Are we going to come back? Are we going to open up the time capsule?' And it's exciting that we get to do it this year."
Twelve-year-old Younan Wahalathanthrige had made a word search for the capsule featuring all the hit movies of the era.
When she returned Wednesday with her husband and children, she couldn't remember what any of them were, she said.
"Now I had to look back at the article I wrote," she said with a laugh.
Other items in the time capsules included photos of the students, old VHS tapes that needed to be digitized, and a video about a day in the life of the school made by a Grade 2 teacher using an old video camera, said Rachel Chimienti, a special education teacher at W.J. Langlois who also taught Grade 7 in 1999.
Some students had anticipated in their capsule autobiographies that they would be married with children 25 years later — and many of those students turned up at the event with their spouses and children.
But the real emotion came when students received letters from their parents, Chimienti said.
"Some parents have passed since then. [We've] had situations where some students have passed," she told Windsor Morning host Amy Dodge following the event.
"So there was a lot of emotion ... I know a lot of people were not going to open their letters until all of the busy and the fun was over."
People have been asking if the school plans to bury other time capsules, Chimienti said. But she doesn't know if it will happen; she plans to retire in a few years.
Chimienti said that if she were to fill another time capsule for the school, she'd include some of the devices students use now and some sports memorabilia from their house leagues.
"I would want to put [in] some books," she added.
"I just want kids to read some books."
With files from Dalson Chen and Windsor Morning